Rain

by Cynthia Barnett

  To the dismay of their loyal fans around the world, the Smiths broke up in 1987, after only five years of making music. Morrissey and Marr never spoke again. Morrissey, tapping his trademark melancholy, soared with his first solo album, Viva Hate. He was dubbed the Pope of Mope. On his own, he made the top ten of the U.K. singles chart on ten occasions. Yet his subsequent albums have sold fewer and fewer copies.

  I could not help but wonder if Morrissey’s music was missing dark and drizzly Manchester. As the millennium turned, he had moved to a new estate, in a new part of the world. Newlyweds Clark Gable and Carole Lombard purchased the bucolic place in 1939 and fixed it up together, but they enjoyed it for only three years before Lombard was killed in a plane crash at the age of thirty-three. F. Scott Fitzgerald was in the neighborhood, too: He rented a little guesthouse near the estate, in a heartbreaking and unproductive stretch of screenwriting that preceded his death.

  The estate lies just south of Ventura Boulevard, in sunny, rain-spare Los Angeles.

  TEN

  THE SCENT OF RAIN

  In the human quest to capture rain, the artists and writers trump the engineers, their images and words growing stronger while dams weaken over time. But the most wondrous attempt to catch ephemeral rain is made by villagers in an outpost of northern India. It involves not a book or a barrier, but a tiny bottle.

  In India’s state of Uttar Pradesh, the village of Kannauj lies a dusty, four-hour drive east of the tourist-mobbed Taj Mahal, white-marbled wonder built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his third and favorite wife. Empress Mumtaz Mahal died in 1632, giving birth to their thirteenth child.

  The Taj is Jahan’s grand paean to lost love. But he also mourned his queen in much more personal ways. For a time, he traded his colored and embroidered garments for bereavement white, and he abandoned music, a sacrifice for a devoted patron. While color and song eventually returned, Jahan never again wore perfume. Fragrant oils—known in India as attars—had been one of the couple’s great shared passions.

  Long offered to the gods, aromatic oils and incense during empire days became the purview of royalty, too. A Portuguese friar named Sebastien Manrique, smuggled by a eunuch into a dinner of elites one evening to spy on Shah Jahan, wrote with astonishment of the gold vessels, silver braziers, and perfume holders emanating the scents of ambergris, eagle wood, and civet. A seven-spouted silver hydra spewed scented water into a trough.

  Then and now, Kannauj was the place to fetch the fine scents—jasmine oils, rose waters, the roots of grasses called vetiver, with a bouquet cooling to the nose. Exactly when attar-making began here, no one is certain. Archaeologists have unearthed clay distillation pots from the ancient Harappan ruins of the Indus Valley. Fragrance references also are found in the Hindu holy text the Rig Veda.

  In the seventh century, a king called Harshawardhan made Kannauj the throne of his north Indian kingdom. The industry must have been well under way then, because he was taxing vetiver. But after his death, his empire disintegrated into small, rival states. In the millennium and a half since, Kannauj’s royal past has been largely forgotten. But its attar industry has quietly thrived, growing to become the largest in India.

  Today, Kannauj is to India what Grasse is to France, hub of a historic perfumery that draws much of the town to the same, aromatic pursuit. Most of Kannauj’s villagers are connected to fragrance in one way or another, from sinewy craftsmen who steam petals over wood fires in hulking copper pots, to mothers who roll incense sticks in the shade while their toddlers nap on colorful mats nearby.

  But India’s fragrance capital has something Grasse and the other aroma-cultivating places of the world do not. Along with their ancient perfumery, the villagers of Kannauj have inherited a remarkable skill.

  They can capture the scent of rain.

  —

  “Smell,” wrote Helen Keller, “is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived.” In her perceptive essays that helped prove the deaf and blind could master language and much more, Keller described scent as the fallen angel of the senses. People appreciate it enough in a lovely garden, but too often ignore its complexities.

  With her nose alone, Keller said, she could tell a man from a woman and distinguish among professions—carpenter from ironworker, artist from mason. Most powerfully, scent preserved her strongest memories. “A whiff of the universe makes us dream of worlds we have never seen, recalls in a flash entire epochs of our dearest experience. I never smell daisies without living over again the ecstatic mornings that my teacher and I spent wandering in the fields, while I learned new words and the names of things.”

