The Sixth Sense is a great M. Night Shyamalan movie everyone should watch. The fifth sense, is our sense of smell. This sense, olfactory function, is more strongly linked to our memories than perhaps any of the other senses. I’m sure it has happened to all of you; a certain smell can send you hurtling back in time, to a distant memory that presents itself like yesterday in your mind. Smell is far more complicated and important than we give it credit for.
Some scientists believe that kissing developed from sniffing; a primal behaviour that gave people the opportunity to smell and taste their partners to know if they’re a match. People who have anosmia, the loss of a sense of smell, stated that they felt cut-off from the people around them and the rest of the world, in addition to experiencing a blunting of emotions. Smell loss has also shown to affect people’s ability to form and maintain close personal relationships, potentially even leading to depression. So let’s just take a moment and appreciate the wonders of smell, and all it does for us.
The beautiful thing about smell is, that the most innocuous ones can be linked to your past. When I was a child, every Thursday night, my mother used to make Rajma, Rice and Matar Paneer (peas & cottage cheese). We used to serve ourselves mounds; with my father posted away, my brother, my mother and I would sit on her bed and stuff ourselves silly. After a year, my brother left for college, then it was just my mother and I. I was all of 10, coming to terms with sleeping without my brother for the first time and spending large amounts of time by myself.
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A lot was changing, but every Thursday night, dinner was the same. Every Thursday night we sat, sans brother, on my mother’s bed, eating away. Almost 15 years later, when someone asks me what my favourite meal is, there’s only one thought in my mind. When I come home and my mom makes the same meal, I help her in the kitchen. While I’m there, stirring the pot and adding spices, every deep breath I take sends me back to 2005; my brother, my mother and I sitting on the same bed and eating. The memory isn’t a very important in the grand scheme of things, but it is important to me. Every time I smell my mother’s Rajma and Matar Paneer, I’m sent back there and I cherish it.
More recently, a relatively newer smell has taken on a great deal of importance in my life. For years, every time I hugged my significant other, I took a deep breath, I didn’t even know I did it at first. But every time, I took a deep breath. I don’t know what I smelled, if someone asked me to describe what it smelt like, I would be at a loss for words. It’s a smell unique to them, it is them. With the pandemic keeping us apart, the lack of that smell still sends me through memory lane. But one tinged with sadness, because I don’t know when I will experience it again and it isn’t something I can put in a bottle, as much as I wish I could.
I think when we’re around someone, we pay so much attention to what we see, what we hear, what we feel, but who knew that what we smelled could knit all of them together?
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