Spittoon Monthly presents “I Don’t Want Him to Smell” by Damyanti Biswas, a story of a poor Singaporean family trapped in the stench of being human. Biswas, an inspired writer of crime fiction, imbues a rare scene with a grotesque and moving texture. Keep reading for a brief author interview on the origins of the story, followed by a critical essay in which Jack Calder tries to find out what stinks.
The Story
I DON’T WANT HIM TO SMELL
by Damyanti Biswas
Today is the third day, and the entire apartment has begun to smell.
“That’s him in there,” Ma says, but neither of us dare look in.
“This not City of Angels ah,” she parrots the one English movie she’s ever seen, “People die here and don’t come back. That’s him, I’m telling you.”
I don’t tell her that even if they could, Singapore has no space for the dead to come back—there’s hardly enough room for the living.
We leave early in the morning before it’s light. Ma brews tea, we toss it down with stale pao from her stall. For the past few days, she eats breakfast at her kueh stall, me at my 7-Eleven shop. On the way to work I have nothing for the condo cat. That tabby eating out of my hand is the only time I get to touch a living thing, and I miss that. If it is my father, my Pa, in that room, I want him not to stink, so we can go about our lives, eat breakfast at home in peace.
On the way to work, the sound of clanking on the train makes me dizzy. They clang like the bracelets on Pa’s arm when he used to get at Ma or me with the cane. That noise makes me see again the blood on Ma’s face when she crouched to keep me out of the way.
I head to the shop downstairs from the 7-Eleven, where they sell fake Chinese perfume. We need to cover up the smell in the apartment. I need something flowery, strong. A salesman in a short-skirt and makeup waves his fingers as he explains which scent would make me smell manlier, and why. I wonder if he is a he or she, if he has bulges where there should be holes, or holes instead of bulges, and what if some of it peeks out of his skirt? Never touched either, holes or bulges, but I want to. My only friend at school, Lim, missing one eye, he’s done it. I’m already too old not to.
Ma says I must keep away from dirty thoughts, but they run away with me towards this man-in-skirts, his sales pitch a singsong of too-soft words. “Stay away from those Engrrish books, Ah boy,” Ma says, “don’t be like that one. I teach you scriptures, such good Mandarin, put you in Chinese school, for what? So you can shame yourself with trash? Be a man like your Pa!”
So I try to think of my Ma, bring back clean thoughts.
“Look at this, the shape of a woman’s butt,” says the man-in-skirts, pointing to a large dark bottle. “Cheap-cheap,” he says, like a helpless little bird. I look at him and he draws me in, his eyes false-lashed and smiling, behind the counters and into the store. He teaches me all about bulges and holes, which goes where. It hurts, but I want more. The lunch hour doesn’t last long.
“He loved kueh, so I left him some,” Ma says when I get home past midnight, and she’s done pretending to sleep. Who can sleep in such stink anyway? Not me. Laying down on the bed next to Ma’s, I think of those quick, sweaty moments at the perfume shop, how it would get harder to keep my secret from Ma, how she would smell it on me, the way the neighbors would smell Pa one of these days. It can’t go on.
I spray some cologne on two kerchiefs, both gifts from my man-in-skirts, give one to Ma, and turn away from her. I stare at all the boxes heaped on the tables, under the beds, the cartons of rice flour for her shop, the incense that has given up its fight against the smell and burned out at the altar, stacks of newspapers she cuts coupons from.
All I can think of is my man-in-skirts, his wand all sparkly in rubber, how it got harder the harder you stroked it. He is a he and she, all in one: curry puff, but also ice cream cone.
“Tomorrow, you go in there and take a look, ok?” Ma says.
We’ve lived the past three years like this. Ma and I in one room, Pa in another. Started two days after my fifteenth birthday, the day I came back home to find him hitting Ma as usual. I shoved him.
“You have to be filial,” Ma said, “and you know how much rent we got to pay for rooms like these? I do his washing, he buy his food, we don’t see each other, every one happy. Everything ends up in the sea, anyhow.”
So we stayed. We still haven’t made enough money to move out. Cancer made him weaker, but we heard him when we came back at night, rustling in his room, tinkering under his bed, among his guitars, his fancy shoes. Coughing, sometimes. He had lost all his money at the casino, and fallen very sick by the time he thought of selling the apartment. Ma didn’t help him with that.
