Most poems about memory begin with a person, a house or a summer. Sunandita's begins with wet soil. "The smells I love" is a list of eight lines, and for seven of them the speaker never says why these particular smells matter. Only in the last line does the reason arrive: they bring "memories I hold so close." The central idea is that smell is a storehouse. The past is kept less in stories than in sensations that can ambush us at any moment, and the poem proves this by showing the triggers and keeping the memories to itself.
The syntax carries much of the meaning. Almost everything before the last two lines is a fragment: "The freshness of earth after rain," "Temple flower, burning camphor," "Warm linens straight out of the dryer." There is no "I" and no main verb, only things presented one after another, like objects set out on a table. The "I" finally appears in the closing line, and by then the reader has taken in the whole collection and is ready to hear what it is for. A list is an unusual shape for a poem, yet here it feels right, because smells do tend to surface one at a time and without explanation.
The rhythm reads like someone remembering faster and faster. Line 2, "And a whiff of delicious vanilla in coffee," is long and unhurried, and you can almost feel the slow sip. Then the lines tighten into short, comma-separated beats, and the shortest, "Khus-khus and lavender!", is the only one that gets an exclamation mark. It is the moment enthusiasm spills over. Rhyme is mostly absent at first. "Dryer" and "fire" sit close in sound, depending on how you pronounce them, but only the last two lines settle into a true rhyme, "rose" with "close." That click makes the ending feel like a lid closing on something precious, which suits a poem about holding things close.
The word choices are worth slowing down for. The title says "smells," not "scents" or "fragrances," and the plainer word lets warm laundry and marshmallows stand beside perfumery without apology. Within the poem, the vocabulary of intensity grows. A "whiff" is brief and almost accidental, while the final "heady aroma" is strong enough to make you dizzy. The list also travels widely. Judging by the words used, the speaker's world seems to include both South Asian and Western reference points: temple flowers, camphor, khus-khus and Oudh share space with coffee, a clothes dryer and lavender. Marshmallows roasted on a fire sit in the same poem as camphor burned in worship, and that pairing is a quiet delight. Two kinds of flame, one playful and one probably ritual, end up with the same emotional weight.
The senses also overlap. Vanilla and marshmallows bring taste into a poem about smell, and "warm linens" brings touch. This reflects how smell actually works, since it rarely arrives alone. The smell of rain on earth is also the feeling of relief after heat, and the smell of laundry is also the comfort of something warm against the skin.
The poem's significance lies in its restraint. It names no person, place or event, so the memories stay private to the speaker, yet the reader is not shut out. Because the poem gives only the triggers, we find our own memories rushing in to fill the gaps. Rain on dry ground or fresh laundry will mean something to almost everyone, even if the meaning differs. The poem is also democratic. It sets everyday smells beside costly ones, and the cheap pleasure of a dryer-warm towel is not ranked below rose and Oudh.
It is not a flawless piece of craft. The second line sprawls compared with the others, and the rhyme scheme only commits at the very end. But the looseness feels fitting, since memories rarely arrive in tidy metre. What remains is a small, generous poem that shows how little it takes, a breath of air or a warm cloth, to open a door we thought was closed.