It's earthy and sweet, I’d probably say if someone insisted that I describe the smell of Bhubaneswar. Over the course of returning to the city, again and again, I have tried to deduce the components of this tangible yet elusive smell, much like how I reconstruct the ingredients and recipe of a dish I’m tasting for the first time. A handful of coconut trees, a dash of the not-too-far-away and not-too-close-by sea, a sprinkling of the melancholic gangasiuli, a smattering of lush and partly trampled undergrowth, and mildew according to taste. And the main ingredient—generous dollops of red laterite soil, colloquially known as mankada mati, lit. monkey soil, possibly a reference to the bright red colour of rhesus monkeys’ bottoms! This essay traces loss and longing through the smellscape of a city in the course of imagining and remembering it through memories and of traversing it through its transformations.
