“But what is manusher gondho ma”?— Aratrika Das
Hau mau khau, manusher gondho pau, I smell humans. The first part of the phrase is a growling sound in Bengali language. It is the sound a rakkosh, a monster, makes when he smells a human in Thakumar Jhuli, a collection of stories that is read to every child in Bengal. The collection is a result of a 1907 ethnographic study by Dakshinaranjan Mitra, who travelled from one village to another in rural Bengal (then part of undivided India) in search of folk tales told to little children by their mothers and grandmothers. I often tell these stories to my son. “But what is manusher gondho ma?” In response to my son’s innocent quest to know the smell of a human, I inhale deeply and catalogue the smells on him: his hair has a strong odour of Parachute coconut oil; tiny fingertips have faint aroma of mustard oil and garam masala of mangshor jhol, mutton curry, we ate at lunch; sky-blue shirt on him has the scent of detergent, Johnson powder, and soap; his shorts with vestiges of mud from the garden has an earthy and humid fragrance; the skin on his neck and back is sweaty and has his distinct smell. I inhale his scent again, deep, from the warm spot on his neck. Inhale. Inhale. Inhale. Until I feel my son’s stare. “But what is manusher gondho ma?” – he repeats, unconvinced with my list. A mild whiff of cow dung seeps in through the verandah, and I realise English language is particularly deficit in words on smells.
Think of a typical coffee that Starbucks sells in New Delhi: “full body of Brazilian coffee”, “inviting cup with delicate notes of maple, vanilla, and toasted nuts”, “nutty/cocoa”, “papery/musty”, “dried fruit”, “buttery”, “creamy”, “smooth”, “delicate”, “thin”, “smoky”, “syrupy”, “caramel”. The descriptions are of a luxurious experience built upon randomly paired words. These odourless words strive to portray before the eyes, and not the nose, a liquid that must delight the senses.
Manusher gondho, smell of a human, is a stinky affair of memories and is particularly difficult to control, define and describe. I do not want to remember how my grandmother smelled. It is a room freshener with a distinctly flowery, lingering smell. A thick scent that my mother had hoped would mask the many clinical smells of my grandmother’s room while she was bed-ridden, body ravaged by old age. Instead, it mingled with them and created a smell that became a note of death, of impending grief. It is almost 6 years since my grandma died, but I cannot stand the smell of a lavender room freshener. Smells don’t evoke memories. They are memories. While I want to hang on to my son’s smell, perhaps bottle it somehow, I want to forget my last unkind words to my dying grandmother, forget that she will forever remain a hole in stories I tell my son.
But I must explain manusher gondho to my son today, perhaps emulating Shahjahan from the painting The Emperor Shah Jahan with his Son Dara Shikoh (Folio from the Shah Jahan Album). A quick GoogleImage search on my phone shows us the beautiful painting: Shah Jahan is admiring jewels with his son Dara in a garden. The father contemplates a ruby in his right hand, while holding a tray of emeralds and rubies in the other. His infant son meanwhile grasps a peacock fan and a turban ornament. The image illustrates the sumptuousness of court life in intricately painted details of jewels, the gilded furniture, and the textiles, but it is the extravagantly painted frame around the image that has manusher gondho I tell my son. Here are doves with their beating wings dispersing the cloud motifs abruptly as they move past a tree with oversize peaches about to drop, while bees, winged insects, and butterflies flock over flower-buds on the verge of bursting into full bloom. All this action is just on the top of the frame. Peacocks, partridges and cranes strut about lush foliage and multi-petal blooms of vibrantly hued, exaggerated representations of saffron-crocus, narcissus, rose, calendula and purple iris. I close his eyes and tell him Shahjahan and Dara smell what we perceive while walking to school every morning – fresh wet soil intermingled with wild flowers and dampness lingering in the air, with flies, mosquitoes, butterflies, and pigeons buzzing on. Inexplicably my son inhales, with his eyes still closed, inside our bedroom, and claims he likes the shaad of manusher gondho.
A second conundrum begins now: shaad is taste, but can there be taste of a fragrance? I must explain to my son manusher gondho need not have a shaad to his liking. Matsyagandha (literally, smell of fish) is another name for Satyavati, the mother of Vyasa from the Mahabharata. Satyavati means one who speaks the truth. Matsyagandha is Satyavati and is the truth. Matsyagandha is also the name of a superfast train from Mumbai to Mangalore, which runs along the fishing coast of western India. This train in Mumbai — I tell my son – has the shaad of manusher gondho: pollution, Bombay Duck, the metallic smell of trains, garbage, vada pav, mold, rust, diesel, coconut oil, salt, sweat, bodies adorned with garlands and scented pastes, corpses burned on smoky pyres. This shaad displeases him but is the only description I can think of that leans into the idea that there are limits to our vocabulary.
As I struggle to explain manusher gondho I decide to watch with my son Tasher Ghawr – a 47 minute short film in which Sujata Sengupta, a housewife describes a Sunday. Every day is a Sunday during the pandemic. Based on a Tarashankar Bandhopadhay’s story, this short film is on the claustrophobic life of a woman embedded in domestic and sexual violence and her husband’s infidelity. My son laughs seeing rats in Sujata’s kitchen, perhaps never understanding the pain narrated on-screen. He stares at the mention of the different smells which Sujata memorises to cement her pain: the pungent smell of blood of fish; the pool of blood her mother-in-law laid in while dying; the smell of her miscarriage; a scent of blood oozing out of her cheeks when her husband batters her. Gondho. Smells. Sujata catalogues smells while she remembers old songs. Even as she talks on death, she describes the damp earthen plant pots. Manusher gondho, ma! The smell of a human, mom! My son exclaims at the end of the film in such a way as to finally find the right words to know his smell. I remind him, Matsyagandha is Satyavati and is the truth.
Aratrika Das is Assistant Professor (English) in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Indore.
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