Fragrance of a forgotten time...

The nose always remembers more than the eyes. The Ashram always smelled wonderful -incense smoke combined with the vivid scent of tulsi leaves and frangipani and jasmine. I need only step into the Ashram environs to be carried away in a flood of memory.
The memories are both pleasant and painful. I remember a girl growing up and finding herself a stranger who fit nowhere. A thirteen year old was not meant to sit quietly tying flowers into garlands or doing a hundred rosaries a day in between homework. What I believed was a normal life was so far from it that years later in the various hostels I lived in during my college years, I was considered as something of a freak. I was in constant torment between trying to find my own way and surrendering my all to faith and believing myself a mere instrument of God like I was taught. At that age I could not cope with the schism in my thoughts and desires and managed to build a wall around me so effectively as to be forever after referred to as cold and arrogant.
The pleasant Ashram memories had more to do with the friends who would come from various places in India to visit annually – for their parents it was a pilgrimage of sorts. I laughed and delighted in their company and we would go exploring the areas behind the Ashram fields and climb the little hill with a sense of achievement all out of proportion to the actual activity. My sister and I would cajole someone to pluck the green mangoes (chakkara mangoes were my favourite – they tasted forgettable when ripe but amazing when yet unripe with a sweet tartness I still savour on my tongue) and we would find a corner to sit and eat them slathered with a mixture of coconut oil, salt and chilli powder. Mango season was also jackfruit season. I loved jackfruits with an insane passion and could literally eat them in any form whether painstakingly made into jam, cut into strips and fried as chips, added in curries or cooked on their own or even made into payasams and appams. So my pleasures in the Ashram were simple ones and had more to do with a rural setting than the actual Ashram atmosphere.
As I grew up and went away to college, I found that homecoming while enjoyable grew less so with every passing year. I would return home full of radical thoughts and ideas thanks to books read and conversations over chai in the college canteen. I discovered that growing up and being taught nothing of life except the benefits of prayer left me very skewed and unable to cope in situations which were a breeze for everyone else. I learnt fortitude the hard way after being ridiculed and I changed sufficiently that homecoming only served to underscore differences.
In spite of growing up consciously different from the family that raised me, there are still moments when that once-familiar whiff of incense, frangipani and tulsi turn me back into a thirteen-year old sitting under the mango tree in front of the Ashram dreaming always of a different life.