Mitti Attar: The Town That Bottles the First Rain — Epoche B1
The town that bottles the first rain Everyone knows the smell: the first fat drops of June rain hitting ground that has been hot and dry for weeks. Science only got around to naming it - petrichor - in 1964. Kannauj, a small city on the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh, had been selling it for centuries by then. Kannauj is India's perfume town, and it distils flowers in equipment a Mughal courtier would recognise. A copper pot, the deg, sits over a fire; a bamboo pipe leads the scented steam across to a long-necked receiver, the bhapka, cooling in a water trough. Inside the receiver waits a base of sandalwood oil, which catches and holds whatever the steam brings over. Roses in spring, jasmine in summer; the whole line runs on firewood, water and patience. The strangest product on the shelf replaces the flowers with earth. For mitti attar - mitti means soil - dry local clay is baked in a kiln like rough pottery, broken into pieces, and loaded into the deg. What condenses into the sandalwood, drop by slow drop, is the exact smell of rain arriving on hot soil. The finished attar then rests in kuppis, flasks of leather. Leather breathes: the last of the water escapes through the skin, and the perfume that remains grows stronger as it waits. I had come to Kannauj expecting roses. Instead a perfumer put one drop of mitti attar on the back of my wrist and watched my face do what everyone's face apparently does. "June," he said, in May. A small vial costs a few hundred rupees, and it is the monsoon, one month early, in a pocket. References Lonely Planet (2018). India. Lonely Planet Publications. Rough Guides (2019). The Rough Guide to Bangladesh. Rough Guides.