STENCH!

Warning: This piece contains material of a disturbing nature please do not read if you are of a sensitive nature……….

It sounds like the name for a band or even a post – ironic name for a modern perfume but I want to talk about the Real Thing: Stench!
In the UK we don’t really do ‘stench’ do we? Oh, we complain and even recoil when things smell a bit off but ask yourself, when was the last time you really experienced a genuine, honest to goodness stench eh? In my letters home, I’ve often talked about the sights and sounds of India, but it occurred to me earlier today that I have never really delved particularly deeply into the smells of India. I recall having written about the all pervasive background smell that one generally encounters in the worlds ‘warmer regions’, a redolent cocktail of decay that is not especially unpleasant and soon fades into the general sensorial background noise. I kind of like it and its pretty much the first thing to greet me when I step off the plane at Mumbai. But India as an olfactory experience is utterly unique in terms of both the intensities and the contrasting varieties of odour on offer: The spices, the perfumes, the incense, the flowers etc all have a travel brochures clichéd charm of course but nothing that you can’t experience at some point in every high street in the UK these days. Where India excels is in the, erm, somewhat less marketable whiffs that abound here in so many interesting combinations.
Partly it’s to do with the sun but its also to do with India’s unfortunate (and nobody can deny this) lack of hygiene and civic housekeeping, sorry, make that complete absence of same.
I am consistently struck by just what a totally litter strewn place the subcontinent is, I used to think South East Asia was bad but believe me it’s a paragon of orderliness compared to Mother India, in fact it is really quite difficult to find somewhere that is not litter encrusted and of course ‘litter’ here is, ahem, rather more than the odd crisp packet. … Dead dogs for example are not that uncommon a part of the rubbish ecosystem here and let me tell you, until you’ve had a good lungful of dead dog that’s spent a few days out in the baking sun until its swollen fit to burst and a deep purple-red in colour, you have really not given your nostrils the full work out. I notice that even the crows don’t touch them.
With the chronic lack of public (or private) ‘conveniences’ in India, the elimination of waste products from the human body is something that is generally done in public and no notice is taken of it, one simply ‘doesn’t see it’ However, said waste materials solid or liquid do have a certain pong that is multiplied manyfold by a combination of sheer quantity and of course the ever present heat. This does not mean that the place smells like a toilet, far from it, toilets in the west smell predominantly of chemicals; perfumes odourants and disinfectants, chlorine and phenolics that whilst distinctive and yes, not exactly pleasant, are a far cry from the full- on stench that may be given off by a Mumbai back street once the sun gets up…… The last important component are the odours given off by unbridled and pretty much unregulated heavy industry; metal smelters, pharma companies, fine organics producers and their ilk spray an impressive mix of gaily coloured fumes and liquid waste streams direct into the long suffering environment and some of these smells can cause your hair to stand on end and your eyes to bulge ( as well as smart and water). I’m a chemist and yet I can’t even begin to guess at the chemistry of some of the smells I encounter. There’s one I pick up every now and again that’s like very intense cat piss and another one that reminds me, somehow of rotting metal….In practice of course these odours are mingled and layered to subtle ( and not so subtle) effect, ever changing and transforming, blending with ( and usually dominating ) all those other, rather more pleasing smells I mentioned earlier. So a visit to India is always an olfactory adventure, one simply never knows exactly what noxious pong one will encounter next and there are times, here in New Bombay when I think ‘enough already’ give me the delicate perfume of a silage clamp or some simple diesel fumes.