The Language of Everyday Smells

Book Review: The Smell of Fresh Rain by Barney Shaw

Can you smell these things? (Selection of oil paintings by various contemporary artists)

What does three o’clock in the morning smell like? The Smell of Fresh Rain by Barney Shaw has an entire chapter devoted to this question. Last night, I went to the terrace and started sniffing. For once, I didn’t smell car exhaust which is ubiquitous in my neighborhood. There was a cool breeze thanks to the monsoon clouds. A hint of incense, the sweet woody floral smell of the flower Rangoon creeper or Combretum indicum (Madhobilota in Bengali, a tropical vine with clusters of red flowers, grows to great heights and flowers in the summer), and a faint whiff of detergent. Someone was doing laundry at three in the night. I went back to bed quite satisfied. But there was more to learn. I still couldn’t use specific words to describe the floral scent that my brain registered as Madhobilota and differentiated it from a jasmine or a marigold. Neither I could specify a particular smell for the witching hour.

What does your three o’clock in the night smell like?

The beautiful Rangoon creeper

Our sense of smell is elusive. A fleeting experience. A citrusy perfume and you wonder whether it has orange, lemon, or grapefruit notes or a combination of any of the three. Bite into a piece of ravioli and you wonder if it is butternut squash or pumpkin. We smell a scent and try to articulate it but the next moment it’s gone. Sniff again and your mind goes blank. We lose our sense of smell on repeated sniffing for evolutionary reasons. Our olfactory palate is cleansed so as to stay alert to new dangers, rotting food, diseases, etc. This the reason perfumers smell coffee beans between testing perfumes to recalibrate their noses.

There are quite a few books about perfumes, history of perfumery, physiology, genetics, and psychology of olfaction, chemistry of fragrant molecules, and natural history of fragrances. The world of perfumes is the olfactory ivory tower next only to wines. Who among us has actually smelled ambergris or oakmoss in real life? Or distinguish top notes and base notes in our perfume bottles. Perfumers and sommeliers are experts trained to dissect the body of a new perfume or wine and identify the composition of smells. Their guides and flavor charts and wheels cannot help us articulate smells of everyday. We need words to describe smells of barbeque, charcoal, rusted window, a bunch of keys, brown paper bag, bread, fresh rain, capers, books, glossy magazines, celery, baby powder, alum, shoe polish, tuna, mangosteen, old books, old people, mangroves, subway, etc. How to describe the smell of a caper rather than calling it ‘caperish’? There is no dictionary of smells for everyday common objects and beings. Until now.

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The maximalist’s sensory dream book

Barney Shaw, an artist and former civil servant, wrote this book inspired by his son Nick’s unusual experiences with smell. Nick, 32 at the time this book was published, was born blind, and is a savant with a deep intelligent understanding of classical music. For Nick, three o’clock in the morning smells of foxes.

‘Foxes smell tense,’ said Nick,’ sort of like Shostakovich, by the way.’

Perhaps a case of synesthesia. Turns out, a childhood dream featuring a fox has made home in Nick’s mind and bound itself to the smell of night. Some people indeed dream about smells.

The author, curious about the wide range of olfactory experiences and Nick’s questions, curated a language of smells for the non-specialist reader. He invites the reader to shed all inhibitions about the exotic language of wine, beer, coffee, and perfume fragrance and flavor wheels. Shaw travels to a lot of places in search of the words that describe the common and the sublime. Perhaps this is what makes it a unique book.

He takes us near the ocean. And no, the sea doesn’t smell of salt even if the scented candles tell you so. Pure salt has no odor. The seaside often smells of the by-product of plankton, dimethyl sulfide. It has a “touch of the offensive cabbaginess of sulphur”. The boatyards and docks smell of materials like fresh paints, fuel oil, fish guts, nylon rope, and damp wood.

