Love notes and scented cards: a perfumer’s pandemic journey
The Hindu
Perfumer Jahnvi Lakhota Nandan’s pandemic journey shows us how the last months have reminded many of the power of smell and helped them reconnect with it
What is your first memory of smell? Mine is of smelling my sister’s head the day she was born, August 16, 1979. I really liked that smell of a clean human scalp, talc, and also surprise. Forty years later, in late 2019, when people started losing their sense of smell at the start of the pandemic, in a collective anosmia, the question became even more pertinent. I also started asking it a lot as part of a project that I started in Goa last year, along with impresario Sacha Mendes. We called it called Dial-a-Perfume. A phone-based service to speak with people about their memories of smell in a world where the unthinkable was happening, where ‘loss of the nose’ had become a symptom. People would call and I would try and interpret their words into a fragrance, and sometimes even a unique hand ‘purificator’. These were called Oté, referring to hands in Japanese, a word that is believed to represent the final stages by which all actions become possible. To handle means to manifest, and hands create a passage from the conceptual to the real.More Related News