The longer you live in Bali, the more you’ll become either immune to or more tuned-in to the gamut of smells that the island has to offer. Ceremony times, in particular, will open up your nostrils to a whole new nasal experience, ranging from the smell of the blood of a slaughtered animal through to the mesmerizing aroma of thousands of incense sticks.
As I said in the previous issue, Balinese people put ‘smelly things’ into particular categories. Sure, in English the word ‘fragrant’, for example, always means something that smells good; but to describe most other smells we just use adjectives that cover broad categories. An odour just means a bad smell to an English speaker, and to describe a sweaty smell we have to create a compound word: ‘body-odour’. In Balinese they have a specific word for this: ngaas. The smell of fish, blood or raw meat also has its own particular terminology: angit. This word is dying out though, with more and more people using the Indonesian word, ‘amis’, which is normally used to describe a fishy smell. Whilst Balinese is alive and well today, the future of some of the words seems less and less certain as the years pass. This becomes painfully clear when you ask young people about words as common as smells.
Puun is the word you use when something’s burning, normally preceded by the word ‘mebo’ meaning ‘smells’. Puun is not used for incense, however; these are always ‘nyangluh’, meaning ‘fragrant’. You can use ‘puun’ when you smell the all-too-common smell of burn-offs that cover Bali island in a blanket of smoke in the late afternoon.
A ‘smell word’ that surprised me a bit is ‘piing’ which refers categorically to stale oil or oil that has gone off. I personally didn’t even realise that oil could go off – shows how much time I spend in the kitchen…
