How to Lose the Betel Smell When You Are out of Bleaching Powder?
Every morning, he would be late for school watching the lizards chase the roaches.
by Sayan Bhattacharya
THE STING OF TURMERIC, tempered by the soothing smell of boiling lentils tried to fill up the air but there were other smells that upstaged them. Agarbatti wafted from the small TV set kept near the door leading to the three steps that led to the kitchen. The repeat telecast of Mahabharata was playing. Krishna was robing Draupadi as she was being undressed in the courtroom. Krishna’s divinity oozed from the screen. The 10 year old boy was sitting on the steps, transfixed feeling the smoke of incense in the form of Krishna snaking his way from out of the black and white TV. The cook, R, was sitting next to the boy. He asked the boy if he was feeling scared and held his hands tightly and made him sit on his lap. As the dressing, undressing continued on screen, the boy felt R’s hands squeezing his nipples and stomach and something hard hit his back.
R would never stop chewing on betel — lentils, turmeric, incense were finally edged out of the playground. The boy was now covered with the leafy smell of betel juice.
One Sunday two decades back.
What was he feeling? What had happened? Later that day he rushed to the bathroom. The bleaching powder that was used to scrub its floors to drive the roaches and lizards and spiders away felt soothing in its overpowering note. Bleaching powder was Boroline to the acidic smell of betel juice. He started scrubbing his body — his hands, his chest, his back. It stung. His mother shouted, “Why are you in the washroom again? If you fall sick, I will not look after you.” He kept scrubbing.
His father was in the only room they had in that tiny house, falling apart, yet bursting at its sides with people. He was watching the news on a Sunday morning. Father, mother and son shared the room but the television in the room belonged to the father only. Bomb blasts, beauty pageants, Akshay Kumar’s latest break up, coalition governments… However, the boy loved the Mahabharata. So, he would clamber up the steps each Sunday morning while R would cook the afternoon meal for twelve people. That little TV outside the kitchen was R’s companion. The boy’s family had bought him that TV so that he would quietly feed the household. The boy’s mother would go to the kitchen, wash the fish of its blood and cover it with salt and turmeric. She would cut the vegetables and once a month, the smell of fish was replaced by the ethereal smell of ginger, garlic and vinegar used to marinate the meat. Then she would come downstairs leaving R and his TV alone only till the boy arrived every Sunday. His mother would allow him, indulge him because his father wouldn’t.
But this Sunday was different. Or was it?
Next Sunday, the boy wondered should he go back? His mother rumpled his hair, her hands covering him with the smell of turmeric. She asked him why he was not watching Mahabharata? His father was watching the news. The boy could not answer. Then R beckoned from upstairs. The serial is about to start. Aren’t you coming? He quietly went up the stairs and jumped into the pool of lentils and betel juice as the incense from R’s TV and the rusty smell of dried blood from some disaster zone on his father’s TV became one and the same. This Sunday the bathroom did not have bleaching powder.
Later that afternoon, he asked his mother while they were lying beside each other, why couldn’t they scrub the bathroom floor again. She laughed and asked him if he was imagining lizards and cockroaches still roosting there.
Yet even a few months back, he loved their presence in the bathroom. Every morning, he would be late for school watching the lizards chase the roaches.
Pain, anger, shame, pleasure.
The boy could not stop going up to the mezzanine floor every Sunday. What he could stop was having paan, served at the end of any wedding meal. While others his age and older would chew on the betel leaves and stick out their tongues to prove how they were becoming adults or how they looked like Kali, he would feel bile gurgling inside him smelling that leafy smell.
Betel juice follows him. So, he has made an unhappy truce with it.
The first time he experienced the thrill of two set of hands feeling each other up in a semi dark corner of a public urinal, it was against a wall covered with paan stains. Pee, betel juice, phenyl splashed around by the corporation which sometimes wakes out of its stupor and goes on a cleanliness drive, the mossy smell of the stranger’s sweat combined with the talcum that made a sea of salt flow down his throat.
Or that other time, a hurried kiss with a friend after a full meal during a university excursion, her saliva mixed with bits of paan, and the bittersweet smoky smell of weed.
The body gives and receives pleasure through smells. Perhaps it receives and gives pain through smells.
But what is his smell?
He wishes he could smell of rock salt and lemon grass — like that lover who he has named “Waiting”.
Or perhaps like the smell of fresh paint in the house of that lover who sneaked him in while his partner was away. Can one smell like a thousand-year-old secret?
Or like hurt? The hurt he inflicted on his friend whose wedding he did not attend because he knew he was losing her.
Or like his mother, whose smell keeps changing. From the sweat of morning labors in the kitchen to the stagnant odor of waiting for nothing to the occasional bursts of flowers, cumin and hing.
But often the truce with betel leaves seems to break apart. It threatens to overpower him. He closes his eyes and tries to squeeze out the smell of bleach, turmeric, fish, lentils, sweat, salt from his cells. Betel laughs and recedes. For now.