Grief is not what the films show you. It is not a single dramatic moment. It is finding his reading glasses in the kitchen drawer six months later. It is the way a stranger on the metro wears the same cologne, and you have to get off at the wrong stop just to catch your breath. My brother and I were not close in the way people mean when they say close. We argued about politics and borrowed money we did not return. But he was my brother, and now the city is smaller without him in it. Some mornings, the familiar scent of his fragrance seems to drift in from nowhere, like a sentence left unfinished.
He was seven years older than me. Old enough to feel like a different generation, young enough to still steal my music. He had terrible taste in shirts and perfect taste in fragrance. That was his one vanity — a dark, smoky woody cologne he wore every single day, even to the fish market, even in the monsoon when the humidity made everything cling. Our mother said he bathed in it. Our father said it preceded him by ten minutes and lingered for twenty. He said that was precisely the point.
We grew apart the way brothers in Indian families sometimes do — not with a fight, but with geography and silence. He stayed in Kolkata. I moved to Hyderabad, then Pune, then back. We spoke on Durga Puja and birthdays, sometimes not even then. I told myself we had time. That is the most dangerous sentence in any language — we have time.
You do not.
You never do.
You only think you do because the alternative is unbearable.
And perhaps that is why fragrance can become so deeply personal. A familiar scent can bring back an entire person, a city, or a moment before you are ready for it. His signature fragrance became one of those memories for me — a dark, smoky scent that still feels like him long after he is gone.
He died on a Wednesday. A heart attack at forty-nine, in his office, mid-sentence — his colleague said he was talking about the cricket. That sounds right. He loved cricket the way he loved everything: loudly, with opinions, and with an absolute refusal to be wrong.
I flew back for the funeral. The flat still smelled like him. His cologne was on the bathroom shelf, half full. I stood there for a long time, just breathing it in, trying to memorise something I had taken for granted my entire life.
I took the bottle home with me.
I do not wear it. That would feel wrong — it was his, not mine. But some evenings, when the loneliness gets architectural, I uncap it and hold it under my nose, letting the city shrink back to the size it was when he was still in it.
It smells like sandalwood and smoke, Sundays at our parents' house, and every argument we never finished.
Perhaps that is the quiet power of a signature fragrance. A scent can hold memories that words cannot. A familiar woody fragrance can bring back a person, a place, or an entire chapter of your life in a single breath.
My therapist says grief has no timeline.
I think grief has no fragrance either — but his does.
And as long as that bottle is not empty, he is not entirely gone.
