The smell of Phenyl

Before you think it is a hugely abstract article, I suggest you better stay with me till the end.

Yes, I am alive and well. Since the day I started working, I feel this is the first public holiday that I have encountered. Rest assured that I may NOT be able to find time in the future soon.

Well so much for me and my blogging.

Poetry and Prose alike, a lot of people have written on smell. Rudimentary stuff like smell of flowers to highly sensual stuff like the smell (or scent !) of a woman. A lot of writing on smell exists around the world.

Well today is 'Raksha Bandhan', a very important festival in our country. People get up in the morning, have a bath to get squeaky clean and then dress their best for the occasion. Girls in bright yellow to deep red and guys mostly in White Kurtas and their other colors are either blue or black.....

And here I was, 9:30 a.m, at my place, just out of bed in my residence. My hair style loosely resembled that of Einstein, hair standing on its ends, giving me a look as if I had just been electrocuted. Well, there I stood along with my pathetic looks and my toothbrush in my mouth and stared down at the basin. Here is what I saw..

Normally one would expect water to be clogged in the basin. But along with that there were other assorted items like chillies, capsicum, cabbage. On close inspection I could also find some cough and sputum floating around the already clogged water (Yuck!). On closer inspection still, I also found that traces of fungus were beginning to appear right at the basin board and just when I thought that I had seen it all I found mosquito larvae floating merrily in the clogged basin (now a drain!) along with some cockroaches in the dry periphery.

Damn! I thought, first of all we bachelors are happy messing around the place and when the time comes to clean up I am all alone! Momentarily it crossed my mind,maybe I should sneak outside and spit my toothpaste in the neighbours porch. But I thought otherwise and decided to do one good thing until now and decided to clean up the place.

So here I was with my toothbrush still in my mouth and I started rumagging in my store room and finally found myself a cleaning brush. At least it remotely resembeled a cleaning brush. Then I started with first clearing the clogging and then washing it with some good ol' detergent powder. All the clogged material had to be cleared personally by me and then finally I cleared my throat in the basin before the time came to vomit it out along with my last nights food content.

I then opened the tap and let it stay for a while and finally...

And finally I managed to get hold of some phenyl (imagine I am making it sound heavenly for additional effect) I turned off the tap and sprinkled it generously over my wash basin and then finally looked at it. I could see the original stainless steel of the wash basin.

But the most satisfiying thing was the smell of phenyl. How good it smelled. Maybe the smell of flower or the smell of a woman is better. But at this moment nothing, absolutely nothing could compare the smell of phenyl. To me now it resembled bliss, ecstacy all rolled into one...

The smell of phenyl never felt so good. NEVER EVER so good.

So much in a days work.