Random thoughts by Punya
The other day we spent a few hours at the Metro Centre in Gateshead, or was it the Eldon Square Complex in Newcastle? The town seems to be kind of left behind somewhere else, in another dimension. A cavernous, meandering shopping mall, full of lights, people, noises and smells.
It was the first time I had become aware of the assault of the smells: not only from shops selling perfumes and soaps, but also from the stream of perfumed people wearing clothes washed in scented powders and rinsed in scented fabric softeners. And perhaps the shops spray their aisles with air fresheners to hide the smell of mould?
I became aware that – coming from a secluded little house on the edge of fields and woods – smells and perfumes were registered by my brain as ‘information’. Information like, Get out of my way! such as when you hear a honk from a car or a bark from an angry dog jumping on its gate.
Information, information, information from smells, then information from sounds. Is it just the resounding sound from the little kids’ train on the lower level – which would not affect my safety? Or do I really have to jump to the side to avoid being run over by a steamroller? People talking loudly on their phones… or is it Amiten calling me from afar? Maybe he has found something he wants to buy.
Back home, what do you do? Take off your smelly clothes, hang them out to air for a few days, take a shower, wash your hair, and get back into your comfy, odourless home outfit. (There are people in my life who would be dismayed to know that I have to shower after I’ve spent time with them! Just because of the smell of chemicals in their car or house! The particles seem to have a glue component to stick to woven fabric…)
Smell is ‘information’ indeed. I am thinking of the time when we lived in caves… and then suddenly there is that smell of the bear approaching. That’s useful information. Or of fire when we were living in the Oregon desert – time to call our Fire Brigade. Smell of gas (a smell that is artificially added to the odourless household gas so that we can detect it when there is a leak).
Smells… You can smell the laundry hung out in the sun in the neighbours’ garden – from their favourite fabric softener. And beware of the barbies on a Sunday (popular, I should say compulsory, with Romanians and Greeks). Close those windows – in Corfu in winter when the olive trees get pruned and branches are burnt on bonfires, ‘destroying’ your freshly-washed laundry.
And as a watcher of TV here in the UK, what are the most common commercials? Washing powder (a classic) (the newest is with a scent that imitates the fragrance of laundry dried out in the sun!), air fresheners, betting sites (hate them too!).
As sannyasins, having been trained to be odourless – if you wanted to see your Master in person – it has become habitual not to use perfumes on our bodies or scented candles in the house. Memories of being sniffed for darshan and then – because you work in the kitchen – being singled out (like nowadays a bearded man with an Arabic name at a check-in) and being tested, smelled again, extra carefully. Nothing worse than smelling of soup in a darshan.
We even cooked a special pot of dal for Haridas – without garlic – because he was working in Lao Tzu, Osho’s house. Just in case his breath would leave the smell in the corridors. How beautiful those awareness exercises were.
The first time I became aware that it can be insulting to mention anything to do with smell was that Sunday morning when I entered, after a short knock knock on the door, into my parents’ bedroom. I see the picture in my mind, I must have been around 12 years old – I was quite tall early on. The room was darkened by dense roller shutters plus a set of solid wooden folding shutters. The colour of the picture is brownish dark.
In the twilight I could just see Mum sit up in bed after I had blurted out: “It’s smelly in here!” But it was Father who got very angry (I was terrified of him). I thought that the air had just been used up overnight by two people breathing. Only later in life I realized that people fart at night and that the liquids interchanged during sex have a sometimes bad smell (in Italian one of the words for penis is ‘pesce’, fish). So my parents were probably embarrassed by having been caught after that ‘sin’ (Father being Catholic).
Then in the commune, when we shared the same room with 6-8 people, there was ample opportunity to smell the above-mentioned liquids. Some fluids really smell earthy, at times…
I remember, with one lover (it could well be my present one – we have been together for so long…) we had this game that we would smell each other’s armpits, relish in it (this was not faked, because we truly liked it) and then play out as if it was an aphrodisiac! (Pheromones are wafted about from armpits – thus the hair – and the male ones, I hear, have a distinct effect of relaxing the nervous systems of women. Thus slow-dancing! If two men meet, though, the androgens in the male armpit could spark antagonism in each other.)
An interesting thing about smell is that after a while you stop being aware of a particular smell. You enter a shop and you smell the mould (you might even be so bold as to tell the owner about it – who will undeniably deny it with a I have never smelt that and nobody has ever told me). Then, after you have been in the shop for a few minutes the smell is gone. The information comes, you have been alerted, if the alert does not mean danger, on you go, ready for a new smell – which could mean danger, or dinner!
