Scent of a memory

Aanchal Malhotra’s debut novel is rooted in the many stories of the partition—her forte

- NIRMAL JOVIAL

A memory intangible to the core shared by her mother helped oral historian and author Aanchal Malhotra give form to her first novel-The Book of Everlasting Things. Malhotra's maternal grandfather used to work as a chemist at a pharmaceutical firm. He would bring home samples of fragrances, and mix them with the water in the air cooler during summer. And, the house would smell like heaven. That scent still lingers-both in the memory of Malhotra's mother and in her own wish for a whiff of it. Traces of it-malleable as memory is-seeped into Malhotra's imagination and helped her shape her novel's protagonist-Samir.

Samir hails from a family of perfumers in pre-partition Lahore. It is amid the perfume bottles in his family-owned ittar shop that Samir falls in love with Firdaus, an apprentice calligrapher. But their love story gets shaped and reshaped during the partition, which divided not just land but people as well into Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Released in December, the novel evokes a mixture of scents of people and places, too-that survived that bygone era of terror and fear.

Partition history is Malhotra's forte. A decade ago, she became a collector of memories, materials, and even sighs of that bloody age of mass exodus. Her Remnants of a Separation (2017) revisited partition via objects that refugees carried across the border. Her second book, In the Language of Remembering (2022), traced the “long-term, cross-border, generational legacy of the partition”.