Scent of a woman

Many years ago, when I was still a grubby (that being the bon mot) little schoolgirl, life was fun and easy. For the most part, anyway. I never had to worry about how to get home when it rained too much, for instance; the school would contrive. And if the school was stuck on that score, my parents would ride in to the rescue. Ditto with lunch, grazed knees and unrequited crushes. As I grew up, I did most of my own rescuing and managed to stay alive and well, most of the time. But the days of yore have stayed with me and probably always will.

Perhaps what lingered longest was the smell. Little girls smell wonderfully of puppy dog, mixed in with sugar and spice and all things nice. That aroma gets blended with a ‘tester taste’ of Mom’s perfume, scented talcum powder and the fragrant sachets tucked into the closet where the small frocks and pretty Tshirts are stored. Added to that is the gentle pong of sweat cooked up while playing ‘House’, giggling about boys, bras and bumps on the chest and furtive peeks into the steamy world of American afternoon television soaps, where a kiss is part of almost every scene and heavy breathing mandated by the script.

And there is another smell that is very special to a schoolgirl in Mumbai. Monsoontime is the season for outdoor physical activity, most schools insist, since the weather is cool and the sunstroke factor low. So as soon as the rains begin, or threaten to do so, schoolchildren – segregated according to their gender - are herded into groups, driven or crocodile-walked to the nearest playing field and let loose. There is some supervision, a coach cursorily giving instructions, lots of water, even more mud and dozens of flailing limbs, the melee spiced with much yelling, some laughter, a few tears and fervent battles. And an atmosphere that can almost be felt, rich with the ordure of pre-adolescents who have spent a while in intense exertion.

For me, at the astonishingly snob school I went to in this city, it was all about football, the game that is, at the moment, a la mode. Since we didn’t have our own ground, we had to rent one that happened to be on the main road through the elite part of town. Which meant that we would be gawked at by people we knew, or our parents did, which added to the overall embarrassment of running around in short shorts in the middle of the city in the afternoon. But once we were covered with gloopy, gunky, gluey mud, redolent of rainwater, sweat and assorted pollutants, we didn’t care. Even the fondest mother would not be able to sniff her daughter out from the general chaos, we believed - never underestimate the power of the maternal nose, I learned as I grew up. But we all knew one thing and were oddly proud of it: we ponged like a mixture of old socks and stale asafoetida.

The aura we emitted was summed up succinctly by a sibling who collected us from the playground to drive us home. Brother of my then-best-friend, he had just learned how to drive and did us an extraordinary favour in an incredibly lordly way by picking us up en route home. My buddy and I clambered soggily giggling into the backseat of his old and admittedly battered car (and it wasn’t even his, it was his mother’s!), our dripping behinds nicely separated from clean upholstery by a wad of newspapers and a large plastic raincoat. Pointedly, the young man rolled down his window and deflated our youthful egos swelled with the triumph of being on the winning team with one acid-laden remark: “You stink!”