The man who thought he smelled

'Ice and Spice', at the junction of the roads that split to Coonoor Club and St. Anthony's School was a great place to catch up, snack on delicious Beef Manchurian and sneak those quarts of Whisky that corroded the guts and made the joints ache, fun evenings nevertheless… Many a tale was exchanged there as the evenings wore on and ended in drunken singing in the park. Every day a man walked past, down the Anthony's road, head bowed, muttering something under his breath, sad and worried. I asked my friend if he knew anything about the man. A curious tale unfolded, an office worker somewhere, who started avoiding people and eventually became a loner because he thought that people were avoiding him because he smelled foul. This unfortunate delusion turned into a obsession and led to him leaving his home, job and the company of his friends. In those days, delusions and obsessions were looked upon as a character defect, or maybe demonic possession, and people avoided him like he was contagious, a self-fulfilling turn of events that caused him more despair. As days went by, his pain was even more apparent as he walked by, diminished, wrapped in a cocoon of his terrible thoughts, and his family forced him to see a Psychiatrist. That didn’t help.

One day, riding down the Gymkhana road at the curve near the bridge where the stream emerges from a thick cover of Lantana and broadens into a dank pool, where ghosts emerged, and people were warned not to walk at night, I saw a crowd straining to see the body of a man being pulled out, bloated and anonymous, as only the dead can be. It was ‘He who smelled', truly smelling now. People held kerchiefs to their faces as they hauled him out and took him to that dreary autopsy room. And thus he disappeared, into a cleansing fire. Perhaps, I hope, to a better place.