A Matter Of Smell

Reading a description of the cloying smell of nasi kandar joints in Karina Robles Bahrin's novel The Accidental Malay, my current reading on the fiction front, got me thinking of my own sense of smell. Quite honestly I've never noticed any particular cloying smell from any such place, and I've been in more than a few. But I think it's true to say my sense of smell isn't what it used to be.

When I first arrived in this Far Place, back in 1988, I noticed lots of smells, some fragrant, many less so. These days if a particular smell catches my attention in any way at all it's quite unusual. This can't be so for Ms Bahrin since in the paragraph immediately subsequent to the one about the restaurants she picks out the oily odour of yesterday's garlic bread, and there are at least two further references to specific smells in the final couple of pages of the chapter in question.

Of course as she's a writer consciously deploying all the strategies available to her to evoke a sense of place you sort of expect this kind of thing, but I doubt that I'd ever notice even a single one of the details in question even if I absolutely needed to for some obscure professional reason. Mind you, the smells that emanate from our kitchen when Noi is applying herself to cooking something special more than compensate for the general lack of odour in my life.