Jenny Lagergren

City of Incense

      Around here, it signals dawn or ends the day.  I am among sandalwood air in Mysore, India.  Most of the city’s local three million people use incense as a spiritual cleanse.  It’s a bit like waking up to the first snow at home in Kansas.  I welcome it with a gaze, tie it to a higher force, and bless the day.

      A man invites my friend Lance and me into the back of his spice and fragrance store, to meet his workers who make incense sticks.  Light skin, shorts, and tee shirts separate us from the daily continuum of work and people’s walks on this street.  Up until the offer, we have never seen the origin of incense that sells in nearly every shop.  India seemed to reveal all action on streets.

      We move through one room of glass bottles labeled with fragrance names, and couches for customers to sit and test scents.  One cement room tags onto this main shop.  Its stone walls and narrow door hide it from the perfume customers, and the commotion on the street.  Here is where the rolling of incense takes place.  Two middle-aged women sit cross-legged on the floor.  The only two workers seem quiet, already calm in a position they hold ten hours each day while moving hands thousands of times across a wooden board.  Their time passes dipping wooden sticks into bowls of powder.  Each roll and pack smoothes into a wand holding powder, callused skin, and bits of blisters fallen off into the burning promise of production.

      Attention to motion is loose.  The women mastered circular hand movements long ago, and now they ignore their precision.  The sticks finish identical to the one before, wrapped in an industry that must be smelled.  This cement room is the women’s last stop before old age.  Part of themselves roll up with time they spend working.  A caring of relationships with countless Gods illuminates their work.  The woody, musty scent that concentrates in the room and the streets, comes from the Sandalwood tree.  It is their origin of livelihood.

      This is the India that hovers in the corner of my mind.  Sandalwood mentioned in the Vedas burns in kitchen corners, restaurants, or in splotches over idols of Gods.  The deities are happy during worship that addresses them in a hazed dissipation of wood.  Hindu temples leak mythological scents grown in the gardens of the sky.

      At home in Kansas, I imagine moving back into an old idea of slowness, the beginning of speed.  The women’s work ends in the motion of daily ritual.  The space on the cement floor they work in holds identical hand motions, production, and thoughts I imagine move from the past, to the walk home in the evening.  Thousands of sticks these two women make will circulate out of the shop.  Incense moves over households, India, and countries.  The women are publishers of scent.  A match lights their prasad, lets loose their work over my desk.

About the Author:

Jenny Lagergren completed her B.A. in English �ELiterature at Kansas State University this past December, and she is now starting the M.A. program here at KSU. Her essay, “City of Incense,�Ewas the winner of this year’s Touchstone undergraduate nonfiction award.