Chapter 4- In Another Lifetime

Chapter 4- In Another Lifetime

Lucien scraped his palm over the rough wall of the University dark corridor lit by sconces of electric light. He was walking through a dark passage and at the end was light. And a rowdy classroom of high school students who quieted as soon as he stood before them with a pile of books he dropped on the table before them. He adjusted the glasses on top of his nose and gazed at the students suddenly not knowing what to do. He was about to write some equations on the whiteboard when his gaze wandered towards the window where an orange tree stood with its white flowers and stark orange fruits were in full bloom. The scent of the orange tree wafted inwards to the classroom and he felt weak all of a sudden.

He wrote the equation on the whiteboard and told his students to research and solve the problem. They were welcome to stay in the classroom with their laptops or go home and do it there. He sat down and played with his pen which he twirled like a mannerism he just learnt to play from a lifetime he was just beginning to remember. It would happen to him sometimes, stop in his tracks and remember he had a life to live, this life and no other and yet he felt as though there were other lifetimes before what he was living.

After class, he left the room and walked towards the tree, picked an orange fruit from the tree, was about to peel it when he became more interested in the flowers. He garnered a few one of which he crushed in the palm of hand and smelled with a swoon, Oh, sweet Neroli.

Lucien was a chemistry instructor taking a Doctoral for Chemistry and waiting to become a full professor. He loved it. He didn’t know why he loved it so much. Sometimes he thought because it allowed him to find the desired product and the process by which he did his research was all suited to his temperance. He had the patience for the elements and to know what constituted everything in matter was a kind of power in itself.

“Professor Drew.” A woman’s voice brought him back to the reality that he was standing before a tree doing an irregularity of picking fruits and flowers forbidden in campus. “You seem in the mood for nature. Don’t worry, I won’t tell about the forgetful professor who has forgotten the rules of the Botanical Department. Thou shalt not pick flowers in campus.” The voice of Professor Fields was coy but warm.

Lucien laughed placing his nature treasures on the stone bench and brushed his palms together as though to avoid being caught with the most intimate of scent he could place in his whole personal life.

They sat together on the bench and he peeled the orange and offered it to the lady professor who bit through the juicy fruit and leaving the seeds on the rind.

“Oh, are you going to the opening of that new perfume in the market. You seemed keen on attending the other day. You still have the ticket I believe. There is to be a dance show by the students of the University and word is that it is to be a very markedly sensuous yet enticing one.”

“I don’t know.” Lucien replied. “I might if the company is as convivial as you Professor Fields.” Professor Fields was part of the Chemistry department as well. Some of their students would go on to be interns for perfumeries, mostly female and gay students more interested in the artistry of chemistry with an olfactory skill which were wittier than their tongue.

“You flatter me Lucien. Some of the students are going there tonight. Don’t forget, Eight p.m. at the Crimson Atelier. With some nice fancy installations to go with it, it really might be a worthwhile thing to go to don’t you think? Drinks and cocktails. See you then, Lucien.” She stood up with a whiff of scent which was proving more and more that Professor Fields was more than just playing around with him. He had the nose for such things as well and it was embarrassing sometimes.

                                               

                                                            ***

Stella remembered pounding odd plants on a stony mortar and pestle as a child and using the sap to paint flowers of different colors. She would learn to taste them as well and one time was driven to the emergency room of a hospital vomiting the flowers she ate with complete disregard to their bitterness. They were poisonous harmless looking flowers but she so wanted to taste what she smelled as though they all came without polarity between the life-filled colors and the death-grip of their taste.

She almost died and through it she would recall things, a cold desert swelling below a midnight sky so blue it reminded her of heaven and hell, a twist of wind that captured her completely she was turned to sand like the granules in the hourglass of time.

Stella learned to hate watches after that. Time became an annoying factor. It became almost irrelevant to her.

After that encounter with what she could only term as time, she was reduced to smelling things. Differentiating the different smells from the repugnant to those that held her attention. She came to love oranges and would ask her mom to buy more from the grocery. It was as close to something she could not name and yet it wasn’t.

Oranges. She learned to eat them a lot until her guts hurt. Some books she read said orange is a sign of marriage and so it was. But what of it. She learned to sprout the seeds and bury them beneath the soil. Some grew and bore fruits and flowers. Strangely, she climbed the tree one day and picked a flower, crushed it within the palm of her hand and inhaled it. The scent of Neroli never left her from that time on. She grew up learning the art of perfumery, realizing she had the nose for distinguishing the seven different types of smell. She started buying little vials of perfume and mixing them up to create a new scent and had so much fun in the process.

Neroli, however, haunted her. It was like that dream of orange sands and a deep blue sky above it that never left her. These three elements became a source of mystery for her that she needed to fathom. It was as though there was something to find among that scent.

Later on, when she was to decide on which scent to create a perfume with, she chose Neroli with the idea that if she created it, it would attract that which she was searching for like a scent that left a trail of elusive memories behind which she so wanted to know, to feel, to love and to be loved. Why she felt so strongly about it was beyond her comprehension. She knew it had to do with time and her repugnant attitude towards it. And yet she wanted so much of it, she was almost desperate to find it and what it had to do with the scent of Neroli.