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In Pursuit of Everlasting Things

Aanchal Malhotra visits the crowded lanes of Chandni Chowk in pursuit of the smells that make up the world of her sensorial debut novel The Book of Everlasting Things.

“Sometimes, when the whole world seems ruined beyond recognition, even the faintest gesture of beauty, like the whiff of a familiar perfume, can bring solace. . . Smell then, becomes an escape, a shelter, a sanctuary. . . Our sense of smell, regarded by so many as secondary, is one of the most extraordinary ways to preserve intimacy, history, and, of course, memory.”

“Of all our senses, smell is the most fragile. It is the least understood and also most secretive. . . it has occasion and history and response. . .the ability to take someone somewhere else… smell is a portal.”

Over the last decade, as an oral historian, I’ve had numerous conversations about homelands irretrievable due to partitions and borders, and was surprised at how many of those stories were rooted in intangible, sensorial experiences – the taste of food one used to eat, the colour of the walls in their house, and the smells… of the kitchen, the old sandook, the soil of the fields, even the ittar their mother used to wear.

While writing The Book of Everlasting Things, I wanted to draw my readers to this undeniably strong connection between smell and memory. The book is about two families— one of calligraphers and the other, of perfumers —set against the backdrop of cataclysmic events like the two world wars and Partition. And for its research, I often found myself in the streets of Chandni Chowk visiting Gulabsingh Johrimal, the 200-year-old iconic ittar kada.

Samir, my protagonist, as a young man learning to be a perfumer in the 1940s in Lahore, is introduced to the evocative ittar kadamba by his friend, Rashid —

“Samir brought the applicator to his nose and inhaled. He marvelled at the smell, notes of pistachio, sandal, and kewra, with hints of sweetness. He closed his eyes, inhaled again. Within seconds, he was transported to the mithai shops in Anarkali, surrounded by the aroma of milky barfi and dense laddoo.”

When he tells Rashid what the smell evokes, his friend smiles and proudly says that Ittar kadamba is brought to them specially from an old perfumery in Delhi called Gulab Singh Johrimal, such is the lore of the fragrance and the family that composes it.

Amrit, a perfume at the heart of the novel, is the namesake of my grandmother. It is composed by another perfumer-protagonist named Vivek, using the Ambrette seed. While writing the scenes surrounding that perfume, I wished many times to smell pure Ambrette seed oil, and I found it finally at Gulab Singh Johrimal.

A year since its publication, the book has found place in readers’ hearts and has woven itself into their memories. Many of them have also written wanting to know more about the process of ittar production. To answer these questions, I found myself back in the familiar streets of Old Delhi, where the scent of history touches every surface. As I talked to Mukul Gandhi, the seventh generation in this family of perfumers, the keeper of an ancient art, I was transported yet again to the landscape of Everlasting Things.


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