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2002-03-27 - 8:28 p.m. The Five Senses 5: Smell ------------------------------- It is 1820. We can imagine Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, founder of modern Singapore, taking a walk with his trusted scribe, the bilingual interpreter Munsyi Abdullah, down the bank of the Singapore River. Sir Raffles is still unused to the tropical heat, the way it is burning the back of his neck and sending beads of perspiration down to sting his eyes. ‘My God,’ Raffles remarks, ‘with the sun like this is it any wonder that the river learns to sweat?’ Abdullah is mystified by Raffles’ comments. He gazes at the river and sees the exposed roots of mangroves like the phalanges of giant hands dipped in acid. The sun’s glare bounces off the river’s surface like signals from a morse-code mirror. ‘It’s the smell,’ Raffles continues. ‘It’s that strange river smell. I don’t know how to describe it. It smells of crocodiles, and rotting logs, and unwashed bodies.’ In his study of the English language, Abdullah was often struck by how a language so rich in some aspects could also be so poor in others. He was especially intrigued by how few words there were to describe something smelly. Of course, there was ‘putrid’, the smell of decay, and ‘rancid’ the smell of ‘spoilt butter’ (he didn’t really know what unspoilt butter was, actually, much less the spoilt variety), and ‘fetid’ (for the river, perhaps?), but beyond those there wasn’t much variety. On the other hand, in the Malay language, there was haring or hancing, to describe the smell of urine, hapak, for musty garments, tengik or pering, for sourish foods (like cheese, but he didn’t really know what cheese was, either), masam, for sweaty bodies, hamis, for fishy odours, bacin, for dried cuttlefish or even underclothes worn too long… With as much deference as he can possibly conjure, Abdullah mentions his observations to Raffles, who nods solemnly. In defence of his native tongue, Raffles talks about the weather in his home country, its mild winds and subtle sunshine, how these combine to ensure that smells do not assault delicate English noses ‘like battering rams’ (which, admittedly, Abdullah has never seen before). Secretly, Raffles is aware of how tenuous his argument is. Piss and fish smell the same in any part of the world. But language, as well as literature, is the mark of a civilisation. The more sophisticated the language, the more cultivated the society. And how can he begin any important mission here in Singapore if a fundamental is not established: that the converter is always superior to the converted? Such hubris, such hubris. For this particular show of arrogance, entirely imaginary, Raffles will be punished, four years later. Scottish botanist Robert Brown, travelling in the jungles of Sumatra, will chance upon a flower, whose petals are the colour of rotting flesh. Even more ghastly is the flower’s aroma, so putrid that it is perpetually surrounded by a black cloud of flies, a smell so legendary that the flower has earned the nickname of the ‘corpse lily’. Brown decides to name the flower after the Governor of the Straits Settlement of Singapore. And thus the Rafflesia was christened, a mono-floral wreath, pompon of the living dead, maggot-cauldron and supernova of gnats, whose fragrance would have assaulted the delicate nose of Sir Stamford Raffles, like a battering ram, or even two. But one can guess that even such a smell will not arouse Sir Raffles from his grave, to catch a whiff of this imaginary anecdote you are privy to, to bellow in anger and denounce the outrageousness of retribution: that the revenge for an incident entirely fictional would have to be too real, too utterly literal.
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