The Perfumist of Paris (The Jaipur Trilogy, #3)

by Alka Joshi

And for anyone who thinks they can’t: You can.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. —HELEN KELLER

The beauty of fragrance is that it speaks to your heart and hopefully someone else’s. —ELIZABETH TAYLOR

My sister knows how to exercise infinite patience—she had to do it often enough with those society ladies in Jaipur whose bodies she spent hours decorating with henna paste.

Lakshmi told me that when she and Jay fight over household chores, their guiding proverb is: If we are both queens, who will hang out the laundry?

They say a guilty conscience is a lively enemy. The battle is always raging inside me.

Is allowing me to do what I want the same as me making my own decisions? Why are the girls completely my responsibility? Isn’t he their father? When did I give up my right to decide what to do with my life?

The citrus oil used in fragrances comes from the mist that stings our eyes when we peel the skin of the fruit, not from the juice of the fruit.

In Hinduism, the left and right sides of the body carry different meanings. The left is the feminine, the right the masculine. The left is temporal and earthly, the right pure and sacred.

“When you smell your lover, you’re consuming their essence. You want to absorb some part of them. That’s what I create. Fragrances that make people want to consume some part of the wearer.”

Having run a successful business as a henna artist on her own, Lakshmi understands the satisfaction a woman feels when she is recognized and appreciated for skills she has taken care to develop.

He who does not climb will not fall either.”

I want to tell him that women have moved on in other parts of the world. The best-selling perfume on the market right now is Charlie. It’s American. It’s about confident women on the go, wearing pantsuits, going to work in an office, carrying briefcases. And perhaps even pinching a man’s fesses instead of the other way around. But if I bring up perfume or America, he’ll roll his eyes.

The branch of patience bears sweet fruits, she reminded me.

I want more for myself. I’m a bad wife for wanting more. I love Pierre and I want us to be happy. I resent Pierre for not understanding me or even trying to understand me. I love spending time with my daughters. I’m conflicted when I have to spend time with them and it cuts into my work on the Olympia project. I like it when we’re all together as a family. Sometimes, I wish I lived alone and had no one to look after.

“A wolf may lose its teeth but not its nature.”

“The measure of us isn’t in the day-to-day. And it’s not in our past or our future. It’s in the fundamental changes we make within ourselves over a lifetime. Samajh-jao?”

How fragile our hearts are when we open them wide to allow love that never arrives!

We can’t go back and change anything, beti. But think of what the past has taught you. What it’s taught me is that keeping secrets has a cost.

“Being a woman is difficult. I can see why my mother didn’t like her own gender. We can do so much. Give so much. But not everyone wants what we’re offering. And in the end, we’re left with…pieces of a whole. Shards. Splinters. Chips. Pick them up, they cut our hands. Leave them on the ground, they cut our feet. It’s hard for us to just walk away.”

Why should something I did so long ago in the name of love be my undoing?

Why does no one talk about these women? The focus is always on the men—the artists. I started wondering: When I die, who will remember me? I’ve raised two incredible girls. Yet, the Singhs place them second to boys. Who will remember my daughters? Are men the only figures to be immortalized in history?”

“Did you know there’s a Hindu belief that the people known to you in this life are the same people you knew in your last life but in different roles? And that we’re always trying to learn how to coexist with those people in a better way?

There it is again. The idea that we women lose track of ourselves. Lakshmi always said henna was a way for a woman to find a part of herself she may have mislaid. Sheela said she wanted to bring the forgotten women back to life because while their painted images were famous, they themselves were invisible; they’d been discarded, like candy wrappers tossed on the ground. Is that erasure of us something other people do to us or do we women do it to ourselves?

The petals of the jasmine flower are so delicate that they must be picked by hand very early in the morning and rushed to a distillation facility before their scent fades.

Again I wonder: What could this girl do if she were given a chance?

Now that I’m a mother, I cringe at the thought of them falling for a boy who promises gold and only delivers tinsel.

“These flowers release their most powerful scent after the sun sets. One chapter of your life is setting, and you are becoming your most powerful self.”

An age-old bonding tradition in India, massaging coconut oil into the scalp is believed to activate the crown shakra and calm the mind.

I’ve come to think that some people are meant to be in our lives for a certain length of time and not a moment more.