Of baby powder smells and no magic

We wake up late and rush through the morning’s chores. The OH hurries off to work, and I hurry off on my morning walk.

‘I can smell some sweet perfume,’ the OH tells me as I bid him goodbye.

My addled brain refuses to register any smells, sweet or not.

I come back from my walk, settle down with a nice hot cup of tea in front of the computer, and begin to check my mails and Facebook updates.

‘Migraine attack from OD-ing on baby powder. Thank you, J&J,’ – a friend’s Facebook post reads.

And then I realise I can smell it too. The sweet, very familiar fragrance of Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder.

I take in deep breaths of air, and I can still smell it. I decide I am not hallucinating. Briefly, I wonder if hungrily devouring Joanne Harris’s book about smells and magic every night before bed has cultivated in me a superpower – that of smelling everything I read about.

‘Baby powder?,’ I ask the said friend. I know she has no babies.

‘The Johnson & Johnson ad in today’s TOI, silly,’ she says. ‘It is making the whole newspaper smell of baby powder and, consequently, my entire house,’ she adds.

Ah. So, that is what it is. No magical powers or anything. I feel a tad disappointed. My life becomes the usual, again.

After the monkey business of the other day, this.

The strange things that the world does to mess with my head, I say!