Next, our author travels to a large wood of oak, hazel, and ash trees to meet the proprietors of a charcoal company. A favorite chapter of mine; I love the smell of smoke. Burnt timber, burnt toast, burnt garlic. Counterintuitive since smoke is harmful for my asthmatic lungs. Burning timber gives a range of odors from the signature smell of the specific tree to the bitter, acrid, tarry, and leathery smell of charcoal formation.

So there is timber that smells meaty (larch or bog oak); fruity (pear or apple, naturally); creamy (lime); nutty (walnut); malty (yew); of chloroform (iroko) or of vanilla (beech).

Another destination was a trader’s shop selling small metal goods. Metal fittings, brass knobs, keys, shears, scissors, knives, chains, spare parts. Smells of metal, doesn’t it? Metals do not have an odor of their own. We smell the effect of our own sweat as it corrodes the metal surface as soon as we touch it. Hence, blood smells metallic. It’s not the iron but the molecule called 1-octen-3-one that is “metallic”.

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Our sense of smell is malleable at birth. Nothing is hard-wired inside our brain. No special neuronal bunches pretuned to particular smells. A smell in one person will be represented by an entirely different neuronal ensemble in another person. It is a blank slate.

So, consider this. Our parents or kin teach us sounds and sights by careful instruction. Sometimes too curated for our own good. But nobody told us to distinguish between an apple and coffee. We taught ourselves. Our olfactory spectrum is heavily influenced by our personal experiences and cultural differences. This is the reason smells evocate strong emotional responses and memories. Comparative studies have shown that “Japanese people are more tolerant of smells of dried fish, cheese, and beer; German people are more tolerant of church incense, aniseed, and almond.” I for one cannot stand aniseed-flavored cocktails and dried fish. The latter because I grew up in northern India where dry fish in everyday cooking is virtually absent.

The cultural significance of smells has been a tool used by urban planners like the late Victoria Henshaw who organized movements and walks to map smells of the city or “urban smellscapes.” I asked my readers on Instagram to list five smells of their cities, and these were some of the responses.

The idea was to pay more attention to our sensory lives; modern lives being slaves to constant sight and sound. The other idea was to understand that you can smell the civic problems of your local areas. You can smell the increasing air pollution, leaking chemicals in water bodies, bad sewage system, stagnant water, slaughterhouse mismanagement, and poor electrical wiring that smells of rancid rubber when the wires start sparking.

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Of all the chapters, each equally interesting and chock-full of pleasurable words, the one about the futuristic smells described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World surprised me the most. Artificial scenting of venues is our Brave New World. Scent organs. Ambient scenting. Sweet and intoxicating smells pumped into the air every time you walk into a wedding or a corporate event. Companies targeting consumers to buy more things because we all love the smell of chocolate and vanilla. How many times have you bought a coffee just while walking past a coffee shop even though you didn’t need one?

Towards the end of the book, the author outlines a simple technique for readers to train their noses for everyday smells. A step-by-step guide to sniffing.

• Is the smell simple or complex? Rubber and ammonia are simple smells. Perfumes, not so much.

• Which part of the natural world does the smell belong to? Forest, meat, chemical, fruit, cereals (malts), smoke.

• Identify close neighbors. Apple or peach. Orange or lemon. Rat dropping or dead lizard (a funny experience from my childhood when a lizard died inside our old television).

• Bitter or sweet? This one is tricky. Our tongues can identify bitter and sweet very easily.

• Piquancy element? The stuff that makes your eyes water, tongues tingle, throat burn. Onions, ammonia, ginger.

Phew!

My book is heavily annotated, tea-splattered, and scent-anointed because I have been testing perfumes while reading this book. The paperback copy smells of apples and fresh wood, that particular smell when you snap a green twig. For readers still with me, here’s The Historic Book Odour Wheel. It’s a thing. The wheel shows that my book smells of the compounds hexanal and vanillin. It is a relatively new copy. I hope you find your book smells this weekend.

Smell of heritage: a framework for the identification, analysis and archival of historic odours.

Some entries from the dictionary of smells at the end of the book are given below. The entry for WD40 is one of my favorites. Until next time!

Let the sniffing commence!