To smell is to remember

My father would periodically go out of town for meetings and conferences. That gave me, then four, a chance to sleep with my mother, a great treat.

- (The writer is a US-based international development advisor and had worked with the World Bank. He can be reached at [e-mail])

Sometimes she would read me a story, sometimes she would just talk to me before I fell asleep.

What I loved so much was lying next to her, hearing her mellow voice and, above all, smelling her special scent. Even after all these years, a fragment of that olfactory souvenir stays vivid with me.

Studies tell us that mothers and children, even babies, identify each other first by smell. Researchers found that babies exposed to pads saturated with their mothers' breast smell instinctively drew close compared to unscented pads. Conversely, mothers identify their babies' smell quickly and accurately. In one study, after smelling babies' undershirts, new mothers who had spent only a few hours with their babies rightly guessed the identity of their child in 90 per cent of cases.

We carry a personal scent, unique to us. I may use a cologne but that is superficial and temporary (a friend used Calandre, a perfume by Paco Rabanne, which I found quite provocative, and when I mentioned it, she said, "In that case, I should use more of it!"). I also carry a scent from where I have been and what I have recently eaten; that too is temporary.