The Space between You and Me is not just an installation. It is a basil-infused perfume inspired by an installation created by late artist Hema Upadhyay. Upadhyay had planted seeds on freshly-tilled ground, spelling out a letter to her mother that came alive as the seeds germinated and grew into a ‘letter-garden’. Aphtoori is a fragrance based on a Ladakhi proverb that says ‘On a spring day there are three colds and three warmths’.
“Smells and I, we talk,” says Jahnvi Dameron Nandan, as we walk through the crowds in Jaipur one recent winter afternoon. Dressed in a lambent blue skirt, headscarf, and flat round sunglasses, she attracts considerable attention on the street. “The scents come into my head at strange moments. In my fragrance Aphtoori, I have used grapefruit. I could listen to the grapefruit while blending it. I could hear it talk. I knew by intuition, knowledge and desire that it would go well with vetiver, the essential oil from the roots of khus-khus. You take time off from work and have conversations with mundane things around you. Fruits, cooking, tea, coffee, blankets, leather and the smell of babies. Inspiration could be anywhere.”
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Jahnvi is a perfumer with an unusual story. Born in Lucknow, she spent most of her youth in Japan getting a doctorate in architecture from the University of Tsukuba, and then pursued product designing. After a few years spent between Mumbai and Sri Lanka, she moved to Versailles in France to study in a perfume school. Versailles houses a utopian hamlet commissioned by the extravagant French queen Marie Antoinette, complete with lakes, gardens, cottages, and watermills detailed with delicate spiral staircases and fine wrought-iron work, details that only a rich queen could afford.
“I know where you are going with the Marie Antoinette analogy,” Jahnvi laughs. “But believe me, perfume is more than just luxury. Luxury is a surface pleasure and barely reaches your soul. Smells do more. They send strong messages, create moments, memories. In the market, perfume may be luxury, but for me it is a work of art.”
It’s another day and we are sitting in rattan chairs under hanging paper lanterns shining on tea-crate tables and hand-sewn cushions at Dolly’s Tea House in Kolkata. It’s a hot afternoon, and Jahnvi has just done preparing for the launch of a new perfume. A lady in a starched white saree brings us cool glasses of ginger lemon tea, while Dolly Roy, the owner, who is also India’s first woman tea-taster, gloomily fans herself, yawning after her noon nap in the chair. “I have a perfume for her that I crafted a while ago,” Jahnvi says. “It’s called Nezame. It comes from the Japanese word for the melancholy you feel when you wake up after a nap,” she smiles, and continues. “My grandmother always told me to practise my Bharatnatyam after my nap. This perfume works like that dance workout.”
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Goat’s urine?
Jahnvi attributes her sense of scent to her Lucknow genes. But perfumery is very secretive, she says. “Even though I educate myself from ancient texts such as Gandhasaar, Ni’matnama or The Scented Garden, I do not understand their compositions. As a dancer, you can recreate compositions, but as perfumer I cannot do that.”
Can she explain how a Ladakhi proverb can inspire a fragrance? “I have always been intrigued by the line. Ladakhis have faith in saying that misery and happiness balance out in life, and that’s what I wanted to create. And while perfume might smell beautiful, it isn’t composed of only beautiful things—it’s a combination of contrasting smells: some good, some terrible.”
For instance, Jasmine sambac, a special Tamil Nadu variety that Jahnvi uses in Aphtoori, is full of phytochemicals that smell animalic, an olfactory term use to describe animal-like smells.
Describing smells as ‘butterscotch’ or ‘marmalade’ is just a language of connoisseurship and sophistication. The typical olfactory grammar, especially according to South Asian texts, to describe some smells could be fish, goat’s urine, ghee or lotus. “We still use those terms behind the scenes but that wouldn’t be great marketing practice for natural perfumes,” Jahnvi laughs.
Jahnvi inhales the fumes from the tea before sipping it, and talks of her personal life. “I have sacrificed my personal life to become a perfumer,” she says. She describes perfumers as dancers, leading an extremely dedicated and a practice-oriented profession. “To smell 100-200 smells a day and constantly analyse them—there is a very athletic element to it. You are knackered by the end of the day.”
What does it mean? Analysing a smell? “When I smell a rose, I analyse it into lemon, clove, geranium, litchis, artichoke, cheese, wood and so on. So you aren’t just smelling it, you are constantly associating it to notes.” And, apparently, even for someone with her exceptional olfactory skills, there are good and bad times. “It’s quite a fleeting thing,” she says, “that time when you can actually understand smells. I smell almost too well around 3:00 a.m. These remain secret conversations between the smell and me.”
“I will now associate Kolkata with the smell of tea,” Jahnvi smiles, as we walk out. And what about Paris where she lives? “Freshly baked bread” is her instant reply. Tokyo is castella pies and construction work, and Bombay is fish. What about Lucknow? “It isn’t ittars or kebabs. I was too young to appreciate those. It would probably be the smell of my sister’s head when she was born. I was four then and was told that she is very close and important to me. That’s my first smell memory. I hope I can bottle its warmth someday.”
The writer, author of The Lost Generation:Chronicling India's Dying Professions , digs coffee shop talks and pens them into stories for a living.