The Siyarams used to be known for making disposable clay cups popular in India called kulhad. Street vendors serve tea, kulhad wali chai, in the wee unglazed cups. Indians drink the tea and toss the kulhad, which break street-side with a brittle clunk. Tea sipped from the special cups is infused with an earth-rich taste and smell. The scent is the same sought by perfumers for mitti attar, and comes from the same source—clay flooded with rainwater during monsoon season that parches into a fragrant chalk in the dry times.
The perfumers of Kannauj once recycled kulhad pieces to make mitti attar, but demand for the broken cups outstripped supply. About twenty-five years ago, the Siyarams realized they could move up the supply chain, selling their scented earth to perfumers by the wagonload rather than hawking individual cups from door to door.
Like the other fragrances manufactured in Kannauj, mitti attar begins with a harvest. In the Siyarams’ clay pit, Mom, Dad, and their grown children are squatting in ankle-deep slurry, using their hands to shape parched yellow marl into clay disks. Like so much of rural India, the scene is a blend of traditional and modern, all against a premonsoon backdrop of heat and dust. The patriarch wears a skirt called a dhoti, his wife, a flowery sari and head scarf; their sons and daughters wear pants. They use wooden sticks to break the parched earth, and a diesel pump to draw water from the pond to wet it for clay. After they make the disks, they pile them for firing in a primitive kiln, dug into the side of the pit and covered with bricks and straw. Atop the ancientlooking pile, a rainbow of mobile phones gleams in the sun.
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Baked and ready for Kannauj’s perfumeries, the clay disks are called khapra. The next time I spot them, they are heaped in a dark corner of a cavernous fragrance distillery. Back through the old city of Kannauj, we’ve followed narrow, winding roads to a perfumer called Munna Lal Sons & Co. I meet the third-generation leader of the company, Akhilesh Pathak, and a member of the fourth generation—his daughter, Swapnil, a twenty-four-year-old engineering graduate who grew up at boarding school and has just returned to Kannauj to learn the family’s fragrant trade.
Each generation has built part of the eclectic complex where the extended family also lives in a row of well-appointed white houses. A content-looking herd of water buffalo lounges in the shade of a pair of massive Indian lilac trees that separate the homes from the perfumemaking. Pathak says his grandfather Munna Lal made the rain fragrance from the time he opened for business in 1911; Lal taught the techniques to Pathak’s father, who taught them to him.
Lal built the original two-story perfumery, now a faded yellow and cyan and crawling with shy monkeys peeking down from the balconies. In 1962, Pathak’s father built the brick distillery where the company brews essential oils including mitti attar.
If Kannauj feels last-century, stepping into the distillery is more last-millennium. There is no artificial lighting, no machinery, no trace of modernity. It’s like a medieval fort, with dirt floors and columns supporting the partial roof. Through the roof and open sides, natural light streams onto a primitive scene: Ropy craftsmen wearing only threadbare dhotis are tending fires under hulking copper cauldrons called degs, which, topped with oval lids, poke up from long rows of brick stills like giant fossilized eggs.
The ancient, painstakingly slow distillation practiced in Kannauj is called deg-bhapka. Each still consists of the copper deg—built atop its own oven and beside its own trough of water—and a bulbous condenser called a bhapka (receiver) that looks like a giant butternut squash. When a fresh supply of flowers comes in, the craftsmen pack a hundred pounds or so of rose or jasmine or other petals into each deg, then cover them with water, hammer the lid down on top, and seal it with a long rope of mud. They light a wood or cow-dung fire underneath. They fill the bhapka with sandalwood oil, and sink it into the trough. The deg and bhapka are connected with a hollow bamboo pipe called a chonga, which carries the fragrant vapors from the simmering pot into their sandalwood oil base.
Like the Siyaram and Pathak families, the distillery workers have inherited a precise skill from fathers and grandfathers. They must closely monitor the fires so the heat under the deg stays warm enough to evaporate the water inside to steam—but never so hot that it destroys the aroma. As fragrant steam travels from the copper pot through the bamboo pipe and into the squash-shaped receiver, the workers must keep the trough of water on the receiving side cool enough for the vapors to condense back into a liquid, infusing the sandalwood oil with their heady scent. Just by reaching their hands under the water to feel the bulbous part of the receiver, the perfume-makers can tell how much vapor has condensed. Every couple hours, they switch out the receiver, cooling down the deg with wet cloths each time to stop the condensation. A typical hundred-pound batch of petals takes six or seven hours to distill.
