A new book combines science, history, and travel to examine the traditional perfumes of India

Saffron, or Crocus sativus, is a geophyte – it grows from underground corms (or mother bulbs), and one corm produces several more, which need to be dug up and divided from time to time so they’re not cramped or rotting underground. This necessary bit of human intervention is also why saffron isn’t really seen growing in the wild, and why the propagation is as labourious as every other step in the harvest. Knowing when the separation needs to be done is not an exact science. When I asked Rakib how he could tell the correct time, he laughed politely: “Well, the farmer always knows about his own crops, but I would say around seven years is enough time.”

The fresh bulbs are then planted in a new bit of land, thus increasing cover, and harvested in the fall. Flowering is triggered by the drop in temperature, and each corm develops between one to four flowers that have the characteristic mauve or lilac shade, often with a violet stain at the throat. Unusually for crocuses, saffron flowers have a fragrance. An earthy honey-and-violet one – a siren song to pollinators. Within the petals are the three stamens, as well as the three stigmas that are divided into terracotta-hued strings – these are the prized saffron threads.

“We usually begin harvest by October 24,” Rakib added, which was a most precise date, I thought. Of course, when it comes down to the stark realities, the business of saffron cultivation is nowhere near as precise a matter. For the past several years, yields have been declining steadily and profits along with them. Practically every year, newspaper articles debate whether it is possible to save Kashmiri saffron and, most often, the conclusions are not heartening. Rakib mentioned that, for the number of bulbs planted, his expected yield would be over 500 kilograms of flowers, which in turn ought to equal ten kilograms of saffron. However, this year, like the one before, he had to make do with three kilograms of saffron.

The primary problem is that of irrigation. Depending entirely on nature is rife with risk, and rainfall over the last several years has been erratic, as has snowfall, which means that the ground does not retain enough moisture. Excessive rainfall in some years during the flowering phase caused crop failure, as did the floods in 2014. The ill effects of climate change are felt here keenly. The government has made attempts to address the situation, notably through the National Saffron Mission set up in 2010, with a budget of over Rs 400 crore and an aim to improve soil health, build a network of tube wells and sprinkler systems, and offer financial support to the farmers, all of it hopefully culminating in increased production.

The results of the mission have been lacklustre. In its first five years, the government managed to dig less than half of the 109 wells it had planned, most of which are not functional. They also tried introducing more modern methods for cultivation, but either from a lack of preparatory education, resistance to change or some mix of the two, nothing really caught on. The result is that growing this rare spice has become unprofitable and riddled with risk for farmers, many of whom have switched to other crops or have sold part of their land.

Though technically this is prohibited – the land earmarked for saffron-growing is prized – it occurs nonetheless. In fact, a few years ago, the government acquired over 100 acres of it to build the police headquarters on.

As I left the field to follow the saffron onwards, one of the women gave me a handful of the brilliantly purple flowers to take with me. I reflexively raised them to my nose and inhaled. I thought of how I know this smell, not just because I work with it and know what it can do, technically, in composition, but of how I know this scent in my heart, in my bones.

Saffron is the smell of comfort. It’s the smell of don’t-worry-everything-will-be-fine-here-eat-this, the smell of the sweet, milky and spiced phirni that my grandmother made. As a child growing up across cities, moving homes frequently, there had been something of a gap in my life by way of traditional family trimmings. In my family, the rule was that adults went to work, and children made up their own entertainment and tried to stay out of trouble. Large extended family holidays or cobbled together religious rituals were sporadic at best.

After my parents’ divorce and my subsequent move to boarding school, they quietly fizzled out. Any that survived, I credit squarely to the efforts and influence of my paternal grandmother, my dadi, who was every bit the reigning matriarch during her lifetime. She was a formidable lady, unusual in some ways. She’d had a liberal college education, rare for a woman of her generation, and, even when married, largely declined to cook, citing (quite rightly) tedium as the reason. But she had also lived through Partition, seen much of the horror it unleashed and held to the belief that family was of paramount importance. Everyone in it was required to love and show up for one another or, at the very least, make a very convincing show of it.

My own relationship with her hadn’t always been a smooth one. The gap in our views, wide enough already from being two generations apart, grew deeper as I grew older. She would often seek me out to talk about the rift between my parents, while I tried to avoid the sore topic as far as possible and just get on with navigating my fraught-enough teenage life. She, like most grandmothers, equated love with food and was never satisfied by the quantities I ate, but I had discovered that being even slightly overweight in an all-girls boarding school was basically akin to existing in a constant state of wretchedness. I wanted nothing but to fit in, be thin and indistinguishable from my classmates. In her lexicon, being attractive necessitated fair skin, and again, I thwarted her by insisting on playing sports outdoors, flaunting tan lines and flatly refusing any of her remedial concoctions. We agreed on little.

But now and again, when the fancy struck her, she took to the kitchen to produce her one masterpiece: a perfectly creamy, delicately sweetened phirni, fragrant with cardamom and a whisper of saffron. I was powerless to resist it. During those interludes, all hostilities ceased. I ate with abandon and relish, I let her smooth my hair and patiently listened each time to the accompanying story on the process of this miracle dessert – how the milk had to be stirred constantly, the rice had to be ground fine but not too fine and how she’d spent hours perfecting it. All of it – her voice, the taste of the phirni, cool in the small glass dishes in which it was set and that velvety, spiced scent – was deeply comforting.

Now, even years later, that combination of smells still leads to a powerful rush of emotion. I suppose it could be filed neatly under the Madeleine Effect. In fact, what Proust suggests, in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu published over a century ago, about the potency of olfactory memory is quite true. Once an odour is experienced, the context in which it occured and the emotional value of that experience fuses.

This odour-associative learning is that flood of whispers in your head that a single fragrance can unleash; the power to carry you away to a different time and place. Science has known for a while that, for all practical purposes, smell and taste are the same, and most of what we think of as taste is really just smell, the tongue being sadly limited in what it can discern compared to the nose.

When I taste saffron, what I am really experiencing are the major constituent molecules: safranal, which gives it that characteristic aroma and the picrocrocin, which is responsible for the slightly bitter taste. A third aspect, crocin, is what gives saffron its dark, earthy red colour, so restful to the eye.

Where flowers are picked, processing usually awaits, and I followed the crocus blooms to this next stage, which takes place, not in a factory or similar industrial area but rather more intimately, in the grower’s own home – also home to Bharat Saffron, his brand.

It was a traditional Kashmiri home: wooden, with window frames painted the blue of a clear sky, a small driveway with a border of flowers. Downstairs were the family living quarters, and upstairs, where we went, was a mid-sized room. It was bare, save for the carpeted floor covered by plain white cotton sheets on which six men sat in a circle, mounds of saffron between them, and the air thick with its warm, spiced aroma.

The context of each rare and perfumed botanical, its origin and provenance is what completes its story. Saffron, inseparable as it is from Kashmir, seemed perfectly represented by the scene in that room: the sheets stained red-gold, the pherans and low hum of kishtwari and the warming cup of kehwa offered to me, also flavoured with saffron. It made absolute sense.

Excerpted with permission from The Perfume Project: Journeys Through Indian Fragrance, Divrina Dhingra, Westland Books.