Skip to main content

Petrichor

It has always been my favorite smell and recently I found out it is called petrichor. This is the one smell I would love to have around me always - to remind me of childhood and the home I have left far behind - favorite smells can trigger the most pleasurable nostalgia.

Like Mrs de Winter said to her husband in Rebecca: “I wish there could have been an invention that bottled up a memory, like perfume, and it never faded, never got stale. Then whenever I wanted to, I could uncork the bottle and live the memory all over again.”

That wish can now come true thanks to Demeter Fragrances that wish can possibly come true. Earthworm is a close approximation of petrichor. Then there is New Zealand to bottle the essence of the country itself.
Labels:

Comments

Suchi said…
Ah, fascinating, I wasn't aware there was an English word for it. The Tamil word for it is as beautiful as the smell itself: mann vasanai
Literally, earth fragrance.
1:14 PM
Anonymous said…
I don't know what it is about smell, it seems to evoke a much stronger sense of nostalgia. The whiff of a familiar fragrance or odor even. Maybe because it's not as much tangible as an object that we can see and feel.
10:37 AM
Natasha said…
Quite a coincidence.
That is my all time favourite smell too, but I never even dreamt it could have a name.
Thanks for introducing me to a new word, and rekindling the memories associated with that gorgeous smell.
2:15 AM
reNUka said…
Thanks for reminding me the word...! When I read the meaning, the word 'mann vasanai' came to my mind (like Suchi has said)!
4:09 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more