First showers, fresh flowers and many more!

A hundred sweet memories wisp in front of my eyes like traces of smoke emanate from a bunch of lighted incense sticks as I think of the smells from my childhood. Which thread should I hold first to go back and begin the story?

Well, let me begin from the beginning. My mother is an expert in cooking. In our childhood we subscribed to a popular weekly, in which a column devoted to food recipes was her favourite. She used to cut  out the articles and paste them in a separate book. Every now and then she would try experimenting on one of those recipes. She must have cooked like that a hundred things but the memory of only a particular one still remains fresh in my mind. It was halwa made of papaya. While she was preparing it with grated papaya fruit, sugar, fresh ghee, cardamom and cashew nuts an irresistible sweet smell would come out and we could not control ourselves until it was made. Sniffing appreciatively and drooling we used to go to her with stretched hands. Smiling, she would put it little by little in our tiny palms and we quickly blew it ufff....ufff....to eat it fast.  

We lived in a small village. We did not have tar roads. When the route bus went  along the village dusty road a cloud of fine dust mixed with diesel smoke would rise behind it.  I liked the smell of this smoke. If I happened to be going to school at the time of a bus` going I used to run behind it as far as I could just to get as much of this smell as I was able to . In one such occasion my father caught hold of me and told me that it was not good.

Sometimes, at nights a camp fire would be lit with dry Palmyra leaves and twigs  in the open space in front of our village house. Cousins, uncles, friends and womenfolk from the house... all used to gather around it. It was not a camp fire alone. There might be ground nuts, cashew nuts, palmyra tubers under the flames giving out sweet smell as they were getting done. Those were such sweet days!

Talking about this, I can recall a hundred more memories of smell of fresh pages of a new book,  of wet sand during first showers, of coffee and jasmine flowers ............ ohhhhhhhhhhhh stop me! Or else you have to read it on and on until the week end.

© Dantuluri Kishore Varma