On this day, the distillers are brewing the only attar that doesn’t come from a plant. Like feeding coal into a furnace, they shovel the clay disks into the copper pots before pouring in the water, hammering on the tops, and sealing them with the mud. Just like with the flower petals, the men will mind the mitti for six to seven hours before all of the aroma steams out of the clay. At that point, they’ll drain the receivers from a hole in the bottom, siphoning off the water that has condensed in the vessel until only the rich, fragrant oil pooled on top remains.
The mitti attar is not finished until a final step, when it is poured into a special leather bottle called a kuppi and sealed inside. Attar not stored in the kuppi “is essentially ruined,” says Shukla, ever wary of modern manufacturing techniques, especially anything to do with plastic. “The moment you put it in the leather bottle is important, like the moment you put it on your skin. It allows the attar to release any remaining moisture and realize its true scent, in this case, the first rain on the ground.”
Back on the labyrinthine streets of old Kannauj, we find the shop of the man who makes the bottles, Mohammed Mustakin, who traces his craft lineage even further back than the Siyarams or the Pathaks. Like in those family businesses, the next generations are here, too, working beside Mustakin, whose long white dress, or kurta, matches his squared white beard. I meet Mustakin’s two sons, and a beautiful toddler grandson peeking from behind his dad, who translates for Mustakin: “My father and forefather and forefather and all the forefathers we remember made leather vessels for the attar,” he tells me. “We always learned that our vessels are the same from the fairy tales of Ali Baba.”*
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Our last stop on the trail of the mitti attar is another Kannauj storefront, a retail perfumery owned by a three-thumbed shopkeeper named Raju Mehrotra. Also carrying on the business of his father and grandfather, Mehrotra sits at a soapstone counter, metal shelves behind him jammed with glass bottles and tins of every size filled with oils and attars of every type: jasmine, champaca, rose, kewda, three kinds of lotus, ginger lily, gardenia, frangipani, lavender, rosemary, wintergreen, geranium, and many more I’ve never heard of. The two bestsellers are khus, a cool, tranquil attar made from the roots of vetiver; and hina-shamana, a warm and woodsy compound said to be the favorite of Ghalib, a nineteenth-century Urdu poet of the Mughal era who was known as a ladies’ man.
When we arrive, Mehrotra is busy with a young Muslim couple who’ve traveled eighty miles to stock up on attars. Although his customer base has contracted with the growth of mass-market perfumes, many of his most faithful clients are Muslims, who use only traditional attars for fragrance because Islam prohibits alcohol-based perfumes.
Shukla calls over a tea vendor selling kulhad wali chai. The man juggles a tall stack of kulhad cups in his left hand and a steaming pot of milky tea in his right, and still manages to pour with a flourishing stream. I let my tea soak to capture the scent of the kulhad. I swirl it around, then taste, smell, and drink it all at once.
By now, Mehrotra has fetched the mitti attar. It sits on the black stone counter in an inch-tall glass bottle. I twist off the little gold cap, close my eyes, and breathe in the scent of
the Indian rain. It smells like the earth. It smells like the parched clay doused with pond water in the Siyarams’ backyard. More than anything, it smells like the tea in my little kulhad.
The aroma is entirely different from the memory of rain I carry from my childhood and my part of the world—ozone-charged air, wet moss, Thomas Wolfe’s “clean but funky” scent of the South. But it is entirely appealing: warm, organic, mineral-rich. It is the smell of waiting, paid off: forty years or more for a sandalwood tree to grow its fragrant heartwood; four months of hot, dust-blown summer in northern India before the monsoons arrive in July; a day for terra-cotta to slow-fire in a kiln.
I ask Shukla, the supersmeller, to tell me what the scent brings to his mind. “It is the smell of India,” he says. “It reminds me of my country.”
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In my country in recent years, rain likewise has become a singular national reminiscence. But there is no earthiness about this American aroma. No electrical zing of ozone. Nothing as dank as geosmin to wrinkle the nose. With climate terrain as different as the Mojave Desert from the Louisiana swamps, it is not, as in India, patriotic nostalgia for the smell of wet ground. It is, instead, a widespread recognition of the smell of wet laundry.