  And from the time of her childhood, Keller would never forget the smell of a coming storm.

  My little friends and I are playing in the haymow. The sense of smell has told me of a coming storm hours before there was any sign of it visible. I notice first a throb of expectancy, a slight quiver, a concentration in my nostrils. As the storm draws nearer, my nostrils dilate the better to receive the flood of earth-odors which seem to multiply and extend, until the splash of rain against my cheek.

  Every storm blows in on a scent, or leaves one behind. The metallic zing that can fill the air before a summer thunderstorm is ozone (from the Greek verb ozein, “to smell”), a molecule formed when electrical discharges, in this case from lightning, break oxygen’s two atoms down to three. Likewise, the familiar, musty odor that rises from streets and storm ponds during an old-fashioned deluge is called geosmin. A by-product of bacteria, geosmin also gives beets their earthy flavor. But what’s pleasant in rain and root veggies can ruin a cool glass of water or a catfish fillet. Geosmin is the bane of urban water suppliers and freshwater fish farms. The two products don’t go over with too much gout du terroir, taste of the land.

  Rain also picks up odors from the molecules it meets. So its essence can come off as differently as all the flowers on all the continents—rose-obvious, barely there like a carnation, fleeting as a whiff of orange blossom as your car speeds past the grove. It depends on the type of the storm, the part of the world where it falls, and the subjective memory of the nose behind the sniff.

  City rain smells of steaming asphalt, in contrast—not always unpleasantly so—to the grassy sweetness of rain in the countryside. Ocean rain smells briny like Maine clam flats on a falling tide. In the desert Southwest, rare storms punch the atmosphere with creosote and sage. In the Southeast, frequent squalls leave the damp freshness of a wet pine forest. “Clean but funky,” Thomas Wolfe called the exquisite scent of the American South.

  But nowhere is rain’s redolence more powerful than at the climatic extremes of the world, where great, dry swaths of desert are inundated with the most dramatic seasonal storms on Earth. The monsoons of India, Southeast Asia, western Africa, and parts of Australia can turn deserts to grasslands and famine to fortune. In the otherwise dry places that depend on the downpours for most of their annual rainfall, the monsoons shape everything from childhood to culture to commerce. And they arrive with a memory-searing scent.

  To Sanjiv Chopra, the Indian American Harvard Medical School physician and author, like his younger brother Deepak Chopra, the loamy smell of long-awaited rains soaking India’s thirsty ground is “the scent of life itself.”

  The British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, born in northwest India, credited the monsoons of his childhood with having given him a lifelong sense of rain as “the great event.” He left India when he was eight. At fifty-three, he wrote of how his mind could still “recapture the thrill of the smell of parched land rain-soaked.”

  The earthy essence is strongest when rain quenches dehydrated ground. The scent can so tantalize drought-stricken animals that it sets thirsting cattle walking in circles. Not infrequently, writers and poets mine the language of fertility or sexuality to convey the aroma. A leading Aussie poet, Les Murray, describes a first rain’s pheromones as the “sexual scent of Time itself, philter of all nativ
e beings.”

  In the 1950s and ’60s, a pair of Australian mineralogists, Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Grenfell Thomas, set out to discover the source of that piquant perfume. They dug it up from the earth itself, baked by the sun into rocks and clay. Using steam distillation, they managed to extract the scent, a three-part chemical compound that clumped into oily, yellow globules. One simple, one acidic, and one neutral with fatty acids and other organics, no single of the three could produce the scent alone. Just like perfume, the key to the redolence was in the range.

  Ultimately, Bear and Thomas linked the scent to organic compounds that build up in the atmosphere, including heady-smelling terpenes secreted by plants. The major components in turpentine and resin, terpenes also put the essence in essential oils. They are the freshness in pine, the cool in peppermint, the spice in ginger. From the tallest conifers and from the tiniest mosses, hundreds of millions of tons are released into the atmosphere each year. Unleashed, the terpenes make some remarkably diverse contributions. They give hops its bite and cannabis its smooth character. They help form the blue haze that hangs over the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and the Blue Mountains of Australia. They also make some of the planet’s most intoxicating perfume.

