A Blonde Bengali Wife

A Blonde Bengali Wife
Travels in Bangladesh

We've Nearly Made It

Hello and Welcome!

AS OF AUGUST 2016 A BLONDE BENGALI WIFE AS MOVED TO ITS NEW HOME ON MY WEBSITE AT http://www.writerightediting.co.uk/

HOPE TO SEE YOU OVER THERE!

Where you will learn everything you
need to know about the progress of A Blonde Bengali Wife, the travel
book I've written about my love-affair with the fabulous country of
Bangladesh.

It's a blog about Bangladesh, about Bhola, and about fiction
and creative writing in general...

A Blonde Bengali Wife:


First published in September 2010 and launched in October 2010.

Reprinted and re-launched in November 2015 as an eBook available from Amazon UK/.com

#1 Amazon Bestseller


Follow it on Twitter @AnneHamilton7 and @Anne_ABBW and Goodreads

Buy it here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blonde-Bengali-Wife-Anne-Hamilton-ebook/dp/B016UDI86I






















Wednesday 25 July 2012

Sense and Sniffability

Sunday morning brunch: paratha, stuffed with a chilli and onion omelette.  Before she even takes a bite (snatching it away from Simon's grubby, wiggling fingers and ignoring his anguished howls of 'more, more'...) Jacqui is sniffing madly and looking glazed...

It's not the eye-watering onion or the all-powerful chilli, not even the dextrous daintiness (poetic licence for those of you viewing the door-step pictured in the link below) of the rolled-up flatbread.  It's the smell; the spicy, warm, bready, just-cooked-eggy scent of a roadside food stall in rural Bangladesh.  It got us talking about the evocative nature of the sense of smell, that fleeting whiff across the nostrils that has us momentarily in a different place or time.  For Jacqui, Bangladesh was locked inside that paratha, but my Bangladesh wafts on a nostalgic air of RID insect repellent... 

Christine had a vat of it with her on that first trip and as it was far superior to mine and she appeared immune to the bugs anyway, I commandeered it.  I noticed the smell at the time, of course, pungent with it's throat-catching chemicals but back in Ireland the empty container was consigned to the bin and that was that until a few years later when I saw Christine at home in Sydney.  It was sunny, spidery and I was sleeping on the floor of her music room; 'Here,' she said, throwing me a spray can, 'douse yourself before the bed bugs bite.'  I took the lid off and my head - metaphorically - spun.  One sniff and I was back in Khalia, in the Peace Library in the midst of an interminable (now rose-coloured) House Meeting... Back in sydney, each time I awoke during the night to check for funnel web spiders, I uncapped the RID, had a quick snort and was transported.  It was like my very own olfactory time machine.

If I could bottle the effect, RID would be one of several:
  • woodsmoke rising from a village in La Creuse
  • Chanel No.5 in the midst of the freezing, snowing backroads of Co. Mayo one February
  • cooking oil frying the chipsi mayai of Songea, Tanzania
  • Elizabeth Arden's Red Door perfume framing the Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica
Aaahhh.... just like the Bisto adverts say.

And it was just after that paratha-brunch, I realised that time doesn't dull the effect either.  I opened a pink bottle of Johnson's Baby Lotion the other day; it was handed to me to slather on Simon and I'd no recollection of ever using it before.  Then, in a nano-second twenty-five years disappeared and I was on Kibbutz Kfar Hahoresh, near Nazareth, getting ready for the Friday Shabbat dinner...

Anne xx

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