From cleaning supplies to beauty products, American retail shelves are awash in rain-themed products. In the household aisles: Refreshing Rain laundry detergent and dishwashing liquid, Renewing Rain fabric softener, Morning Rain carpet freshener. When it’s time to scour the toilet, Clorox has you covered with a Rain Clean bowl scrubber.
As it freshens our clothes, counters, and commodes, we Americans also like rain-clean bodies. We shower with Pure Rain soap and Rainbath gel, soak in Midnight Rain bubble bath, and wash our hair with White Rain shampoo. Men can roll Granite Rain deodorant across their armpits while women rub the scent of Rain-Kissed Water Lily under theirs. The hyperhygienic woman can even freshen up with Tropical Rain–scented douche.
None of these scents existed in my 1970s childhood (though my favorite shampoo embodied the most blatant scent marketing ever: “Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific”). I tapped the International Fragrance Association of North America to help me figure out how rain ended up in so many U.S. product lines in the years since.
One of the top perfumers behind the craze turned up in Marietta, Georgia, just north of Atlanta. Heather Sims, a redhead with a refined southern accent, has a chemistry degree from the University of Georgia and the nose of a supersmeller. She’s director of perfumery at Arylessence, a family-owned fragrance house that has become one of the largest U.S. developers of scents for beauty and personal-care products; laundry, cleaning, and home items like scented candles; prepared foods and teas; toothpastes, gum, lip gloss, and more. Arylessence’s scientists churn up butter flavor for microwave popcorn, a Cajun kick for seafood boil, and subliminal air fresheners for hotels and retailers. They are the reason your Omni lobby smells of calming lemongrass, and the menswear retailer Tommy Bahama emanates a subtle piña colada—all in the name of marketing.
As a child growing up on a farm in rural Georgia, Sims often noticed scents in nature that other people did not—or detected them first, including a coming rainstorm. Her chemistry degree led her to Arylessence’s fragrance lab right out of college. She arrived just as manufacturers of cleaning supplies began to abandon the floral-dominated fragrances of the 1970s and ’80s, responding to consumers who found them too reminiscent of Grandma’s soap. At around the same time, most laundry detergents had become equally effective at conquering dirt. Consumer choice was evolving to hinge on whether clothes seemed “fresh”—a notion that is wrapped nearly entirely in scent. Arylessence’s marketing surveys show the smell of laundry detergent now drives nearly 80 percent of repeat buys.
Enter the rain. Despite geosmin and ozone, wet moss and mold, American consumers have what Sims describes as a fantasy of rain as fresh. This is not the case in damp regions such as Britain and Ireland, where products harkening clear skies and fresh air—“Breath of Fresh Air,” “Blue Skies, “Sunshiny Days,” “Sunshine Lemons”—far outnumber anything to do with water, be it rain, morning dew, or ocean spray. My Irish friend Susan Devane, who operates vacation cottages in the Wexford countryside and checked the store shelves there, could not resist adding her amusement: “It’d be a joke here. Honestly. People would just laugh: ‘Ah Jaysus, ya wouldn’t need to be addin’ rain scent to the washin’ today!’ ”
As an Irish consumer’s dream of fresh is “Sunshiny Days,” Sims says, an American’s might begin with the childhood memory of a rainstorm and also trigger a fantasy of rain’s bounty—rolling green hills, waterfalls, forests.
Chemists can’t use gassy ozone to harken a coming storm. And they wouldn’t dare add geosmin; no one wants the laundry to smell of fish. Instead, Sims and scent scientists conjuring rain might use anywhere between fifty and seventy-five different chemicals that call freshness to mind, starting with a wide array of compounds known as aldehydes. Aldehydes can be toxic, such as formaldehyde, and otherwise nasty, among the emissions from coal-fired power plants, forest fires, and diesel engines. But aldehydes with the longest carbon chains can produce strikingly fresh, aquatic scents. Many of these are behind the most famous perfumes in the world, including an unprecedented concentration in Chanel No. 5.
