“Smell is a potent wizard ..

.....that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.”
Helen Keller(1880 - 1968).

There are lots of times when people, places , voices, music and events transport me back to some specific period in my life.

But smells! they take me back right to the moment that i last inhaled it...does that happen with all? I was always credited with a sharp sense of smell, but i think i greately undervalued it. As my life progresses and i mellow down i realize that is the one sense i remember and associate with more than anything else...

I had a smell associated with each one of my family.My sister used to smell of milk, even when she grew up..i think till about the time she discovered perfumes!I loved to sit next to her , just for that smell. Not the strong milk smell when you boil it, but the milder , grassy smell immediately after milking...

The only one whose smell i could never figure out was mine..i kept asking mom, and she used to find it quite funny i guess. TB was the first one to tell me what he felt i reminded him of...he thought i smelled like "water". Now if only i could check that myself!

I always pick up a book or a garment at a store and smell it before even i look at it..it just comes by habit..I smell the heads of all babies that are available in close quarters...i sidle upto my close one's so i could feel their smell....each one of them have an individual smell stamp...i go weak at my knees every time i smell TB's neck or V's head.

My earliest memories of seasons were the change in smells...freshly washed earth in rains, smell of grass in the windy season, the mango blossoms, the drying leaves...the scent of earth warming up in summer, the jasmine blooms, the smell of paddy --sap oozing, cut, dried, billowing in the wind, boiling in cauldron...the smell of ground cotton seeds and rice husk in the cowshed. Of kerosene and oil lamps...of gardenia's in a dark night.

I can still feel the way our very first house smelled..the perfume TB was using when i first met him.., the smell of bamboo on the southern corner of my house...the smell of drying mango stem sap at my father's ancestral house, after all of us had downed a few dozens with salt and chilli powder.

Oh! the smells. I could define my life with them.

This morning, i propped up V into the school cab, and rushed out of the building as usual..Stepped out and in a split second, i smelled summer- of earth warming up, of fallen mangoes and coral jasmine. I slowed down, stopped and savoured it all in.

In that moment, i was back at my house on a summer day, sitting on the mango tree with a book and listening to my philips radio hanging from the next branch.

Nothing is memorable than a smell to me. Once scent can bring back a lifetime..What brings you memories??