  Rocks and clay absorb terpenes and other molecules from the atmosphere like sponges: the drier they are, the more they draw in. Meanwhile, the hotter the temperatures, the faster the ingredients cook into Bear and Thomas’s integral odor. During hot, dry stretches, desertlike places build up great stores of the compound. When the humidity shifts ahead of the monsoons, moisture loosens the material from its rocky pores and sends its pungency adrift on the wind. This is why sometimes rain’s bouquet blooms before a storm, and sometimes after. The aroma is more powerful in the wake of drought because the essential oils have had longer to build in the layers of rock.

  Publishing in the journal Nature in 1964, Bear and Thomas proposed a name for the scent brought on by rain. They called it “petrichor,” a blend of the Greek words petra, rock, and ikhor, the ethereal fluid that flowed as blood in the veins of the gods.

  But the scientists acknowledged that they were not the first to identify the stormy smell. They were not even the first to extract it. In fact, the element they dubbed petrichor was already the signature fragrance in an attar produced in an ancient perfumery found in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, in the village of Kannauj.

  The scientists flubbed the name of the fragrance, which is called mitti ka attar. But they got the translation right: Extracted from parched clay on the eve of the monsoons, and distilled with techniques dating to the Harappan, the scent of rain, in India, is known as Earth’s perfume.

  —

  India’s cleansing monsoons may stir a beloved national aroma, but before they arrive, the capital, Delhi, often reeks of some of the fouler ones—rotting garbage and excrement, especially at the Old Delhi Railway Station, where I wait on a hot June evening to board an overnight train to Kannauj. Each time a train pulls out, small, barefoot boys jump onto the tracks to pick through the swill left behind, among the estimated half-million ragpickers in Delhi who handle the vital work of garbage collection with no official pay or protection.

  The children seem too focused on the task to be bothered by the waste and stench from the trains’ open-pit toilets. With those odors sending my train into the night, the distinctness of the village of Kannauj will lie, indelibly and deliciously, in its scents.

  On the outskirts of the city, truck-farm-sized fields planted with aromatic crops stretch for miles, interspersed with the monolithic chimneys of hundreds of small-scale brick kilns for which the region is also known. Like the attars, bricks are manufactured here little differently today from centuries ago, red clay earth cut from topsoil, then stacked and fired by men whose fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers cut, stacked, and fired bricks too.

  In the crop rows, white jasmine flowers shaped like starfish bloom in their ocean of waxy dark green. Twiggy trees called gul-hina are blooming too, their tiny flowers clustered into points of white flame. Ordinary on the tree, gul-hina leaves become the extraordinary henna that decorates women’s hands and feet for special occasions, or tints dark hair a spicy red. Less well known: Its flowers make a delicate-sweet attar.

  It can take about one hundred pounds of flower petals or herbs, infused into a pound of sandalwood oil—the ideal and purest base for essential oils—to make one pound of pure attar. Extended families head out in the early mornings or cooler evenings to pick the delicate flowers. They pack their harvest in jute sacks, then rush, before the petals start to wilt, to one of two dozen steam distilleries in the town.

  But I’ve come to Kannauj for the only attar made from neither flowers nor plants, one manufactured nowhere else in the world. Never have I traveled so far on such little assurance that I’ll find what I’m looking for.

  —

  It was springtime when I began to correspond with Shakti Vinay Shukla, director of India’s Fragrance & Flavour Development Centre in Kannauj. He confirmed that locals still bottle the scent of rain, just as described in Bear and Thomas’s half-century-old paper. But his e-mails were guarded, reflecting the secrecy that surrounds perfumers and the embattled psyche of the natural attar industry, which is losing a long and painful war with synthetics.

  After flying 8,000 miles to India, taking a train to rural north-central Uttar Pradesh, catching an auto rickshaw to the fragrance-center boondocks outside Kannauj, and finally arriving in the morning at Shukla’s office on the funky agricultural compound, I still had only three worrisomely vague answers: Yes, mitti attar is still manufactured in Kannauj, and only in the heat of May and June, when petrichor has built up but the monsoons have not yet begun. Yes, Shukla would show me the mitti-making, but “only once we are sure about your identity and mission.” And yes, there would be a place for me to sleep in Kannauj, at the fragrance center’s government-run hostel, as long as said identity and mission checked out.

