My mother taught in a girls’ college (there were no ‘young women’ then), and if a student came to her class wearing perfume my mother would remark upon it with close to terminal prejudice, ‘She was actually wearing attar!’, with the transgression indicating brazen hussiness and secret rendezvous plans with boys. As for my father, he found the idea of a man wearing fragrance highly self-indulgent. I’m sure many of my parents’ friends, couples of Western-ish convictions, of which the men worked for Union Carbide, ICI and Hindustan Lever, must have worn perfume and cologne. But this was left unremarked upon, at least in my hearing.
I first properly came across the concept of self-curated body odour in the Anglosphere books I’d begun to read. There was none of it in Enid Blyton or Richmal Crompton. But as soon as you moved to James Bond or James Hadley Chase, you got some descriptions of scent, especially with the women. That men could and should wear bottled smells was something I only grasped when I joined a boarding school in Ajmer, which was – you’re quite correct – populated by sons with fathers in the corporate world, not to mention princelings, many of whose male ancestors had made whole life-time careers of doing nothing but wearing expensive perfume.
The first after-shave lotion I remember using was Old Spice, years before a razor blade ever touched my cheek. It stung a bit and felt quite nice, like superior Dettol. Then, some other boy had English Leather, so one tried that as well. By this time callow, pushy hormones were noisily filing into the classroom and slapping their satchels on the front benches of the body/mind. I began to join the dots between smelling ‘nice’ and – one day, someday – achieving maximum proximity with girls.
Fellow students with differing parental bank accounts had different after-shaves and colognes. Some kind aunty-uncle gave me a bottle of Old Spice, which helped me keep up with the Joneses but only barely – the foreign-based boys toh just sneered at the quaint white bottle.
In class 10-11, the hormones now throwing the satchels through classroom windows, we were allowed socials with the slightly older young women a.k.a. girls of the local boarding college named after a lady saint. Like others, I began to trade in the pong-market in my House. There was one boy from Dubai or somewhere who had Jovan Musk for men. One guy had Faberge Brut. Another guy had the best, Paco Rabanne Pour Homme.
The exchange rate was around two hits of a spray for one sweet dish in the mess, or some help with homework. On his room wall, the Musk guy had a picture of Farrah Fawcett in a bikini, the loudness of the picture and perfume matching perfectly. The Paco Rabanne guy was a man of altogether superior taste -he had a poster of an anonymous but very beautiful woman, White as was the norm at the time, but fully clothed in a light shirt, top two buttons open, and fitting dark jeans. After we arrived at some satisfactory contract, he’d hand me his bottle with the zany logo with the P inside the R. ‘Okay, two presses on the button only! And you can look at her while you spray. Otherwise I don’t let anybody look at her.’ I would carefully aim the nozzle at my chest, meet this black and white woman’s eyes, and spray. Engulfed by her and PR Pour Homme, totally smelling of the future, I would walk away with a bounce in my step.
