The Smell of India

While visiting the Tiger Fort in Jaipur a few weeks ago we talked with a fellow tourist about trying to describe the smell of India. Nothing remarkable resulted, but this is a passage Rachel just found in a book she's reading:

"It's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It's the smell of gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay. It's the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the island city, and the blood-metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty-million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shines, churches and mosques, and of a hundred markets bazaars devoted exlusively to perfumes, spices, incense and freshly cut flowers. Karla once called it the worst good smell in the world, and she was right of course, in that way she had of being right about things. But whenever I return to Bombay, now, it's my first sense of the city - that smell above all things - that welcomes me and tells me I've come home."

Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram