The Book of Everlasting Things, page 31
“Is this … normal?” Samir asked.
“Mais oui, but of course. It is quite normal, and usually a temporary condition, lasting until we cease to feel suffocated by our grief. Le nez, the nose, is a unique organ, and being a nose is even more so. We wish to hold on to the smell of a beloved’s skin—the sweat, the air, everything that has been absorbed into it. We want to re-create and bottle what we love, particularly if we have lost it. But this process of creation needs time, distance, and recollection. How we remember the smell of another is changeable by our experiences, alterable by time and weather and light, and the maturation of our own senses. It is a forever kind of yearning that few have been able to capture, where each attempt becomes a refuge.”
Recalling all the vials composed as homages to Lahore, Samir nodded. He wondered whether Rose sahib was speaking from experience, if he had lost a lover, a wife, a father, a mother, a grandmother; if he had attempted to bottle them.
“Samir, ce la mémoire … this memory is a rather distressing endeavor.”
For the second time that day, the young man reached into his suitcase and began shuffling through the contents. The rustling of papers, the shifting of clothes, and the rattling of perfume bottles filled the otherwise silent room.
“He did it eventually,” Samir said. “In Lahore, nearly twenty years after her passing, he composed something beautiful and powerful, inspired by her.”
He placed Vivek’s vial on the table before them. Ambrette as an elixir, immortal, Amrit.
41
The Perfumed Land
Holding Sophie’s hand, Léa walked down the stairs from their apartment to Madame Blanchet’s, where she dropped her daughter off and headed to the hospital. Buttoning up her cardigan, she held on to her nurse’s cap as she walked against the wind. It had been a few days since Samir had left for Grasse, and if she was being honest, it had been a relief not to fall asleep or wake up to his figure hunched over a pocket-sized journal. Over the last few months, all he’d paid attention to were words from a time he could not change.
The final unraveling had happened last week, when she was at the hospital and he was supposed to pick up Sophie from Madame Blanchet’s after his shift at the artist’s studio. But he was so engrossed in the pages of the journal that not only had he forgotten to pick up their daughter, he had not gone in to work at all. Léa would have been more furious had she not returned that night to find her husband weeping on the apartment floor, a pile of journals strewn around, and open bottles of perfume enveloping him in a cloud of sorrow. Stitching her anger into silence, she had cradled him in her arms like a child as he finally revealed what had happened to his uncle. From the battlefields to the flower fields, from a secret desertion to a secret marriage, the content of the journals had left her husband in a state of delirium.
Their marriage was fragile. It had felt so devoid of love for the past several months that when Samir revealed his wish to go to Grasse to search for answers, Léa thought that some distance might actually rejuvenate their relationship. They had never once been apart, and she wanted to give him a chance to miss her and their life together so he could carve a path back to it.
Two or three weeks, he had said when she dropped him off at the train station. Kissing her forehead, Samir had promised to return with closure.
* * *
Each morning during his stay at Villa deRose, Samir stood on the balcony of his room and stared out at the gentle green hills, citrus trees planted by the hundreds, and hectares of flowers blanketed by sunshine. Nestled within this Eden was the village of Grasse, a cluster of tiled, sloped roofs built over pink and yellow homes, distilleries, and factories of fragrance.
Samir had never inhabited a home this grand, and his meager belongings took up very little room. The only thing he had been particular about was hanging the framed photograph from 1937 on the wall in front of his bed. Sitting in front of it, he thought about the very first time he had opened the vials of perfume in his Paris apartment, the sublime assault of aromas and his insistence to repress them. But he knew now that he would always be nurtured by smell. And though he had come to recognize the malady that accompanied his occupation, the benefits of its artistry outweighed everything else.
Perfume had once been his mother’s island, his father’s livelihood, his grandfather’s nostalgia. But most importantly, it was his only connection to his uncle, and an homage to the nose he had bequeathed him with.
* * *
Every day began with Samir and the aging patriarch eating breakfast together, for it was in this way that Vivek would be returned to his Rose sahib. Samir would talk about Léa and Sophie, and his cautious yet inevitable return to perfumery, and in return, the aging perfumer would narrate stories from his youth. Then, for the remaining hours of the day, Samir would follow the journals through town in an attempt to discover exactly what his uncle had discovered decades ago. Samir also used his nose to navigate, but unlike Vivek, it was not fear that followed him around but secondhand memory. Though the harvest in Grasse might have varied year to year, the streets and its stones had remained the same. The air was unchanged, the sky was the same shade of azure, and fragrance had proved its strength by surviving two world wars.
He went to see Madame deRose’s ancient cottage, strolled the lengths of Place du Petit Puy to arrive at the town’s majestic twelfth-century cathedral, walked the garden that a famed Russian writer had once frequented, and even found the wooden door where Vivek and Ambrette were photographed after their wedding.
One day, while passing by the cathedral, he came across a strange monument—a tall, arched form with a rounded roof and four pillars. The beige stone structure was enclosed within a metal gate on all sides, and opening it, Samir walked up the three steps to survey it up close. His face tightened as he realized that it was a memorial to the two world wars, monuments aux morts. Walking around, he passed the pillars engraved with 1939 and 1945, to arrive at 1914 and 1918.
The First World War, the Great War, the Long War, Laam, Jarman di larai.
On each pillar were engraved names of the French soldiers who died serving in battle. “Amart, Anes, Allary, Allegre, Amic, André…” Samir scanned the list, whispering each name. He was searching for nothing and no one in particular, yet the act brought him comfort.
* * *
Weeks passed into a month, then another and then another, until Samir had been in Grasse for half a year. He began working first in the fields and then in the distillery, as Vivek once had. Every week without fail, he wrote to Léa and Sophie, and had made trips back to Paris, but insisted that he needed more time with the deRoses. He could sense Léa’s growing anxiety, but would try to explain how each conversation revealed something new about Vivek and Ambrette’s life, and he could not leave without collecting every detail.
Often, he would open the journals to the wedding photograph and stare at the faces long enough to imagine them speaking to him. Sometimes, he would peruse the pages speaking of an everlasting love and bearing such optimism that it became easy for Samir to forget how life had eventually unfolded.
November 14, 1916
Sometimes, when Ambrette helps with my Francisi, it feels like I am back in the billets, learning from the Francisi sipahis. The words from the battlefield were of sustenance and survival, the coarse language of everydayness. But Ambrette’s words are of love and lightness, the language of pleasure. To these, I surrender. “Waazo,” she tells me as it flutters by, a bird. “Ter,” she gestures to the moist earth. “Po,” her fingers run across her skin. “Kurr,” she places her hand over her heart. I cannot pronounce this last word, but I offer her my own in return. One I have carried on my tongue across the oceans of the world. A word reserved for her. I take her hand and along with mine, place them both upon my heart. “Dil,” I tell her, “dil.”
Reading this, Samir’s thoughts meandered to Léa, who had helped him to learn French, as Ambrette had Vivek. He remembered the early days of their courtship, how she would slowly correct his pronunciation—running her fingerips across his nose to emphasize the nasal n, focusing on the shape of his lips, using beat and pulse to teach him the rhythm of each syllable in a phrase, how both her voice and intention changed when she switched from French to English. He remembered her laughter when he failed, and her joy when he succeeded.
And in thinking back to these moments, he also recalled the memories that he had buried with great difficulty then, just as he was trying to now. But the realm of language belonged so profoundly to Firdaus that Samir couldn’t help but give in. Immersed once again in perfume, the days of his childhood and, by extension, his childhood love had begun to find an effortless passage back to him. The power of smell resurrected their intensity, and any guilt that arose alongside was weaker than the desire Samir surrendered to.
He imagined Firdaus, sprouting flowers and birds from the lean stems and fat bases of Urdu letters, as her pistachio eyes followed the qalam on the page. Firdaus, dipping delicate squirrel brushes into inkwells. Firdaus, mouthing Arabic poetry along with her abba. Firdaus, crushing lapis for the dyes. Firdaus in a sea green dupatta holding Samir’s first letter. With closed eyes, he wondered if there was a way to bottle these moments of daily life. Why had his uncle not taught him that? He would have distilled Firdaus’s drifting laughter from the bicycle ride over to Standard Restaurant, seized the evening sky on the first day she spoke to him in the studio, taken captive the color of her eyes; he would have composed with the warmth of her breath, the feel of her skin, the movement of her hands, the fall of her hair, even the sound of her voice.
Opening his eyes, he slammed the journal shut. With his heart still pounding in his throat, he shook off the past, and he penned a letter to Léa, filling the envelope with sprigs of fresh flowers, and posted it out the very next day.
* * *
When Samir returned from town that morning, Édouard deRose was waiting for him at the breakfast table. He was no longer able to walk or smell well, age having defeated his body and its senses, but he was still a gifted storyteller, and would spin the tales of history like Som Nath once used to.
Two wars had swallowed the world, but through both, Grasse had survived. Men had enlisted; they had lived and died on the far fields of battle. But no blood had been spilled on southern soil, which had made Grasse the perfect escape for men like Vivek. In the years following the First World War, it became a cultural center, home to artists, writers, and musicians from around the world. Even perfume thrived, for American soldiers who had been stationed in France during the war took bottles of French fragrance back with them, driving renewed international trade. The export of the centifolia rose flourished. During the Second World War, Grasse became a more official refugee camp, as people from across the occupied areas of France were evacuated into the tiny town. Through Rose sahib’s raspy voice, a story of tragedy and triumph unfolded, not quite so different from the one Samir had abandoned on the other side of the world.
Over eggs and croissants, Samir asked Rose sahib the same question he had once asked his father, and the answer he received was miraculously similar.
“What are perfumers to do when our world, our freedom is under attack? How do we play our parts in war; how do we fight?” From all the stories that Rose sahib had relayed, the Second World War had imperiled not just land and power, but the essence of humanity. It had stripped millions of identity, exterminated those who were considered other, and resembled, in misery and misfortune, the days of Hindustan’s Partition.
