My mother

I sometimes smell that particularly flowery smell of sunshine- I can be in a sweaty compartment of the train, in a restaurant, in the canteen- and I feel like I've been thrown into another world. Time stops, my body is independent of my mind and I can do nothing but let fragments of a memory that I can barely remember take over.

There is a strange comfort in things that don't change. At 24 there is very little that hasn't changed and yet when I smell that mix of sunshine, starch and flowers I'm transported to a warm cocoon. I feel four again. I watch as my beautiful mother wears make up and combs her hair, watch as she stands in the middle of what looks like reams and reams of beautiful silk. I feel the cool breeze of the air cooler and the magic in the air as the puddle of silk on the floor rapidly disappears. Amma was always impatient dressing up, she would click her heals and swear at safety pins. I hardly blame her, there is a bewildering ritual in wearing grown up clothes. The click of heals, the touch of rouge, the right shade of lipstick and the precise fold of every pleat.

I watch as she carefully combs her hair and snaps at me for getting in her way or bringing food into the room- I'm a clumsy child and in my jaw dropping wonder I can't seem to balance my plate. Sometimes, and these were prize days, I would be called on to to be part of the enchanting ceremony. I would sit on the floor and yank on pleats so that Amma could tuck them in just right. She would then spray on that perfume- it was never the same perfume, I could tell by the bottles being of different colours- and yet it would be that same ambrosial bliss.

When I was a child I dreamed of growing up, of dressing to Naval balls just like my mother did, of being as pretty, as perfect. It's amusing how childhood dreams turn out. I don't yearn so much for any of that anymore, we live lives that are of mutual pride and yet so cosmically different; but sometimes, on that rare special evening I'll walk into my mothers room and pretend to watch TV as I take in the unchanged present and revel in the permanence of that smell.

I have "borrowed" a tidy sum of perfumes from Amma in the hope that I can conjure that moment on demand but it's never the same without my mother, her boxes of make up and those magical reams of silk.