There are certain times when I enforce a restraining order on my husband, several times a day in fact – when he’s had a cigarette and is still reeking of the odor. If there is one thing I cannot stand, it is the smell of a cigarette. My nose is pretty sensitive to the slightest of obnoxious smells; add to this the fact that we live in a relatively small apartment, you can imagine how hard it is to actually enforce this unwritten restraining order. Most of the time, I end up screaming like a “mad woman”, to quote my husband, because I cannot tolerate the smell.
For the past fortnight however, there has been an eerie silence at our home; I have not been taxing my vocal chords, not because he has become a saint and quit smoking, but because my nose is out of order. A combination of too much travelling, the flu and a very severe cold confined me to the house for more than a week, with the result that my nose was fully blocked. So in effect, it was goodbye to the odors that make me and other normal people wince and screw up our faces.
Oh, how happy I was – on the shuttle court, when everyone else was rushing to throw open some windows and let the stink of the termite repellant out (we play on a wooden surface which was apparently under threat from termites), I was thrilled to not share in their misery; at the in-laws’ place, people were rushing to close windows and get far away from the stench because the septic tank next door was being cleaned, but I didn’t have to budge from where I was. And of course, it was very peaceful on the home front with my neighbors being saved from the sound of my voice (again, hubby’s opinion, not mine).
But then, the downside of a life with no nose reared its ugly head and in one stroke, pushed this feeling of smugness to a tiny corner. For quite some time now, two weeks to be more precise, I had found that food was tasteless. Yes, I understood that it was the cold and the fever that was playing with my taste buds, so I just pushed down enough of it in order to take my medicine and antibiotics. But when you start to feel better and are actually hungry, and food still tastes like sawdust, you start to wonder why, especially when you know that you haven’t cooked it yourself and that it is your mother-in-law’s normally very tasty mutton biryani.
It all boiled down to the nose again – apparently, when you cannot smell, your sense of taste is also diminished. So when your nose goes down for the count, it takes your taste buds with it –perhaps it is a one-sided relationship where your sense of smell cannot stand your sense of taste living on when it has died.
So in a nutshell, life is pretty bland these days – no smell, no taste, and no noise (hubby is very happy – add to this list “no nagging from wife” for him). And while the nose limps back to normal, I am wondering about the unfair choice – do I really have to stomach the nauseating stink of cigarettes if my stomach is to enjoy some tasty food?