“Ah.” He peered at Samir through his gold-rimmed spectacles. “Oui, there were those who fought in the battlefields, bien sûr, men like your uncle. With arms and weapons, some had no choice but to enlist, some volunteered.” His fist rose slightly in the air. “And then there were those of us who fought another kind of war, a resistance war. We were the soldiers of beauty and art. Throughout the war, when bullets and blood covered the land, when battles consumed every mind and heart, we were the transporters. We bottled memory, painted paradise, wrote on all that was being forgotten, transcribed the world we were witnessing … a world that may later have required the clarity of retrospect. You see, we were the bridge to the lost civilization. It might seem an insignificant undertaking, when compared to fighting in a battlefield, but it was also essential. This is what art did, what music did, what perfume did, it elevated human life during crisis. We were the transporters, we took people somewhere else.” Rose sahib’s hands now moved across the table in a wave, like a ship carrying folk from somewhere to somewhere else. His voice was barely louder than a whisper, as if he were imparting to Samir a secret of great worth.
“The transporters…” Samir repeated after him.
“Oui, exactement.”
42
The Second Apprenticeship
When Sophie turned five, Léa brought her to visit Samir for the first time. She had started school, and whenever anyone asked her where her family was from, sensing the foreignness of her surname, her answer would simply be “Grasse.” One year of postal envelopes filled with fragrant petals and leaves had eclipsed any memory of the years her father had spent in Paris.
As for Léa, she would need to get used to this new version of her husband, not at a desk, not lifting patients or moving beds or constructing painter’s canvases, but indulging in the ancient art of perfumery. She found him transformed, almost unfamiliar. There was a delicacy and finesse to his movements that she was witnessing for the first time.
She noticed his effortlessness as he took them on a tour of the flower fields and the riviera, greeting pickers and distillers, townspeople and shopkeepers. His eyes seemed to sparkle; the smile she remembered from when they first met had now returned; even his physique had improved from working in the fields. She noticed the tenderness with which his hands grasped a stalk of tuberose or wove a string of jasmine in Sophie’s hair. He was attentive and romantic, intimate and present. For the first time in a long time, Léa found herself drawn to her husband, and wondered whether it was distance that had rekindled her feelings, or the stability he had achieved here, or simply the fact that he was returned to his most natural state of being.
But no matter how charming his work as a perfumer seemed, it had rendered their marriage into a task. She hated that he chose to live here, in Grasse, so far away from her and Sophie. She hated making excuses when Madame Blanchet asked when he was returning. She hated that his state of mind rendered him incapable of the commitment he had made to her. She hated that he no longer made love the way he once used to. She hated the distant feeling of his skin, even when it was pressed against hers, and how the expression in his eyes was always far away, looking toward some other day, some other memory, perhaps even some other person. But what she hated the most was that he seemed to have left her behind.
All through the visit, Léa wrestled with this sense of abandonment. Then one evening, as the couple sat with their daughter in the garden, she brought up the future.
“Tu reviens quand?”
Distractedly, Samir looked up from the painting he was making with Sophie. “Quoi, mon chérie?” and so she asked again.
“Tu reviens quand à Paris? Ou on va vivre à Grasse ensemble? When will we be together again?”
“Soon.” He smiled, turning his attention back to the piece of art. “Very soon.”
And that was it; her husband never brought up the subject on his own, as if this arrangement was completely normal. A week later, when Léa got back on the train to Paris, child in tow, she felt more confused and lonelier than before.
* * *
“It takes ten years to master the art of smell recognition,” Gaspard deRose stressed. “An average person may be able to remember a few hundred odors, but a perfumer, a nose, knows and recognizes thousands!”
One week after Léa and Sophie had left Grasse, Samir began the second apprenticeship of his life, this time under Gaspard deRose. Since he had first worked as picker and distiller, this new role would complete his perfumistic education and lay the foundation for his future in France. On that particular morning, the pair occupied the darkened basement laboratory, where Vivek had also worked. Lined up on the shelves were hundreds of brown bottles in every size, arranged in alphabetical order, holding ingredients from around the world. This was the collection Samir would have to memorize.
Gaspard led him into the adjoining room, which contained a small perfumer’s organ, almost identical in shape and form to the one Samir had grown up with. He approached it in the same reverential way as one did an altar, carefully letting his fingertips glide across the bottles. On a table, a unique initiation had been set up, modern and more clinical-looking than any that Vivek had undertaken. Samir approached the table apprehensively. Ten vials were laid out, with blotting cloths and droppers. Each smelling exercise was to be separated by a pause of several minutes, after which ten new vials would be brought out and the exercise repeated. Gaspard was testing his new apprentice’s knowledge, for not everyone could hold the monsoon in their nose, after all.
Vial after vial, Samir smelled and identified, some easily, if they were natural elements that he’d been exposed to in Lahore—rose, orange flower, vetiver, musk, civet. These sat at the very tip of his nose. But with the advent of science in modern perfumery, synthetic compounds had been produced to supplement the limited extraction of natural substances, and to those, Samir paid the most attention. Complicated chemical names gave no indication of the corresponding smells, so all identification began and ended in the nose. Deconstructing the synthetics was difficult, a combination of concentration and association, pausing all other senses to rely only on smell.
