The smell of Memory
Chapter One: The Smell of Memory
I woke up to the message notification.
It said, “Again, that kid!”
Being honest, this job makes you come into contact with all kinds of psychos. And I love my job.
Am I a psycho? Because I sound like one.
There’s a certain smell that never leaves you. Not incense. Not death. Something in between. Something metallic, yet damp… like rust in your throat or copper in your mouth.
I was nine when I first caught the scent of it. But I didn’t have words for it then.
That week, Mumbai experienced five consecutive days of rain. The monsoon seeped through the cracks in our chawl ceiling. The window grills cried quietly in rusted streaks. Waterlogged slippers lined the gallery like dead fish. On the third floor, in house 307, the rain drummed louder—on tin, on glass, on something deeper.
I don’t remember what woke me. Maybe it was the flickering of the tube light outside the bathroom. Or maybe I just knew what was going to happen, worse already happened.
The TV still hummed—Business static. I walked past the dining table, still laid with last night’s dal and rotis turned rubbery in the steel tiffin box. Papa hadn’t eaten. I hadn’t either.
We didn’t have a very normal relationship, but we used to eat together. Since my maa left, he has been unwell. He refused to go to a doctor, and his condition was getting worse. Sometimes, I would catch him talking to himself, and sometimes with Maa, who wasn’t there.
The door to the bathroom was open. Just slightly. Enough.
The steam was unnatural; maybe the humidity of Mumbai actually started to kick in. The steam was as if it had been building up for hours, not from a shower, but from something—boiling.
I stepped in. The floor was covered in small hairs and razors. Wet
He was there, curled in the corner of our bathroom, just like a small rabbit, white and red. Silent. Still. Water touched the rim, turning a dull, dusty rose.
His head was bare. Smooth. He’d shaved it. Not just the head—his eyebrows too. His arms. His chest. Hair clung to the wet towel on the floor like wilted grass after a storm. Razor blades were scattered across the counter, some shining, some rusted already in the wet.
There were red lines on his wrists. Clean. Intentional. They reminded me of the red tika lines our neighbor used to draw on her son’s notebooks. Straight. Ritualistic. This was not. He killed himself. He looked too peaceful then, after so long.
I didn’t run. I didn’t scream. I sat. Cross-legged on the cold, cracked mosaic floor. My school uniform still folded neatly in my cupboard. My maths homework unfinished.
That was Day One.
You think children don’t understand death. But children understand silence. Children understand when the air stops moving. When the clock ticks louder than it should. When flies begin to gather.
By Day Two, I’d stopped counting hours. The fridge light had gone. I drank tap water. Someone knocked—distantly. Then again, louder. I didn’t respond. He hadn’t either.
By Day Three, the smell reached the corridor.
Neighbors muttered. “Sharmaji ke ladke ka kuch toh gadbad hai.” The chowkidar was called. Then a locksmith. Then the police.
They broke down the door with a single iron kick. I looked up at them through the steam. My fingers were wrinkled. My face pale. I don’t remember crying. But the constable looked at me as if I had screamed without a sound. One of our neighbors vomited on the site of my father’s last site. A goodbye. No.
They pulled me away. I watched his body float for one final second. The red water sloshing. One last breath escaping from a body that had long since exhaled.
What if I could have saved him?
What if he was alive when I saw him?
What if …. By now I almost forgot all those three to four things that came into mind when I saw him like this.
They said schizophrenia. Or maybe psychosis. Or “severe untreated mental health.” But there were no files. No records. Just whispers. My mother had left us months earlier—said his eyes had changed. Said he talked to shadows.
I believed her.
He’d once spent a whole night staring at a ceiling fan, murmuring about voices from “above the blades.” Another time he drew spirals on the wall using a matchstick dipped in turmeric paste.
Nobody took it seriously. He was just “a disturbed man” in a disturbed city.
And I? I was just the boy who stayed in the bathroom with the body.
Do you know what a body smells like after 48 hours in stagnant bathwater?
No. You don’t. And I hope you never do.
It isn’t just death. It’s memory. It’s sweat. It’s everything that was trapped inside a person finally trying to escape. Desperately. Violently. It coats your tongue. It nestles in your hair. It wakes you up ten years later in the middle of a perfectly normal night.
That’s what I carry. Not grief. Smell.
That’s why I took the job.
Detective? No. That’s just a badge. I chase minds that crack. I trace the invisible trails people leave behind before they fall apart.
I like the strange ones. The ones with no motive. No logic. Just patterns buried inside old scars.
I don’t care about justice. I care about the why.
Because I need to know—what made my father shave his entire body, slide into a lukewarm bath, and bleed out into a red spiral of silence?
Every time I walk into a crime scene, I know within seconds if it’s real or rehearsed. If it’s the work of a broken hand… or a broken mind.
Sometimes, when I smell stale perfume in an enclosed room or see damp towels on a sink edge—I freeze.
Because I know what comes next.
That day… that bathtub… It wasn’t just death. It was my origin story.
