தாய் மனம் Thaai Maṇam

It’s the first thing you register as you exit the airport. The smell of dirt, brought to the nose by a dry wind tinged on the edges with the scent of urine. You haven’t smelt this smell, touched foot in this country for four years. This scent, hanging in the air outside the airport, signals this very moment, the one your soul has been waiting for all these years. You are home. You are here. And because this is the first whiff of home, you don’t care that others would turn up their nose, screw up their faces with a look of disgust—the nostrils slightly flared and the lips twisted towards the nose, the eyebrows knit and the eyes smaller, a little closer together. This is one of the smells of your motherland, the first smell among many that signals your homecoming. You gulp big inhalations of breath into your lungs, like a prisoner who has been released from his cell after years of confinement breathing damp, musty air. You can’t get enough.

When I arrived home at the tail end of 2022, I was at a complete loss. I had been living in Italy for the past year, where I was about to put a down deposit on a gorgeous apartment in Rome, a stone’s throw away from The Vatican. My lover and I had moved down together after we graduated from our Master’s programme in gastronomy in the north of the country. I had a job working in the kitchen of the only female-owned Michelin-star restaurant in the city. I walked past world-renowned monuments such as the Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum every day on my way to work. Life was idyllic, it was perfect.

Two days before I signed the lease on my new apartment, I told my lover I was leaving. A week later, I packed up all my belongings, left them at an acquaintance’s house, and flew to India, with nothing to my name except a carry-on suitcase.

I met my family in Ooty. We had each returned from our own far-flung corners of the world to celebrate the winter holidays together at home, as a family, for the first time in six years. We spent a glorious three weeks together and then everyone left, one by one, until it was just me in the giant house that is my family home. Perched on the mountainside between Doddabetta Peak and Mynala junction along the Kotagiri Road, the house looks out over the Blue Mountain ranges, overlapping in the valley below.

You sit in the cavernous living room of your family home. It is dark, close to midnight, and everyone else has gone to sleep. The house is quiet except for the crackle of flame in the fireplace, the embers burning low and deep. This is the smell of home- the smoke of the young wattle branches as they release water and hiss, catch fire and burn, char into ashes that float up on gusts of wind that sneak down the chimney every so often.

Here, too, is the scent of eucalyptus: that pungent, clean, full-bodied smell that cuts through the room’s haze and the brain’s fogginess and calls attention to the breath. Eucalyptus, the oil your mother rubbed on your chest when you had a cold and couldn’t breathe at night. It cuts through your consciousness even now, alerts you to the thoughts half hidden, slowly coming out of the shadows and into the light, ready to be examined. You are safe enough, here by the fire in the house of your childhood, to pull out your buried secrets. No doubt the full light of day would prove too harsh, and the firelight suffices.

You watch as the woman who has worked for your family for years prepares you chai. She brings it to you twice daily, with a constancy that marks the passing of the hours from mid-morning to late-afternoon. Today, like always, she begins with bringing a small saucepan of water to a boil, and sprinkling tea leaves on top. As the water turns from clear to a stained brown, the smell of Nilgiris tea wafts towards you. Just as soon as it reaches your nose, the bitter scent is cut by the smooth pour of milk, which billows into the sauce-pan, colouring it a creamy brown, like muddy puddles after a monsoon rain. The scent of chai is layered, first the bitter bite of tea leaves, then the soothing milk, and finally, the rounded sweetness of sugar, ladled in plentiful, heaping spoonfuls. Just when you think “surely, this must be too much,” the last spoonful goes in with a shhh sound as the granules of sugar slide over the cusp on the spoon’s curve and into the tea water, and that last spoonful is what makes it that perfect cup.

Held now in your own two hands, you bring the steaming mug to your lips and sip. The chai slides down your throat, smooth and warm, an embrace you don’t know how you went so long without.

I come across a concept that explains my predicament so eloquently, I am left dumbstruck. For the first time, I begin to understand why I have come home through a language that is not my own, the language that is the mother tongue of this region. Thaai maṇam, a woman says to me, when I ask her why she chooses to live here now that all her children have grown and left for America. “I can’t explain it in English,” she says, “But in Tamil we call it thaai maṇam, scent of the mother.” And at this moment, I understand. There is an essence, a smell that calls me back, that speaks to me of familiarity, of an old, rooted, caring, nurturing love that calls me into its arms and reminds me of a mother’s embrace. Yet not an embrace, something more ephemeral, yet just as strong. A scent.

I am here because I have not known the way, and in my unseen wandering, the scent of the mother has guided me home. Not only have I returned to the motherland, I have returned to myself. Slowly, I have felt myself unblocking. Within the first two weeks of my life here alone, my gut started to heal and I began going to the bathroom unaided and regularly. The brick in my stomach dissipated, along with the constant feeling of heaviness. A weight lifted from my mind and belly simultaneously. My period also returned, and with it a new fertility not only of my body, but of my soul. I still hardly cry, but I feel a new panorama of feelings that up till now I’ve been studiously avoiding. The Nilgiris has wrapped her verdant arms around me, telling me I am free to find myself anew, here in the familiarity of the one who watches over me, the one whose scent I know.

I know my mother, her scent carries with me. Thaai maṇam is chai—sweet milk and honey, eucalyptus breathed in heavily, rich dark loam beneath the forest canopy, flowing streams after a monsoon rain, bodily fluids—blood and urine. What I don’t know is myself. But as a child of The Nilgiris, there are some things I do know about the kinds of roots that will take hold in the soil of my soul. There will be shola in my forest, big red rhododendron flowers in the thicket, wattle with their tiny yellow flowers waving in the mountain breeze, and eucalyptus, blue and water resistant. And there will be other trees whose seeds have yet to be planted. These images are with me as I prepare once again to fling my body across the expanse of the globe. I leave for America in a week, with no plans of immediate return, though return I will. These scents—my mother’s, now my own—will follow me wherever I go. I know now, the scent of the Mother is with me, and I am she.

I am renewed.