Like eating custard in a public toilet

We were late back last night, and scored a lift home from the station as a result. When the car rounded a sudden bend, I had the strangest sensation. It was as though I could smell durian. There was something coolly pungent about the scent.  Fruity, but with a whiff of the obscene.

We were in the depths of Sydney's anglified suburbia. Moreover, we were inside a car.  I put it down as just another one of the vivid travel longings I'd been experiencing of late. I'll see a battered metal sign, and think of Delhi, or watch the way shadows fall across wet footpath and think of Bangkok. Doughnuts are Tokyo, rye bread is Helsinki, and palm heart salad is London.

We got home and walked into the kitchen. There was the strongest smell of gas in there. I panicked, and checked the stovetop. The burners were off, but the smell remained. It was elusive, but carried with it a certain sweet hint of death.

Odd, I thought. Maybe that scent I could smell in the car was actually gas? The two were awfully alike: cool and lingering and pervasive.

We began to eat. Esther, Andrew's mother, walked in and casually announced that she and Robert had been eating durian before we got home. The durian had cost $2 a kilo at Woolworths - it was overripe, but cheap. Esther's own mother, perhaps homesick for Malaysia, had bought two and a half kilos.

In unison, Andrew and I exploded: 'I could smell it in the car!'

'Then I thought there was a gas leak in the kitchen,' Andrew continued. I was just elated to think I wasn't crazy.

Some have described this gustatory experience akin to 'eating custard in a public lavatory,' while 'smells like hell, tastes like heaven,' is another popular saying. I don't know that the scent is 'hellish' or foul per se - it's just indefinable, and seems to carry more than a hint of all the things that scream to humans, 'eating this is not a good idea.'

After dinner, the remainder of the durian was produced. It was nestled in a clear platic take-away box. The pale, fleshy segments looked like hunks of cheese, but the smell was something else. It was so heavy, so loaded: sweet in the way shit and rot and things that have decayed or turned are sweet. Sweet-bad. Sweet in a way where the smell worms inside your brain and sinks into your pores and membranes.

Yet there was a pungent, tangy savoury note as well. A sharp cheddar. Or onions. Or garlic. But bitter. Something biting into that sweetly rotting flesh. Hard like the sting from a slap.

Esther muttered darkly that the fruit did not taste as good to her as when eaten by the roadside in Malaysia or in Singapore. Something was lacking.

I ate a little, but my stomach didn't want to know. It was 11 at night, I'd just eaten a fish dish and I was desperately tired; my body seemed completely uninterested in inclining itself toward this fruit. My brain and tastebuds were in revolt. They could not agree on what this thing might be. Was it pleasantly sweet, or was it just a bad idea?

The kitchen smelt exactly like Tops Supermarket in BKK. It was like being back there. Esther put on a fan to try to disperse the scent. It was hanging thickly over the table, saturating our clothes and skin.

When I went back down this morning, the smell was still there.

Comments

[Kahli]

Such nice writing. You are so charming with your words, not that you were necessarily trying to charm us.... but there is a politeness in your descriptives that I have always enjoyed.
We just moved and our apartment is right near a big Asian market (Salt Lake?! I know!) and a while back the whole place just wafted with the smell. It reminds ME of Chinatown, SF since I have yet to make my Asian debut and in Sydney we stuck to Manly due to wedding festivities.
Cheers then,
Kahli

[Laura]

Great post. I like the smell of durian - at least, I find it interesting, atracting - but have never managed to eat any.
Somehow your post doesn't make me hungry to try some.