Smell can be a powerful sense. All mothers smell good, without exception.

The loss of my mother isn’t in the voice I do not hear anymore when I call home. It isn’t so much in the small gossips and the petty he-dids and she-dids that only a mother will whisper into your ears that a father somehow always forgets. The loss of a mother–which has loomed larger with every year after her passing–has been, strangely enough, in the absence of her smell.

 This absence spells the complete eradication and annihilation, from my personal cupboard of perfumes, the faint but powerful scent of Cuticura powder commingled with a faint whiff of coconut oil, Chanel 5, Vanilla potpourri, fresh jasmine, holy ash and sandalwood. You can handpick all these, boil them all together, stir the pot and pour the concoction into a flacon. You can press the mix under my nose and tell me to breathe deep. But she had just the right proportion of scents. How could you ever bring back my mother in a bottle?

 “I don’t have a problem anymore if you want to give away all her saris and blouses,” says my father, who has hobbled along since my mother’s passing in July 2005.  My sister and I have rarely discussed the opening and the giving away of the contents of our mother’s sari almirah. We believed the subject was taboo if dad did not choose to bring it up. But now that he has, how should we do this? Let me rephrase. Can we get around to doing this?

 On every trip to India, we open the almirah, linger by the shelves, admire the precision of the folds of the saris, each one aired elaborately after wearing and ironed just before it reentered the alcove reserved for graceful aging.

 “Don’t ever fill up your life with more you can handle,” my mother would tell me as I entered my thirties and struggled with raising two children. “And what you do, you must do to perfection, with attention to every minute detail.” She worried that I spread myself too thin and packed my day with so many frills that somewhere I would inevitably begin cutting corners.

 Inside the wooden almirah, the petticoats press with knife-edged precision against one another, in a range of colors from white and black (most often used) to varying shades of peach and pink (least used, but critical to good grooming). Her sari blouses are to the left on this same shelf, stacked by gradations of color, the crease lines and folds matching exactly as the day they were ironed. This, we know, is a monument to the order and discipline of our mother’s daily life: there aren’t so many that the cupboard is overflowing and cluttered; and every shelf has at least eight inches of breathing room so you can move things around in a snap if you want to rearrange anything at anytime. 

 “The problem with our mother,” my sister observes, “is that she never gave away her old saris as she got new ones.” Our mother, we used to whine in her presence, never had the heart to give things away. Today, however, we realize that in her hands, everything stayed as good as new and as good as the day she acquired them.

 We admire the perfection of how she maintained and hovered over her things. We marvel at the calm and comfort of a very small life, cherished and well lived, which reaches us today, in small whiffs, from objects that stayed close to her skin. Long after I’ve begun my journey with bifocals, long after my ears have stopped hearing the hummingbird chip at my office window, long after I’ve cracked under the brittleness of a waning bone density, I will continue longing for that certain smell called my mother.