Living with Four Senses

Most of us have a range of about 10,000 different smells that we recognise,take for granted,and appreciate or wrinkle our noses at. For 27-year-old Heggar,who lost her sense of smell about a decade ago,only a handful of olfactory memories remain. These phantom smells surface at will,nesting in her mind for weeks and often months,as real to her as the smell of the coffee on the table is to me.

Heggar wears a T-shirt,a miniskirt and Burberrys Weekend perfume. She has never known its fragrance,but a friend she trusts picked it out for her a few years ago,and it is one of only two perfumes she wears. It is flowery and bright,with a hint of musk and fruit. That sounds like something I would wear, she says. Her vivacious personality does match the scent. She flippantly attributes her disability to three accidents in her childhood,a small scar from a particularly bad fall still visible on the ridge of her nose. I was about seven or eight months old,playing on my dad’s chest,when I fell and hit the edge of the cot. The scar has been there since, Heggar says. But her response to olfactory stimuli began to deteriorate much later,at the age of 18,and a medical examination failed to reveal the cause of the problem. You must think I am crazy not to have it looked at again. I hate being subjected to medical scrutiny, she says,joking that she is happy not smelling the garbage piling up on Bangalore’s streets.

Of course,for every bad odour she is blissfully oblivious to,there are a hundred aromas Heggar would like to sniff. A foodie and a self-taught cook,she gorges on biryani but is unable to conjure the wafting fragrance of basmati rice. Since much of what we consider to be taste is actually smell,Heggar cant really experience flavour. I can tell if the food is salty,sweet,sour or bitter,but thats about all, she says. I make up for it by trying to imagine flavours I remember,and by focusing on texture,temperature and presentation. But some things remain elusive: she wants to smell ripe mangoes and searches for the aroma of earth after the rains.

Shachina is a thorough foodie. She is one of those people who can go to a restaurant all by themselves to enjoy a meal, says Sowmya Jaganmurthy,a friend who swears by Heggars home-cooked biryani. Earlier this year,when Jaganmurthy was pregnant,Heggar helped satisfy her cravings. The two of us have driven all the way to Mysore just to eat at a restaurant. Thats how crazy she is about food, she says.

The irony of a foodie without a nose is not lost on Heggar. An engineering dropout-turned-fashion designer,she came close to becoming a chef. I was deciding between fashion and cooking school, she says. Luckily,I chose right. Heggar retails her eponymous Indian-wear label at a few stores in the city,besides designing clothes for Kannada films. Her repertoire of 26 films includes Junglee (2009),Paramathma (2011),Charminar (2013) and Topiwala (2013).

The last time she thought she could taste something,Heggar was trying exotic meats at a food street in Singapore. Each piece was beautiful,textured and hinted at delectable,if imaginary,flavours. The idea of flavour is exciting to me, she says. When we meet two days after her return from the trip,she is ecstatic about another episode in Bali. I was in a cab making my way to the hotel from the airport when this exotic smell hit me. I rolled down the windows,I thought I could actually smell again and even called some friends, she says. It was everything she wanted a holiday to smell like sandalwood,spice and musk but the next day,her nose drew a blank once again.

Heggar’s friends say she likes to travel,perhaps,in search of an impossible scent that even her nose would pick up. She is a strong person. She is so used to living without her sense of smell that we often forget about her condition, says Dipanjay Sanyal,an ad filmmaker,who has known Heggar for eight years. According to Sanyal,Heggar makes a mean paella but cant tell if the leftovers in her fridge are rotten. It is a health scare,and since I live alone,my friends come and make sure I dont eat anything thats gone bad. Just like they check the gas stove for leaks, Heggar says.

Outside the realm of medicine,Heggar has tried every trick in the book in the hope of regaining the bits of the world now lost to her aroma massage,looking at a pile of garbage,even repeatedly ordering her beloved strawberry margarita. A mention of the drink,probably the last she had before she lost her ability to smell,makes her smile. One day,last year,she woke up to its sweet aroma,and the feeling stayed with her for over two months,night and day. I must have been the happiest person on the planet. I could only smell strawberry margarita for weeks, she says,wistfully. Yet,these sensory surges arent under her control. They are involuntary,like the memories of childhood triggered in Marcel Proust when he had a fleeting taste of madeleines years later.

Scientists have known for a long time that odours trigger emotional connections. Indeed,research suggests that smells can influence mood,memory,emotions,mate choice,and the immune and endocrine systems. My friends joke that I will never get married because I cant smell the pheromones on the men I date, says Heggar. Pheromones are chemical signals that animals use to transmit messages to one another. Forget subtle signals,Heggar cannot smell her own shampoo. Living and non-living things release certain chemicals that upon entering the nose dissolve in the mucus inside. Beneath the mucus is a membrane containing olfactory receptor neurons that can detect thousands of odours. These receptors transmit information through the olfactory nerve to the olfactory bulb,which in humans is located in a rather inaccessible region at the back of the nose. The bulb,in turn,communicates signals to the brain. Thanks to this shortcut to the cortex,the sense of smell travels to the brain very fast compared with other senses. Heggar says she would like to have access to this primal cue some day. Dr T Sankarshana,a well-known ENT surgeon,says anosmia the loss of smell affects about 20-30 per cent of the patients he receives,but in most cases it is reversible. Bangalore is the allergy capital of India. The reason for sudden loss of smell is often an obstruction in the olfactory region, he says. As for Shachina,she says she would like to know my husbands smell when I do get married. And she hopes to get there with her nose held high.