The Smell of Cardamom

“The airport doesn’t smell like home.” She knew it wouldn’t. Still, the absence feels louder than anything else.

You prepare for the cold air, the clipped English over loudspeakers, the way everything shines too clean. What she hadn’t prepared for was this, nothing where something used to be. No cardamom. No trace of it. Just a blankness that settles somewhere behind the ribs and stays.

Back home in Lahore, I mean, mornings began at the stove. Her mother would press the green pods between her palms. They cracked softly, like a quiet promise breaking open. Into the milk they went, and slowly, the kitchen filled with something warm and sharp and impossible to name. Not sweet exactly. Not bitter. Just familiar in a way that made you feel held.

Nadia never tried to write it down. Some things refuse to survive language.

That was three years ago.

Now she stands in Toronto, waiting for a flight to Halifax, crying into chai poured from a paper cup. It tastes almost right. That’s what unsettles her most. Not wrong, just close enough to remind her of what it isn’t.

She came here on a scholarship. Biochemistry. Her father cried at the airport in Lahore, but only for a second, quick, like he could undo it if no one noticed. Her mother slipped a small bottle of rosewater into her coat pocket. No explanation. Just: “keep it”.

The first winter wasn’t what people warned her about. Not the cold. The cold was simple. It had rules. It was the silence that lingered.

Back home, silence never lasted long. There was always something, a vendor calling out, children arguing over cricket in the streets, the neighbor’s television leaking through the wall, the azan folding the day into five familiar pauses. It felt like being gently reminded you belonged.

In Halifax, there was none of that. Just snow against the windows. Soft. Persistent. Like something waiting for her to forget.

She tried to fill it. Podcasts, music, boiling lentils louder than necessary. She called her mother every night, listening to stories about mangoes, weddings, small neighborhood changes that somehow felt enormous from a distance. She would close her eyes, trying to step back into those sounds. It never quite worked.

Then February arrived. A Tuesday, heavy and grey, the kind of grey that erases the idea of blue.

Her lab partner, Priya, brought sweets. Small, pale squares dusted with pistachio. “Barfi,” she said. “My nani made them.”

Nadia took one. It didn’t taste like home. It wasn’t supposed to. But the word nani—the way Priya said it, soft, careful, shaped the same way Nadia had always known. It shifted something inside her.

They stayed after class that day. Then again, the next week. Priya spoke of her grandmother’s kitchen in Gujarat; Nadia spoke of cardamom. They admitted, almost shyly, that they both slept with extra blankets even when the heat was on, because the cold here wasn’t just in the air. It came from somewhere deeper, somewhere the radiators couldn’t reach.

By March, Sundays belonged to them. Nadia cooked nihari the way her mother had taught her. Priya made rasam, arguing about tamarind like it mattered more than it did. The apartment filled with steam and noise, with small, stubborn pieces of elsewhere. Sometimes they called their mothers at the same time, holding phones across the kitchen, two distant worlds colliding in laughter and overlapping instructions.

It was imperfect. It was enough.

Now she stands at Gate 14 again.

Her degree is finished. She’s going back to Lahore for three months, her first visit in two years. The thought sits strangely in her chest. Not quite relief. Not quite fear. Something in between, shifting.

No one tells you this part, that going home can feel like arriving somewhere unfamiliar. That you carry two versions of a place, and neither fits perfectly anymore.

She takes a sip of chai. Still not right. Still warm. This time, she lets it be both.

The boarding call begins.

She reaches into her pocket, her fingers closing around the small glass bottle her mother once gave her. The rosewater is long gone, used drop by careful drop before exams, before difficult days. But the bottle remains. Faintly, it still holds something, maybe memory, maybe just the idea of it.

She steps forward with the line.

“I’m going home”, she thinks. Then, almost at the same time: I’m leaving it again.

Both feel true. Neither cancels the other.

Outside, the sky stretches pale and undecided. Not quite empty. Not yet full.

She pauses at the doorway of the plane, just for a moment, long enough to feel the weight of it all, and the lightness too.

Then she moves.

Somewhere between departures and arrivals, she realizes: home is no longer a place she can return to unchanged.

It’s something she carries now. Fragile. Shifting. Incomplete.

Like a scent she can’t quite name, but knows she will spend the rest of her life trying not to lose.

Author:

Munazza Wasi

Bahria University (IPP)