I sniff, therefore I am

Few things in this world evoke memories more vivid than that triggered by the sense of smell.

Smell can trigger evil – in the case of the protagonist in Perfume: the Story of a Murderer, his exquisite sense of smell and quest for the perfect fragrance drives him to commit 12 murders. Such an impassioned plea for perfection overrides justice, as it turns out that his executioner, the papal state, and the masses fall for the promise embedded in his fragrance-loaded handkerchief, which he had flourishingly swept through the air at the gallows.

When I opened the medicine cabinet in the 2^nd-floor bathroom this evening, I smelt a familiar smell: had I been here before? I knew exactly where I had smelt it – when I was around 13, and in my grandmother’s house. Kind of makes sense, given that these folks are true blue Asians and my grandma’s cabinet is rather Asian, except that I don’t see how Indian and Chinese items can smell similar. Perhaps this represents globalization on the run.

In any case, have you ever suddenly “lost” your sense of smell such that you cannot smell anything around you? No, it is not the flu or black gold. Rather, as you inhale, you get intoxicated with a very strange déjà vu sensation. This happens around twice a year, and I have come to treat this as a sort of hint that something major is about to happen in my life.

That is just a short diatribe on the sense of smell. It might seem unimportant, but imagine, if you worked in a lab, and were surrounded by phenol-chloroform fumes, wouldn’t you be glad to know in advance that you are being poisoned or choked by those fumes? Without smell, by golly, you’re dead meat. And for mosquitoes, the sense of smell is essential: you smell living flesh, criss-crossed with huge veins through which delicious nutrient-rich fresh blood rushes. Imagine the joy surging through each mosquito as it pierces through the thick epidermis and reaches the *exact* spot where the optimal blood pressure for sufficiently inflating its little belly lies. The sense of smell (and of course, the ability to monitor heat distribution) matters a lot. Unfortunately, you cannot help but curse evolution, and the resulting selection for better mosquitoes with more efficiently blood-searching mechanisms, when you’re the victim, as I was. I am now nursing huge lines of mosquito bites – these lines delineate the blood vessel distribution of my entire circulatory system.

Now of course, I am exaggerating. Don’t worry, mom & dad!