  When I arrive, the 26-acre campus is flourishing with medicinal and aromatic plants (exactly fifty types of each), even in the premonsoon melt. I pass human-sized clumps of lemongrass, citronella, and the fragrance staple vetiver, whose cooling roots are woven into curtains and hats in India to fend off summer heat. Under a sprawling open-air barn, menthol mint is drying in tall piles next to a portable field furnace that will distill 1,200 kilos of herb into 12 kilos of oil (grossing $12,000 on $1,000 in production costs).

  In a complex of laboratories, scientists and grad students are researching plant remedies for everything from memory loss to malaria. At the Soviet-looking hostel softened by white-blooming frangipani trees, farmers from across India bunk for weeklong stints to train in aromatic plant cultivation.

  As it turns out, Shukla needs only to look me in the eyes to decide I am no industrial spy. He asks his joyful round chef, Babu, to prepare my room in the hostel and some breakfast, potato parotta with yogurt and spicy pickled lime. Afterward, we set off in his 1950s-looking car, a black Hindustan Ambassador Classic, to chase the scent of rain on a cloudless day.

  —

  When the British novelist Neil Gaiman got to write an episode of the BBC sci-fi phenomenon Doctor Who, he made “petrichor” a telepathic password for the Doctor’s time machine. On the trail of the scent in old Kannauj, the word also transported me—to an ancient city that has never let go of its past.

  In modern times, Kannauj is also the name of a political district, sprawling home to more than 1.5 million people in Uttar Pradesh. But the old city retains much of its aromatic history—an estimated 40,000 of its 70,000 residents are engaged in fragrance in one way or another—and all the eccentric authenticity typical of Indian villages.

  Small houses and perfume shops, made of a hodgepodge of materials, are packed side-by-side on the lanes. A brick house with a thatched straw roof butts up against a stone storefront with a corrugated metal roof. Colorful one-person Hindu temples are tucked here and there to honor
gods. Cows wander the road, oblivious to their sacred standing. Bicycles loaded perilously high with bundles of incense sticks wobble by. A donkey pulls a cartload of flower sacks rather than flour sacks. All seem to ignore the tiny taxis and oversized work trucks decorated with Hindu icons and honking urgently to pass.

  Stretched across the Makrand-to-Kannauj road, a brick archway carved and painted with colorful flowers and vines is now covered with real ones. Erected in 1944, the temple-shaped edifice announces the business of Kannauj in Hindi and Urdu: “Perfumes, Scented Tobaccos and Rose Waters.”

  Villagers say the Makrand-to-Kannauj road once smelled like heaven—covered on both sides with the shavings of sandalwood, a tree as central to Indian religion and culture as it is to the fragrance industry. That was before the near-decimation of India’s sandalwood forests. Shukla’s scientists have various experimental crops planted at the institute’s grounds in search of a sustainable forestry solution for the slow-growing prize.

  The scientists have told me that Shukla is a supersmeller (“the nose of all noses,” said one), trained in the European perfume industry and committed to Kannauj more as missionary than bureaucrat. He is pained to watch his native country’s attar industry lose market share to modernity. When India opened its economy to foreign trade in the early 1990s, brand-conscious young Indians began turning to French perfumes. For the past decade or so, the industry has survived on attar’s popularity as a fragrance for tobacco products and a chew, pan masala. But with many states calling for bans on the cancer-causing products, reliance on this single market may not be possible.

  Shukla seems to know the names of everyone in the village, along with those of their children. His wife, an obstetrician at the public hospital here, has delivered many of their babies. Beyond the archway and down a dirt road where the houses, bicycles, livestock, and all else are covered with a chalky layer of dust, we arrive at the home of a family called the Siyarams. For generations, they’ve made their living from an earthen pit behind their home. Covered with rainwater in the monsoons, the pit has dried out in the premonsoon summer; they bring water as they need it from an adjacent pond.