| Mumbai, where I live, is notoriously a city where you can navigate by nose alone. From the characteristic odours of the ill-named Love Grove Pumping Station, through the individual neighbourhoods within the Dharavi slum, home to enclaves of leather workers, potters etc. each with their trademark aromas, to the fishy smells of Mahim Causeway and more.
I briefly lived in Andheri, a Northern suburb. I knew it was time to rouse myself and move toward the exit of the train compartment when I caught the unique smell of baking biscuits at the Parle factory.
On 20 Apr 2025, at 02:50, Yeddanapudi Radhika via Silklist <[email protected]> wrote:
There are two standout smells from my childhood.
One was what emanated from a medication called Alcopar prescribed for hookworm infections that many Indian children were prone to as they walked around barefoot often. A vomit laced smell that induced nausea and gagging. My mom tried to hide it in all kinds of liquids, almost ruining the others for me too. But it was singularly effective and I no longer had to endure the other stomach-churning experience of seeing worms curl out of one's excreta. I can still taste it some 48 years later.
The other far more pleasant is that of camphor lit in a small brazier. My aunts had gorgeous long hair and everytime they washed their hair, they'd lie down on a charpai, a traditional bed woven with an airy design made from all kinds of fibres. The brazier was placed below and fumes of camphor dried and scented their hair. In the 45 years since that time, I've once experienced it used for its scent in my friend's house in Kolkata. Their help went to each room with the brazier trailing smoke everywhere and then took it back to the kitchen where it was smothered.
I'd use the camphor in a heartbeat, but apartment-living with its rules and regulations is a real dampener.
In the recent past I've been getting a reintroduction to post-monsoon rural smells in India. This year once again I will be in Hyderabad during the monsoon. Btw, Udhay, I'm coming to Bangalore this year in August and hope to catch up.
Cheers. Radhika On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 1:23 PM Chris Kantarjiev via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote: Ah, soy.
I was quite ill as a pre-pubescent - allergies many and severe, leading to asthma.
One of the earliest allergies was to cow's milk. My parents switched me to goat milk, until I developed an allergy to that, too. At that point, best practice was to switch to a soy "milk", brand name "Soybee".
It had a very distinctive and not entirely pleasant smell. I can still conjure it from memory, roughly 65 years later.
On April 19, 2025 5:13:20 AM PDT, John Sundman via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote:
1) I grew up on a small farm in New Jersey in the 1950's and 60's — a part of the country that has long since become anonymous suburbia. Our one cow, whose name was Cow Beauty, had a nice little shed adjacent to the pasture, and in that shed was a hay loft. Now of course the interior of that shed had a very particular smell -- hay, wood, cow, cow shit, etc. But, one day Cow Beauty gave birth to a calf. (How our one cow became with child, so to speak, was not a question that occupied seven-year-old me.) And when that calf was weaned, we nursed it with formula in a bottle, just like one you would use to nurse a baby baby. And that formula, which was a mixture of water and powder that came in a burlap sack, had a particular smell. So one of my lost 'madeleine' smells is just that: the interior of Cow Beauty's barn during the time that the nursing calf was still there: some combination of the odors of cows, hay, wood, burlap, cow shit, and baby cow formula.
Many years after the farm was no more, I found myself living in a small village in Senegal. There were no cattle there anymore, but there were sheep and goats. And there was also, courtesy of the UN's UNICEF program, corn-soya-milk to help supplement the diet of infants in children. It came in burlap sacks. The smell of these things combined was tantalizingly close to the smell of that cowshed. But it wasn't the same. I wonder if that smell exists anywhere on earth in 2025.
2. The Smell of Other People's Houses, a novel by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock
I haven't read this novel, but I do know the author — or used to, anyway. In 2006 - 7 I spent a lot of time in Colorado Springs, helping my brother & sister in law through a difficult time. Bonnie-Sue was a college friend of my sister in law; she used to help out as well. She & I used to play 1-on-1 basketball. I was taller and an OK shooter, she was quicker and a much better shooter. As a high school student Bonnie-Sue had been a star athlete. She had some very funny stories to tell about playing against Sarah Palin, who later became Governor of Alaska & the vice presidential nominee on the Republican ticket headed by John McCain. But we're very far afield from stories of memorable smells, so I'll stop here.
jrs
On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 9:26 PM Udhay Shankar N via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote: Smells, more than taste (well, what is taste, but just a weaker way of smelling?), play the role of bringing memories of madelines past for me.
What are some scents from the past that you would pay good money to experience again?
Here's a personal anecdote of this:
In the early 80s, my father was gifted a bottle of Jules cologne. In those pre-liberalization times, it was a rare thing that was used sparingly, and was forever associated in my mind with my father wearing it on big occasions like weddings or suchlike. That bottle lasted decades, to give you an idea.
It was discontinued sometime after, never lost its fan following among perfume aficionados. Perhaps as a sop to this group, it was re-launched in the 2000s sometime, but only as a limited edition, available only at the flagship Dior store in Paris. Through a member of this list, I enlisted the help of a mutual friend who was traveling to Paris on work to pick up a bottle for me. Apparently, the very fact that he knew to ask for Jules gave him some cred with the sales people there. :)
This bottle took an incredibly roundabout route to reach me, but reach me it did, eventually. The smell was objectively different from the original formulation, but close enough to give me that hit of instant nostalgia - which I indulge in from time to time.
Udhay
PS: I was sharing this story recently with another member of this list, also called Jules. :)
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