New Delhi, Sept. 24 -- There is something in the smell of autumn. Often subtle or possibly overpowering at times and perhaps imaginably serendipitous in its own enigmatic way, occasionally.

A couple of days ago, while searching for a veterinary shop across a narrow and crowded street in Kolkata, a sudden whiff of a certain smell made me look around, only to find that I was walking over a bed of saptaparni (or as is called in Bengali chhatim) flowers. The small greenish-white blooms lay strewn across a small part of the dingy road - which was still wet and muddy from the torrential downpour earlier in the morning. For those few seconds, I forgot what I was looking for and the smell of the slight blooms took me fleeting back to a time from...