If confined, it can suffocate. It signals news, creation, destruction, danger, distress, transformation.
It speaks:
“Something’s happening.”
“Pay attention.”
Whatever the meaning, when I smell smoke, it smells like India.
Most of my memories of my very first visit to Kerala, the southern state of India on the western Malabar coast where both my parents were born and raised, are hazy at best. I remember my nine year old American brain wondering why there were no McDonald’s in Ampalakkara, the rural village where my father grew up. There were green stretches of palm and banana trees, vast, sunlit rice paddies, and tall stalks of sugar cane growing on hilly tracts, but no McChickens, Big Mac sauce, or McChickens with Big Mac sauce.
That summer, I remember watching the same three Disney movies on VHS over and over with my sisters and cousins. I remember descending from our family home to the rice paddies below with them, wandering too far from the house, getting caught in the rain, and accepting defeat as we saw our dads approaching to collect us in that signature white Tata Sumo SUV. I remember walking through the nearby rubber tree plantation, where sticky, milk colored rubber latex sap was collected by coconut shells cut in half and tied to each tree. My sister tells me there was an area where a hand-crank machine was used to flatten the rubber into sheets, and that we each got a turn at hand cranking the rubber, but I don’t really remember that. What I do remember is the small smoke shack where the rubber sheets were dried over open wood fires. The smoke emanating from the burning wood signified the end of a long production process. It was the finishing touch; a symbol of toil and an embodiment of the rugged industrial spirit of the plantation workers.
The smell of the smoke in that rubber shack in the middle of humid, tropical Kerala has lingered in my olfactory memory just as savory umami taste indescribably lingers on the tongue, endlessly circulating among the taste buds; filling the mouth. So too has smoke dynamically circulated in my memories.
Every 4th of July when I was growing up, my dad’s oldest brother would have a family barbecue in his backyard in Bayshore, on Long Island. As kids, we referred to him as “Big Uncle,” since he was the eldest uncle. Ever since then, it’s stuck. Big Uncle always grilled up the works — the carcinogenic hot dogs that my mom despised but that I looked forward to every year, the charred, juicy hamburgers with relish on fluffy supermarket buns, and his famous slightly burnt, skin-on barbecue chicken, with barbecue sauce on the side. I loved watching my uncle behind the shimmer of the heat haze the barbecue created. I loved watching the smoke rise from the grill. This was smoke as ritual. A backyard of Indians and their young Indian-American children — complete with New York accents and American flags sewn to their matching jeans jackets — celebrating American independence from Britain (attained almost two centuries before India won theirs) with smoked meats and sandwiches.
Years after Big Uncle’s barbecues stopped, I smelled India in West Africa. During my time with Peace Corps in Guinea, I lived in a small town called Kouramangui, in the Fouta Djallon, the highland region of the country. My host father, a Malinke man from another region in Guinea, was the médecin-chef for the entire prefecture, which meant he was one of very few health care providers available for thousands of people. Most days, Dr. Sidibe was at the health center from early in the morning until sundown. In my first few months living there, as I acclimated myself to the sedated, stimulus-free pace of village life, I spent many mornings at home with my host mother, Aminata. She too would be up before sunrise, preparing the children for school, feeding and bathing her 2 month old, and eventually starting the long process to prepare lunch. Like many households in Guinea, she cooked a family-sized portion of rice and sauce in cast iron cauldrons, bubbling over large wood fires. Like many compounds in Guinea, ours had a small shack, in our case concrete with a tin roof, where the fire burned; the meals were prepared. Some days when I slept in, the strong smell of the wood smoke would wake me up. I’d open my door, see the smoke billowing out of the singular, unevenly square-shaped window of the small shack in front of me, and see Aminata’s foot poking out.
“Jaraama, Aboullaye!” She’d squint through the smoke in warm greeting.
The smoke that enveloped her was the duality of prosperity; the transformation of raw material into nourishment for her family, not without its own cost to her health and body. Can there ever be growth, prosperity, thriving — without cost?
On one of my many trips to the hill stations in India a few years ago, I went to see an Ayurvedic doctor, who told me of the fire and smoke inside me.
Ayurveda, the Sanskrit word which means the “science of life,” is a holistic healing system that originated in India but had somehow been, along with the yoga and “chai tea” crazes, appropriated by Indo-manic Westerners as alternative medicine and panacea for health and wellness concerns. I had never put much stock in Ayurveda, but came to learn a bit more about it through my mother, a pediatric ER physician in New York City. Every other year on her visits to India, she undergoes a month-long Ayurvedic treatment for her rheumatoid arthritis that’s comprised of a strict vegetarian diet, oil massages, and various forms of cleanses. Though she studied medicine and is very much rooted in well-researched and reviewed clinical practices, she has a strong traditional tie to Keralan Ayurveda, and the improvement in her symptoms through her participation in these month-long Ayurvedic retreats was pretty remarkable. Now, it’s not always easy to tell whether a person calling themselves an “Ayurvedic doctor” is trained in the ways you’d want someone calling themselves an “Ayurvedic doctor” to be, or whether they’ve set up shop in a tourist-laden area of India, hoping to capitalize on Western visitors seeking to be “healed,” but my curiosity got the best of me.
I sat in the small waiting room and was called into the back by the doctor, a middle-aged woman from Kerala. She began the consultation by reviewing my responses to a brief survey regarding my sleeping and eating habits, and asked several probing questions. She then took me gently by the wrist, closed her eyes, and felt my pulse with both of her thumbs. After almost a minute of silence, she opened her eyes, and began enumerating the attributes of my energy. She told me my energy was dominated by pitta, the energy of transformation, closely aligned with the elements of both fire and water, the former being more pronounced. She told me that the balanced pitta individual possesses a sharp intellect, a robust and courageous drive, and a joyful disposition. But fire can engulf. Excess heat energy in your body causes a myriad of gastrointestinal issues, irritability, anger, and jealousy, and she could feel that imbalance in my pulse. She gave me a detailed list of foods to avoid and foods to incorporate into my diet to re-balance myself, provided me with some breathing techniques for relaxation, and sent me on my way.
Smoke is a warning. It’s the fine line between safety and warmth and uncontrollable destruction. It’s a message — of life, of death, and of transformation. With the right balance, a fire burns, producing only water and carbon dioxide. Without enough oxygen, smoke arises. If we’re not careful, smoke can choke us, obscure our vision. But smoke — and fire — is family, is bounty, is tradition, is energy, is labor. All it asks is that we pay attention.
