Nat agrees a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but if a Thai says you smell like a turtle then neither a Romeo nor a Juliet will you be.
Do you have turtle odour? I know that sounds like an absurd question if you aren’t Thai and have no idea what I’m talking about. If you are Thai, it’s highly personal and you could slap me for asking. No one would blame you the slightest bit. Just from the name, foreign imaginations run wild at the thought of what turtle odour might be. But all Thais know about turtle.
For those of you who haven’t a clue, turtle odour is the unique smell of the human armpit. Charming, no? Well, no. I have no idea why we call it turtle. A friend postulates that turtles may smell the same as armpits, but I’d really prefer not to think about it. Such esoterica is better left undebated. I do want to know, however, who it was who originated this term. How did he think of comparing turtles to armpits?
Anyway, body odours are a particularly Thai phobia. When I was young, a famous television advertisement for Veto deodorant showed a young man on a bus lamenting that even though he bathed twice a day, women complained about his turtle. Commercials like this were not attempting to create a market, they were responding to a deeply seated cultural insecurity on the part of us Thais. Long before Veto was manufactured, my grandmother used to keep all her sarongs in sandalwood boxes and used to bathe with Parrot soap which had a virulently flowery smell. This combination of fragrances has been seared into my memory as ‘grandmother smell’ and is actually quite pleasant.
The Thai obsession with smell goes beyond personal hygiene, however. Smell is by far our favourite sense. Just as much as we are practically oblivious to other senses — like hearing — smell is extremely important to us. When a bachelor is particularly eligible, we say his flesh is fragrant. (Obviously such men don’t smell of turtle.) Furthermore, experiences are linked to smell in Thailand which other cultures associate with different senses like taste and vision. Take eating, for example. When food tastes good, we say it is fragrant. But when vegetables are bitter and unripe, we say they have a green odour.
I recall a friend of mine whose escapades on a Ouija board were rewarded by an intense smell of rot filling his room. Rather than checking to see if his toilet had backed up, this friend immediately said prayers to placate the spirit he had disturbed inadvertently. The rotten smell meant that the game of Ouija had brought the realm of the dead into my friend’s house. Herein lies the key to understanding the important relationships between Thai people and their noses. Smells, good or bad, are conveyers not merely of cold, empirical information on the state of nature, but on spirits, both human and divine.
Smell is important not just because it tells us that someone hasn’t bathed or that vegetables are unripe; it is important because it is reveals basic spiritual truth. This is why deodorant is essential. The poor young man in the advertisement did everything humanly possible — after all, he did bathe twice a day — but turtle odour still afflicted him. This obviously means that something was fundamentally wrong with his character. If you’re a truly good person, you don’t smell of turtle. You smell of jasmine, or roses or grandmother smell or even Veto, but you don’t smell of turtle.
So it stands to reason that a pleasant personal fragrance is a sign of an individual’s basic goodness. Indeed, heroines in Thai history and literature all smelled remarkably good. Isn’t that just the most amazing coincidence? Go read about it. People even sing about it. In one Thailand’s most famous songs, the Thai king was reminded of a Laotian princess whenever he smelled flowers. Her inner goodness was carried by her sweet fragrance and the king fell in love.
This must be why we hang garlands of jasmine at shrines and then light incense and candles. Just any offering isn’t good enough to reach the spirit world. Whatever you give must smell good as well.
But then human interaction with the spirit world through smells is a process full of taboos. To sniff a garland of flowers intended as a religious offering renders it profane and therefore useless. How many tourists pick up such garlands from a street stall and smell it only to have the vendor get upset? It is as if by wilfully smelling the sacred flowers, we are taking something that doesn’t belong to us. If a smell is sacred, it must come to us of its own accord. We cannot take it because it is a supernatural form of communication.
But then smells aren’t really ever given or taken. Although I can think of some instances when an odour is definitely expelled from somebody’s person, I don’t think that can be called a gift by any means. Scientifically, smells are stray molecules that float through the air and touch our olfactory nerves which then register this particular touch in our brains. We develop a sense memory that includes a repertoire of scents, and such smells, like grandmother smell, leave a lasting impression in our minds. This obviously is not an exclusively Thai phenomenon. There are companies that design fragrances for consumer products worldwide. All the cleaning substances we use such as detergent and shampoo or cosmetics like face cream or cologne have been designed to appeal to our memories.
With the advent of so many different scents in our lives, the Thai emphasis on smell seems a little outdated to me. There are so many fragrances we can use to hide the way we really smell. So there’s no way of knowing what a person’s spirit is really like from the way he smells. To this day I will remember the cologne of the first person I ever loved. That was such an awful experience, that cologne must have been hiding a distinct turtle odour that I didn’t know about.
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