heavy musk of regret overpowering his senses; there were nightmares of numbers marching one two three, and of a tightening, throttling pair of prehensile knees … but there was a new gift, and a Lambretta scooter, and (though still unconscious) a humble, submissive love of his sister … jerking my narrator’s eyes away from the described past, I insist that Saleem, then-as-now, succeeded in turning his attention towards the as-yet-undescribed future. Escaping, whenever possible, from a residence in which the acrid fames of his aunt’s envy made life unbearable, and also from a college filled with other equally dislikeable smells, I mounted my motorized steed and explored the olfactory avenues of my new city. And after we heard of my grandfather’s death in Kashmir, I became even more determined to drown the past in the thick, bubbling scent-stew of the present … O dizzying early days before categorization! Formlessly, before I began to shape them, the fragrances poured into me: the mournful decaying fumes of animal feces in the gardens of the Frere Road museum, the pustular body odors of young men in loose pajamas holding hands in Sadar evenings, the knife-sharpness of expectorated betel-nut and the bitter-sweet commingling of betel and opium: “rocket paans” were sniffed out in the hawker-crowded alleys between Elphinstone Street and Victoria Road. Camel-smells, car-smells, the gnat-like irritation of motor-rickshaw fumes, the aroma of contraband cigarettes and “black-money,” the competitive effluvia of the city’s bus-drivers and the simple sweat of their sardine-crowded passengers. (One bus-driver, in those days, was so incensed at being overtaken by his rival from another company—the nauseating odor of defeat poured from his glands—that he took his bus round to his opponent’s house at night, hooted until the poor fellow emerged, and ran him down beneath wheels reeking, like my aunt, of revenge.) Mosques poured over me the itr of devotion; I could smell the orotund emissions of power sent out by flag-waving Army motors; in the very hoardings of the cinemas I could discern the cheap tawdry perfumes of imported spaghetti Westerns and the most violent martial-arts films ever made. I was, for a time, like a drugged person, my head reeling beneath the complexities of smell; but then my overpowering desire for form asserted itself, and I survived.
Indo-Pakistani relations deteriorated; the borders were closed, so that we could not go to Agra to mourn my grandfather; Reverend Mother’s emigration to Pakistan was also somewhat delayed. In the meantime, Saleem was working towards a general theory of smell: classification procedures had begun. I saw this scientific approach as my own, personal obeisance to the spirit of my grandfather … to begin with, I perfected my skill at distinguishing, until I could tell apart the infinite varieties of betel-nut and (with my eyes shut) the twelve different available brands of fizzy drink. (Long before the American commentator Herbert Feldman came to Karachi to deplore the existence of a dozen aerated waters in a city which had only three suppliers of bottled milk, I could sit blindfolded and tell Pakola from Hoffman’s Mission, Citra Cola from Fanta. Feldman saw these drinks as a manifestation of capitalist imperialism; I, sniffing out which was Canada Dry and which 7-Up, unerringly separating Pepsi from Coke, was more interested in passing their subtle olfactory test. Double Kola and Kola Kola, Perri Cola and Bubble Up were blindly identified and named.) Only when I was sure of my mastery of physical scents did I move on to those other aromas which only I could smell: the perfumes of emotions and all the thousand and one drives which make us human: love and death, greed and humility, have and have-not were labelled and placed in neat compartments of my mind.
Early attempts at ordering: I tried to classify smells by color—boiling underwear and the printer’s ink of the Daily Jang shared a quality of blueness, while old teak and fresh farts were both dark brown. Motor-cars and graveyards I jointly