I can imagine that in the past, when sewage was running down the gutters in your street, you would have had a dead-nose for those smells. While the upper classes imported perfumes from the East to cover up the smell of their unwashed bodies and clothes. It could well be that the sense of smell went dormant for centuries, until we invented showers. The British still view with some estrangement the baths the Romans had built here during their occupation. There is even a town called Bath!
When we bought our small cottage in the Scottish Borders – which then, for a few years, had become a busy Osho Information Centre for Active Meditations and Reiki – the locals commented on how odd it was that the previous owner – who happened to be an American! – had installed a toilet on the ground floor, a bath and toilet on the first floor, and an en-suite shower and toilet next to the master bedroom. It was the perfect arrangement for our use!
Sometimes, when walking on our nearby cycle path I imagine… This route runs where in the past there were rail tracks on which steel and coal were transported, pulled by strong-legged pit ponies and cobs (which are still being bred here), downhill to the Tyne Docks to be shipped on to London and beyond. I sometimes imagine not only the din, the clatter of iron chains, the turning shaft winches from the mines, but also the smell which must have been here as recently as 70 years ago, still in my lifetime. The all-drenching acrid smell of burning coal which I know a little from winters in our beautiful village in the Scottish Borders, when it was still common to warm your house with a coal fire. Here in Stanley, where we live now, the smell of coal must have been in the air the whole year round as the mine winches must have been powered by coal fire. Add to that the fine dust of coal in the air, a fine black dust I can still detect on certain walks taking off from the cycle route. Poor lungs!
I almost forgot to write about one thing: smoking! In the days when smoking was still in fashion, there were conversations like: Wouldn’t that guy be a good match for you? And the reply could be: Oh, no, he is a smoker! It sounded like a Catholic father saying, Oh, no, he is a Protestant! But you did consider if it would be comfortable, as a non-smoker, to kiss a smoker…
My grandmother once asked me if I had started smoking. (I was a teenager and many of my school friends were smoking.) Or were you travelling in the smokers’ compartment? You smell terrible! (Grandfather used to smoke but had stopped before I was born. Maybe she was instrumental in that…)
Things have improved with this over the years – thank God! We used to smoke even in offices (I was a culprit there as well, at Feltrinelli’s – a belated sorry to my boss, Cincin Calabi). And do you remember when there was smoking even on airplanes? Smokers in the back and non-smokers in front. Once on a Czech Airlines flight to Mumbai the non-smokers were seated on the left and the smokers on the right side of the plane. (I had an aisle seat, so my neighbour was smoking!) California and Scotland were the first to ban smoking in public places. I vividly remember the joy when Amiten and I could go to a pub for the first time. It was in Glasgow, a sunny day! Scotland was the first nation in the United Kingdom to adopt the rule. It was such a relief to be able to go out, to restaurants even!
Recently a friend of mine, during a chat on WhatsApp, showed me a tiny bottle. It was ‘Sammasati’. For a while in the Mumbai years, and then in early Pune as well, Osho used an essential-oil mix, apparently to cool his forehead (it has camphor in it). (This was probably before it became clear that no perfume would ever suit his allergies.) Sometimes in darshan there was this perfume in the air. I remember that Mukta’s hair always used to smell of that. One day, when I was on a little holiday in Goa, playing with the waves, suddenly that smell was there, miles and miles from Pune and far from anyone else. It was as if Osho had said hello, that I was on the right track, that he was with me. Many years later, that perfume was sold in tiny bottles, with a label saying ‘Sammasati’. I still have one in my valuables box. As has my friend in the States, the one I was on the phone with.
Another thing comes to mind regarding smells. Was it maybe Niten who, visiting the Zurich centre one day, said to me, “So beautiful to hug sannyasins, because they smell… of nothing.”
Featured image thanks to pexels.com
Related articles
- A perfume called ignorance – An essay by S D Anugyan
- Fragrant thoughts – Tarpan’s thoughts on the subject of smell, and an excerpt from the chapter titled, Horse Dung and History of Smell from his recently published book, The Crows of Kedarnath
Related discourse excerpts
- What has happened to smell? – “What calamity has happened to smell? There seems to be no reason why smell has been so suppressed. No culture anywhere has consciously suppressed it but it has become suppressed.”
- Smell can be made an object of meditation – Osho speaks on the topic of ‘Perfume’; “Each sense has two possibilities: if the energy falls …downwards, then it is sexual; if the energy rises upwards, then it is spiritual.”
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