Showing posts with label school memories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school memories. Show all posts

Saturday, October 19, 2013

That familiar fragrance

This is not about the fresh frangrance of jasmine or a smell that would transport you to a different world or something exotic which would pull you to breathe and inhale the fragrance for a long time..It is about the smell of bagasse, a fibrous matter that remains when sugarcane is crushed. This residual bagasse is also used for newsprint and paper-making purposes. I studied my last two years of schooling in a school run by the management of a newsprint organisation, within the campus of the paper-factory. So, bagasse is a part and parcel of everyday life there.

The first few days were quite hard in all aspects : the new school, new people, being in a co-education school, new teachers, the long commute to school and needless to say the bagasse smell everywhere - in classrooms, in canteen, in the ground..As weeks passed by, I got so accostomed that instinctively I knew when the air will begin to smell different during the travel. A small tea-kadai about two  kilometer away from the factory is the landmark-this served as a virtual border after which the breath you take will be of different fragrance than the one before the limits of the shop :) I got used to it and life went by.

After nearly a decade , when I happened to pass-by the campus last week, I voluntarily rolled down the windows of the car to inhale "that-familiar-smell". Brought back lots of memories too.