every nest has an aroma

i was busy keying in a message, while turning the key of the home absent-mindedly... as i pushed the door open, my nostrils which cleared after a bad cold, were greeted by a strong smell... the smell of my home... of late there has been a new tinge to it, of a strong cleanser, the effect of a pest (only roach) control that we did some months back... minus this tinge, it has been the same smell across all my homes... all my 12 homes that i have set up, some earlier ones painstakingly, the latter ones, by way of habit...
the smell of a home has a personality, the same as that of the inhabitants... so there is a nicotine smell in the air at home, thanks to B's lean fags from Turkey; it has R's deo smell, which has replaced the tinge of the baby smell that abounded when she was a baby... but that baby smell i can still get when i recall her growing years; and the incense that we burn some days...
in the mornings, there is the perfume smell that i use before i go for work, B's after shave smell...
in the evenings, there is the smell of the cooking rice or the seasoning G, my cook (in fact, my life line, thank God, he does not read my blog... he could even ask for a hike) uses for the vegetable he cooks or the fish he fries...
all in all, it is our smell... and on days that i come to an empty home, with B at work and R, either visiting friends or in her classes, it is this smell that hugs me in... i feel reassured that i have come to a corner which is mine...
yet, it took a long while to get this identification... just after marriage, when in Mumbai, i could only identify with home back at Kolkata... so every long break we got, we ran there... so, not surprisingly, when Dad had come on work and i asked him how he liked my home, he answered, "nice. new concept. two bachelors staying together."
in fact, it was only after R came along and no matter how long a break we got at work, we could not run back, that my mind started taking root, longing to go back, but not with the same intensity... and the smell of my home started taking shape...