“Foolishness of woman,” Ma would say, leaving snacks and piles of washed clothes at his door over the months and years, “as the man dies she does not know what to do.”
In the morning her gifts used to disappear, but they don’t any more–not for the last few days. Some of the kueh she put there must smell now, but there’s no way to know for sure. Everything in the house smells like old puke—the chairs, tables, bedsheets, walls, floor, cups and saucers, clothes.
Today she has brought him a gift-wrapped red box. “He loved his music, so I got him an old radio,” she says. That past tense again. And who listens to the radio anymore? In front of his door lies the pile of her gifts, like a funeral offering. He loved kueh, thumping, and sex, I want to tell her, and so did you. I used to hear your grunts right after he thrashed you each night. I sniffed you along with the sweets you brought him from your shop. How dare you ask me to think clean thoughts? Go put Angkoo and spirit money, tea and joss sticks at his door, go sweep his room. Let me do my thing in peace.
I don’t open my mouth. As usual.
Turning to the wall, I soak in the perfume from the handkerchief and it takes me back to my man, how he’d taught me about the slapping and slipping about of flesh. Bôa, he’d whispered, and I smiled, because my one-eyed friend Lim had told me about that bit. I want to try it again, but I must wait for morning, for lunch hour tomorrow.
My head hurts with the smell. The cologne can’t keep it away, and I feel like Pa is in bed with me, dragging me down with him. I won’t let him. I sit up, look out of the windowpane, not daring to open it, lest the smell escape. They’re firing up a barbecue out there, the neighbours at the pool deck. I wake at dawn to find Ma at the window with her head outside.
“You mad or what? Someone will complain!”
Two days later, there’s a notice from the Health Department slipped under the door. I step on it when I open the door and faster shut it. We didn’t find you at home, it says, here’s the date and time we’ll visit next. Call this number if you want to change the appointment. Very official, with a stamp and everything. They mean business. I tear it up. I think of running away. I think of opening the door to Pa’s room. Since I’ve eaten dinner already, I upend a bottle of perfume on a new handkerchief, pop in a pill the man-in-skirts slipped me, and go to sleep.
I don’t go back home on the day of the appointment I did not make. Man-in-skirts says I could move in with him if I want, so I decide to stay the night. Can’t sleep though. His bed is not meant for two and I worry about Ma, so I return at dawn.
Ma grunts and turns over at the noise from the door. I find my sleeping bag next to her, and zip myself in. I cover my face with a towel. I can’t breathe. Later, I dream of being dead, rotting inside my sleeping bag. I startle awake from it at the noise of banging on the door. The clock says I’ve overslept.
“Police!” a chorus of voices, like soldiers at my school play last year.
Before I can unzip the bag, they burst in.
“Leave my boy alone,” Ma’s voice is braying. Not smooth like when she hawks kueh at the stall.
Hands hold me down when I struggle, my back creaks the way it did under Pa’s knuckles. After a while, I give in. Even want to thank them. For sure the place they are taking me can’t stink like this.
I must hide from Ma, get hold of my man-in-skirts, run far with him, far away, find the City of Angels. It’s got to be someplace out there.
Brief Interview
Deva Eveland: I can imagine this being inspired by an actual event, but I don’t want to presume. What kind of research, observation and writerly obsessions went into the writing of this piece?
Damyanti Biswas: You’re right, this story was inspired by a news item about a man who had lived with the bodies of his dead parents for years.
When writing this piece, I remember reading up about hoarding, about the abuse of children, about funeral practices. Then the narrator’s voice took over, and I went with that. I got it read by Singaporean friends to check for authenticity, and corrected goof-ups I’d made—in this particular story I’m an expatriate writing about a Singaporean, and I was hyper-aware and respectful of that. Any remaining errors in the research are entirely mine. I try always to write what interests me and writing a story set in Singapore was a great way to research the country I’ve called home for many years now.
DE: Can you discuss the role that keeping secrets plays in this story? Is it a common theme in your writing?
DB: I find secrets fascinating, especially secrets that could be very damaging once revealed. Now that you mention it, secrets play an important role in my debut crime novel, You Beneath Your Skin, and a few other short stories as well. Hard to write crime stories without secrets! Secrets are often about shame and guilt—and at the root of all of this is fear. Fear of loss, of suffering, of recrimination.
On the surface, in ‘I don’t want him to smell’ the secret is a decomposing body within an apartment in a tropical climate. The reason behind the secret is deeper. Like most toxic secrets, it involves a family’s shame, guilt, and suffering.
