Dear Reader,During our childhood in 1980s’ Kolkata, we had to sit through prolonged periods of power cuts. Probably driven by the desperation of having to endure hours of miserable heat, I developed the ability to “smell” electricity: I mean, I could sense its much-anticipated return moments before it actually came back. I would run to my parents saying, “I can smell ‘current’, it’s here,” and lo and behold, the fan would start whirring again. I was not infallible, but most of the time I turned out to be correct: while my sceptical father declared (rightly) that I was a fraud, mother insisted that I had a dubious gift.I realised as I grew older that the “divination” was actually a case of smelling the burnt kerosene in the air as adjacent houses started blowing off their oil lamps when electricity returned. Those days, power would return in phases, not at one go across the neighbourhood but cluster by cluster. So, while we remained in darkness, some houses nearby would get electricity back and start extinguishing their kerosene lamps and lanterns, lending that characteristic whiff to the air. In a leap of faulty reasoning, I had concluded that the smell of those doused wicks was the “smell” of electricity. What a genius!But a real genius, Leonardo da Vinci, is said to have done a lot of experimentation on perfumes—that is, when he found time off from painting the Mona Lisa and inventing the flying machine. An exhibition at the Château du Clos Lucé in Amboise, France, last year, explored this side of the polymath’s personality, showing how he bought perfumes, decoded their source smells, and recorded the process of their distillation. Perfumes were important in 16th century Italy not only as a symbol of vanity—they distinguished the nobility, who were rich enough to afford them, from the “great unwashed”—but also as a charm against deadly diseases like the plague, which were thought to spread through malodorous vapours in the air. (It is said that the bridal bouquet became popular in Europe after the years of the Black Death: the bunched flowers were used not so much a symbol of good luck as a talisman against possible death by plague.)Since most perfumes were sourced from fruits, resins, and spices like tangerine, myrrh, cinnamon, and pepper, they were associated with the remote, near-mythical lands of the East, from where the ingredients travelled. So, when the guilt-ridden Lady Macbeth utters the much-quoted line, “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” the reference to inaccessible Arabia would have immediately brought home to Shakespeare’s audience the utter futility of her attempts to remove the imagined smell of blood from her hands.Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985) by German writer Patrick Süskind is a chilling historical novel about a man with an unusual sense of smell who sets out to recreate a scent that would beguile everybody into believing what he wants them to believe. In his mad search, he kills a young virgin to extract her perfume. More murders follow till he arrives at the perfect smell of entrancement. From an abandoned orphan and murderer, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille becomes a patrician, simply by fooling everybody into presuming his greatness on the basis of this irresistible scent. The story is an ironic commentary on the gullibility of human nature, easily manipulated into accepting evil and false as good and true.The movie adapted from Süskind’s novel, starring Ben Whishaw as Grenouille, is available on Lionsgate Play/ Amazon Prime Video. Interestingly, Whishaw played Keats in Bright Star, an insipid film meant to be the poet’s biography. One of my favourite literary snippets on smell is from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” where he imagines himself after his death:I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweetWherewith the seasonable month endowsThe grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;The word “embalmed”, with its association of mummification, seems to burst with the poet’s stifled grief at the earthly pleasures he will have to forego once death becomes his. In evoking the sweet scents of wild flowers, grass, thickets, and trees, he makes life, with its simple joys, seem dear and worth clinging to, even when it gets unbearable. Who says literature cannot save.And with that, I smell the end of this newsletter. I will see you again soon, with some observations on Draupadi, who, incidentally, is said to be have smelt of the blue lotus, highlighting her divinity.Till then,Anusua MukherjeeDeputy Editor, FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS