Subliminal Investigation Report No. 11

It was 7 am. Shankar sat on a wooden chair near a pavement in Pondicherry, facing the Bay of Bengal, sipping his morning tea in his comfortable apparel designed in Italy, manufactured in SriLanka and brought to him by an American company through an Indian retailer. He flipped his news paper at exaclty 13 minutes and 47 secs after the hour, when he caught a beautiful girl walk by him, her perfume lingered in the air. The first notes of her perfume where green and herbal, it reminded him of the lush cold tea gardens he had been to at the age of 14 from his school. The mid tones smelled cheap, reminded him of the barber shop he used to go once every three months and get a hair cut for 10 rupees from the age of 9 to the age of 13. The final notes of her lingering fragrance was mossy, woody and damp, it reminded him of his out house during the rainy season, where snakes hid to escape the rain. Apart from the out house where he had never seen a snake hiding in any season, let alone rainy season, the final notes of her lingering fragrance reminded our central character, Shankar, of a mushy smell* he encountered during his teen ages, when he was a strapping young lad, courageous enough to do almost anything.

* Dear readers might have already guessed, that the author, being a man of letters, is too shy to mention exactly what the source of the mushy smell was.