Human Odours

Hospital is one place where you witness human helplessness most visibly. I spent most of my time today in a hospital for a person who is a very close relative of mine. He is younger to me by a few years but looked more than a decade older than me because of his illness. Worse, he was utterly helpless. He had to depend on someone for every need of his.

 The moment came when I had to go and buy a diaper for him. At that time, when I was called by the nursing staff to get the diaper, I was sitting in the corridor outside the ‘care room’ where my relative was being given the medical treatment. The corridor had started to stink of human excreta. “Mummy, shit, shit.” A two-year-old child was telling its mummy for quite some time. Mummy was busy on her mobile phone. The whole corridor of the centrally air-conditioned hospital stank of human excreta that emanated from the child’s diaper. The mummy of that stench was still engaged with her mobile phone. I longed to tell her that the whole 21^st century might probably stink because of her. Her little child, the promise of our future, was more aware than its mother about the stench it had released in its diaper.

I brought the diaper for my 56-year-old relative from the pharmacy of the hospital. The PA system of the hospital then announced in a sweet female voice, “Mrs & Mr So & So, Congratulations. You have been blessed with a baby girl.”  I was passing through the same corridor where the stench of human excreta was now replaced with a synthetic odour of jasmine. The mother of that child had put her mobile phone aside and sprayed some perfume around. The fact that she carried a perfume can in her handbag did impress me. We, human beings, do care about the odours we exude, it seems.