In fact, it was Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, obsessed with cleanliness and highly sensitive to smells, who gave rise to the very notion behind the decline of India’s attar industry. This was the spin that synthetic perfumes such as Chanel No. 5 are more refined than scents distilled from nature. Chanel was said to abhor simple flower fragrances she believed were used (unsuccessfully) to camouflage the odor of “unwashed” women.
“I want to give women an artificial perfume,” she pronounced. “Yes, I really do mean artificial, like a dress, something that has been made. I don’t want any rose or lily of the valley. I want a perfume that is a composition.” Chanel hired Ernest Beaux, a celebrated French-Russian chemist and perfumer, to develop the formula that would become Chanel No. 5. Beaux said he chose the famous fragrance’s set of aldehydes based on his scent memory of an expedition to the Arctic; he tried to re-create the redolence of Arctic lakes and rivers in the midnight sun.
Today, when Sims’s clients seek to conjure rain, she also scans her aquatic memory and her periodic table. Following the aldehydes, she might reach for a synthetic muguet to re-create Coco Chanel’s outcast lily of the valley. Next, she might add Calone 1951, a molecule developed by Pfizer in 1966 that imparts an exceptionally intense olfactory sea breeze. Water molecules alone have no smell, so lab-made rain scents, whether in detergent or perfume, often harken “blue notes”—sea and lake—and greens, fresh-cut grass, or clover.
“It is a fantasy,” says Sims. “We are looking to create that fantasy of the cleanliness of rain.” Ultimately, rain’s essence wells up from your own fantasy, your childhood memory of rain, and where in the world you experience storms. It might be India’s monsoons on parched earth, Helen Keller’s hay meadow, or the warm whiff of steaming asphalt mixed with sweet frangipani—rain’s balm in America’s most tropical city.
* * *
* I recall “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” only vaguely. When I read the story later, I can see why it would be a point of pride; the leather oil vessels are crucial to the tale. In the story, the robber captain makes thirty-seven of his thieves hide in thirty-seven man-sized leather jars, cuts a slit in the top of each so they can breathe, and rubs the outside of the vessels with oil to authenticate the ruse. He disguises himself as an oil merchant and takes advantage of Ali Baba’s kindness to spend the night at his house, planning to murder him in his sleep. The story’s heroine slave figures it all out while her master Ali Baba sleeps, and gruesomely kills each of the thirty-seven bad guys in their hiding places by pouring boiling oil into the vessels.
ELEVEN
CITY RAINS
Miami is my favorite city of rain. If you’ve got to endure a deluge,
it might as well be warm, fall amid fairy-tale banyan trees and Mediterranean architecture, and last less than an hour. On the southernmost mainland, rain’s applause rings loudest from the palm trees, fronds drumming with steady appreciation all through the wet season. Florida summer afternoons create just the atmospheric chaos a thunderstorm craves. As the sun warms the peninsula through the day, heat begins to rise off the land. Sea breezes swoop in from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. When these cool, damp drafts collide over the landmass, they push the warm air higher—sending huge, moisture-laden currents aloft. The blue-sky puff clouds of morning give way to silver Rubens by midday. Through the hot afternoon, the currents soar higher. Cerulean towers build and then vanish in a blue-black squall that dwarfs the beaches, marshes, and skylines of South Florida.
As the storm moves in, the sticky air turns cool. The thunder does not rumble in the distance so much as surprise with the closeness of its first sheet-metal clang. On the beaches, lifeguards blow their whistles and mothers wrestle wind-whipped blankets. In the Everglades, flocks of white ibis flash in the inky sky as they fly for cover in the hardwood hammocks. In Miami’s Coconut Grove, wiry men selling mangoes on the highway medians make a break for the underpasses.
A few plump raindrops fall as five-second warnings before everything ordinary vanishes in an all-out tropical wash.
Rain gives Miami its substance as well as its tropical signature: South Florida’s water supply depends entirely on rainfall to fill its aquifers because of what scientists call a hydrologic divide that severs the bottom of Florida from the bubbling springs and inflowing rivers that define the central and northern regions. Without rain, Miami would have no prehistoric-looking gumbo limbo trees, no hot pink bougainvillea pouring over walls and trellises, no bananas and plantains with their rain-slide leaves that ingeniously empty inward to growing trunks when the plants are small and outward to the root zone when they’re mature.
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