Fragrance of childhood : Flash Fiction by Debjani Mukherjee
It happens to her many times, roaming down the memory lane wrapping a scarf of fragrance around her senses. Sometimes the smell of a new lipstick glides her back to the childhood days.
When her year-long wait used to end at the Durga Puja days by her mother, opening the cap of a little cylinder and sticking a dash of color in her tiny lips. Or sometimes a handful of jasmine reminding her of the younger version of her mom dwelling around their house with a wreath pinned in her hair. The sweet smell used to coddle her little nose all through the evening as she used to babble around with Mom holding the edge of her saree. The fragrance has this quality of creating a rainbow of reminiscence inside the mind. A coffee, a talcum powder, a voluptuous bindweed of red and pink Rangoon creeper, a soap wrapper anything can have a story entangled with your past that occasionally puts a flashlight on your memories.
Yesterday Tuhina bought a packet of the joystick. She lit one in front of the little temple of her house and the smell
Instantly carried her to the evenings of her childhood house far away in Bengal. The slideshow of memory flakes in sepia tone started flipping in her mind. An old lady in a white sari maundering from one room to another in baby steps holding an earthen pot in her hand filled with a smoking mixture of camphor, incense, tinder and coconut husk, called 'dhunuchi'. The foggy rooms overflowing the aroma of incense and the same smell of the joystick she bought yesterday an the half-bent weathered woman in white saree coming out of it.
Tuhina missed her Thamma (grandma). She missed the smell of her moong dai khichdi which she used to prepare for the little Gopal in her home temple. She missed the smell of the talcum powder she used to put every afternoon after her bath and tying up her hair. She missed the smell of the little blackish lime candy her wrinkled face Thamma used to take out from her wooden chest and give her every evening. Tuhina missed it all.
When her year-long wait used to end at the Durga Puja days by her mother, opening the cap of a little cylinder and sticking a dash of color in her tiny lips. Or sometimes a handful of jasmine reminding her of the younger version of her mom dwelling around their house with a wreath pinned in her hair. The sweet smell used to coddle her little nose all through the evening as she used to babble around with Mom holding the edge of her saree. The fragrance has this quality of creating a rainbow of reminiscence inside the mind. A coffee, a talcum powder, a voluptuous bindweed of red and pink Rangoon creeper, a soap wrapper anything can have a story entangled with your past that occasionally puts a flashlight on your memories.
Yesterday Tuhina bought a packet of the joystick. She lit one in front of the little temple of her house and the smell
Instantly carried her to the evenings of her childhood house far away in Bengal. The slideshow of memory flakes in sepia tone started flipping in her mind. An old lady in a white sari maundering from one room to another in baby steps holding an earthen pot in her hand filled with a smoking mixture of camphor, incense, tinder and coconut husk, called 'dhunuchi'. The foggy rooms overflowing the aroma of incense and the same smell of the joystick she bought yesterday an the half-bent weathered woman in white saree coming out of it.
Tuhina missed her Thamma (grandma). She missed the smell of her moong dai khichdi which she used to prepare for the little Gopal in her home temple. She missed the smell of the talcum powder she used to put every afternoon after her bath and tying up her hair. She missed the smell of the little blackish lime candy her wrinkled face Thamma used to take out from her wooden chest and give her every evening. Tuhina missed it all.
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