How do you deal with the lack of grace some individuals expressed on Facebook? People, who hardly knew Monika, but felt entitled to judge her and make assumptions in the most insensitive manners?
Three weeks after Monika’s gruesome murder, I planted Jasmine bushes: Mogra – Arabian Jasmine; Juhi – Jasminum auriculatum, Raat ki Rani – night blooming Jasmine; Kunda – downy Jasmine. Fragrances Monika so dearly loved. I planted Jasmines to remember her when I stroll through my garden and pass these delicate flowering bushes. She once shared memories of her grandmother who was equally fond of Jasmine. It was her favorite fragrance, and of great importance for the perfumes Monika invented. One morning, not too long ago, she asked my husband and me to smell six samples of her perfumes that she hoped to market soon as her own brand. She gave us tiny sample bottles to choose a smell, so she can gift us a bottle later. We had a memorable smelling session on our verandah, followed by breakfast, talking about her special ability to smell. All human beings have several million yellowish cells high up in the nasal passages to differentiate smells and taste. But only very few people have such a heightened sensitivity that they can, for example, smell all ingredients in a meal, even their quantity. Monika was one of them. When her nose was “discovered” by a well-known perfumer less than a decade ago, she gravitated from photography to the perfume industry and started to follow her greatest passion: the art of smelling. I was lucky to be part of two of her smelling workshops, which she started to hold in 2015. She was eager to open people up to experience their environment differently, more consciously, by giving attention to the smells around them. We rehearsed her talks and program, since she felt anxious to speak in public, although she spoke so well. Around that same time, I invited her to collaborate with me in an art installation I had conceived for a show that was happening at the end of 2015. This led to intense work related meetings where we discussed smells, jotted down notes, freely associated to put together different smells, which Monika eventually mixed. For different reasons, the installation did not come to fruition then. Only a month before her death, when Monika visited and spent the night with us in South Goa, we revived the project and decided to finally show it in the next few months. This collaboration will now have to become a homage to her memory.
I still wake up every morning thinking of her. The pain and fear she must have suffered in her last hours to live is so difficult to process. When she received her last rites, a few days after her passing, the pyre did not want to burn, as if she was trying to tell us, she was not ready to go. I looked at her delicate feet, her beautiful face. She so much wanted to live. That day of her burning I had emptied one of the tiny perfume samples she had given to me. I rubbed it on my skin and carried her smell to the cremation ground. We miss you, Monika, you perceived the world with such joy and openness.
Ah, these jasmines, these white jasmines!
I seem to remember the first day when I filled my hands with
these jasmines, these white jasmines.
I have loved the sunlight, the sky and the green earth;
I have heard the liquid murmur of the river thorough the
darkness of midnight;
Autumn sunsets have come to me at the bend of a road in the
lonely waste, like a bride raising her veil to accept her lover.
Yet my memory is still sweet with the first white jasmines
that I held in my hands when I was a child.
Many a glad day has come in my life, and I have laughed with
merrymakers on festival nights.
On grey mornings of rain I have crooned many an idle song.
I have worn round my neck the evening wreath of bakulas woven
by the hand of love.
Yet my heart is sweet with the memory of the first fresh
jasmines that filled my hands when I was a child.
(Rabindranath Tagore)
This article is one of several women-authored pieces published this weekend in tribute to Monika Ghurde.
Dr. Katharina Kakar is an anthropologist who works as a visual artist and writer in Goa.
