The Scent of Incense

I love the scent of smouldering incense sticks.  At some indeterminate point of time, quite many years back, I started keeping incense sticks in my living room.  I cannot recall what prompted me to do it.  But it became a habit, almost a ritual.  I fell in love with the scent.  The habit continues to this day when I’m living in Kerala where windows are normally kept open and fresh, uncontaminated, arboreal air circulates in the rooms.

The habit was born while I lived in Delhi where windows were practically useless except for sticking up water-based coolers in scorching summer.  Windows remain closed in Delhi irrespective of the season.  Delhi air is dense with exhaust fumes and suffocating dust.  Delhiites breathe the same air that they exhale when they are inside their house unless it is air-conditioned.  Air-conditioners are for the bosses and the affluent.  Some of the others like me purified the air in their rooms with smouldering incense sticks. 

A friend from Kerala who visited me in Delhi once suggested that the incense sticks might symbolise my death wish.  Incense sticks are usually burnt at the head of corpses in Kerala.  I kept the friend’s suggestion as a possible peep into my Freudian inner demons though my incense sticks never succeeded in bringing home to me the aroma of death.  When I attended a funeral ceremony in Kerala later, I realised that death smelled far more vulgar than my incense vapours.  The incense sticks bought from hypermarkets don’t carry the flavours of death, I’m convinced.

I seem to have discovered the roots of my love affair with incense aroma recently.  I discovered a correlation between my urge to light incense sticks and the rise of cooking flavours from the kitchen.  Is it the tang of food that I’m drowning in the scent of incense?  It seems so.  My friend who correlated incense with death may be right, after all.