Curried Student: An Unlikely Pleasure

During one of my classes a couple of weeks ago, I kept walking past the same spot near the door. The students were taking a test and the room was blissfully silent save for the scratching of pencils. My nose was piqued by something pleasant.

It was the smell of Grimsbury, a small neighborhood in Banbury, UK inhabited mostly by immigrants from the Indian sub-continent. We lived there in the late 1980s and often walked by rowhouses that, just then, smelled exactly like the corner of my room closest to the door. There, near the "Turn-In" and "Graded" trays, was a spectral blend of cardamom, coriander, turmeric, and pepper cooked in oil.

I kept cycling quickly through the rest of the room and slowing down as I approached but still couldn't discern where the lovely odor was coming from. The lunch lady doesn't serve curries (there is some law against serving appetizing food in public schools), the smell wasn't anywhere near the air vent, and I didn't see any other obvious source. I tried to keep my sniffing surreptitious and widened my nostrils to drag in as many molecules as possible.

Then I remembered the name of the boy sitting at the end of the table closest to the door. It isn't an Indian name, but the sound of it would blend well with Samarkand and all that name evokes. I realized at that moment that the 14 year old boy sitting 3 feet from me and worrying over how to write a sentence using the word "suffice" was unknowingly carrying the traces of generations of culinary culture in in the threads of his clothing. It was hard not to lean in and take in a good, long whiff of his jacket.

The smell pulled me back down Grimsbury's winter streets and made me outwardly smile. It also made me suddenly realize how weird and creepy it was for me to be sniffing students.