Critical Accompaniment
It’s hard to get through Biswas’s story, “I don’t want him to smell,” without flaring your nostrils at least once. The thing reeks. Not only the putrefying father, whose stench clings to every action and thought of the narrator, but also the sweaty man-in-skirts, the cloying perfumes, the sickly sweet kueh, the barbeque! Concentrated together in the sweltering heat of a Singaporean summer, these smells become something overwhelming. But the effect is not disgust—a word which betrays itself in its origins, meaning “lack of appetite.” No, what makes Biswas’s story work is a tight relationship between appetite and what we usually describe as “disgusting.” The real anxiety, that hangs like a miasma over the story, doesn’t come from the stench. It comes from the possibility that we might like the stench.
Does clean smell like mint, or does it smell like sesame? The answer is neither of course; both are scents that we conventionally understand as “clean.” But there’s an insight here that emerges again and again in Biswas’s story. Smells don’t cancel each other; they build. Mint goes over rotting breath. The boy’s cheap perfume mixes with sex and death, never quite cancelling either out. Biswas takes this ineradicable quality of scent and turns it into something of a virtue, almost a kind of truth. The stench doesn’t lie or disappear; it waits to be sniffed out.
The boy of the story doesn’t want to smell the stench. He tells us right in the title, and later he tells us why: “I want him not to stink, so we can go about our lives.” The boy’s mother takes much the same line on the rot of her relationship: “I do his washing, he buy his food, we don’t see each other, every one happy.” The stink is the problem, and the solution is to look away. But stink isn’t something visual. We have no eyelids to shut against it. It’s deeper, in the body, almost more animal than properly human (note that smell has no substantial art corresponding to it; compare the other senses). In fact, we only tend to notice that we are capable of smelling at all when we inhale something “disgusting.” General opinion seems to be that smell is at best mildly pleasant, and at worst truly revolting. But does smell deserve such a reputation? Are we truly revolted?
The boy, despite his protests, is not revolted. He revels in the stench. His illicit sexual relationship is pictured, fantasized about, almost entirely in terms of scent. He catalogues the items of the house that have absorbed his father’s stench, “chairs, tables, bedsheets, walls, floor, cups and saucers, clothes” (has he been sniffing the walls? the floor?) He inhales his mother’s arousal when she comes home (how attentive). He even dreams of being dead and rotting! It hurts, but he wants more.
The boy is honest when he accuses his mother: “how dare you ask me to think clean thoughts!” This reveals the lie that has sustained them both in a sort of putrid half life. The same lie that leads the mother to leave gifts at the dead father’s door, in a perverse parody of a funeral offering. The mother isn’t praying earnestly for the soul of a dear one dead, but for the return of her old life. The act of leaving a “gift” at the father’s door is an old habit of hers. Continuing this habit, despite the new fact of his death, amounts to saying “yes, you are dead. But why let that change anything?” In place of the funeral gift, which acknowledges a new reality, the mother gives the gift of the same. The hope: if only we turn away, if only we continue the same routines, perhaps something will replace the stench. But the stench only builds.
Moderation, love, and chastity—kueh, thumping, and sex. For Biswas’s characters, the “virtues” are only a feeble defense against the passions, however violent and disgusting they may be. What surges up as waves of nausea are actually attacks of appetite. The nausea is what is avowed, the pleasure is kept to oneself. This ambivalent attitude of the characters—too weak to grapple with their lusts, clinging to routines that barely salvage “life” (is it even worth it?)—condemns them to rot. And only what was once alive can rot.
The point is not that the smell is good. It’s just there. It’s in life, death, a good meal, starvation—and for Biswas, it signals something that can’t be ignored. The animal that shits and fucks, that carries acid in a pouch to break down what it eats, and whose odor is always rising from the gaping mouth to the huffing nose, forced by life to breathe. How make this a man?
—Jack Calder
Damyanti Biswas’s short fiction has been published or is forthcoming at Ambit, Litro, Griffith Review Australia, Pembroke magazine, Atticus Review, and other journals in the USA and UK. She serves as one of the editors of the Forge Literary Magazine. Her debut literary crime novel You Beneath Your Skin was published by Simon & Schuster India in autumn 2019, and optioned for TV adaptation by Endemol Shine.
Cover art by David Huntington
Interview conducted and edited by Deva Eveland
Critical Accompaniment by Jack Calder