Arya Sora talks about her grandmother's house, the smell of kewra water on summer afternoons, and the decade it took to translate memory into a molecule.
Arya Sora does not talk about her childhood home in the past tense. She describes it in the present — the courtyard, the well, the kitchen doorway, the prayer room with its brass lamps — as though she is standing inside it right now. In a sense, she is.
"Memory is not a photograph," she says, sitting in the Room of Sora studio in Bandra West. "It is a smell. And I spent ten years trying to find the molecules that would unlock a room I could no longer enter."
The haveli is in a neighbourhood of old Jaipur, a few lanes from the walled city. It has been in her family for four generations. Her grandmother — Sora-nani, as she is known in the family — ran it with the particular authority of a woman who understood that a house was a living thing that required daily feeding. Floors were washed with water and neem leaves. Brass was polished with tamarind. In summer, kewra water — distilled from the pandanus flower — was added to drinking water, to the floor wash, occasionally to a pan of heated water left in the corner of a room to scent the air.
"Memory is not a photograph. It is a smell. And I spent ten years trying to find the molecules that would unlock a room I could no longer enter."
"That smell," Arya says, "kewra in a hot room in June — I cannot describe it to you in words. It is the smell of being safe. It is the smell of someone being in charge. I don't even know if I liked it at the time. I know I didn't notice it at the time. You never notice the smells of home until they're gone."
She left Jaipur at 17 for a design degree in Mumbai, then a stint in London, then back to Mumbai for work. The haveli went to extended family after her grandmother's death in 2016. By 2018, Arya was living in a two-bedroom flat in Andheri that she describes as 'smelling of nothing, or worse, of the building's cleaning products.'
She began experimenting almost by accident. A friend gave her a perfumery kit — fragrance oil concentrates in small bottles, a set of blotters, a simple mixing guide. She spent a weekend trying to reconstruct the kewra-summer-room smell. She failed. Then she went looking for why she had failed, which led her to Kannauj, which led her to a perfumer named Rashida who had been making attars for 35 years, which led, eventually, to an experimental formulation called Kewra Morning. This was an early working name, not a fragrance in the current collection. The six launch fragrances are The White Room, The Amber Room, The Velvet Room, The Noir Room, The Rose Room, and The Oud Room.
The process took two years from that first weekend to a formulation she was willing to share. 'The problem with trying to recreate a memory,' she says, 'is that the memory is not exact. I thought kewra smelled like safety. But when I smelled pure kewra absolute, it was too sharp, too green. The kewra in my grandmother's house was diluted, softened by heat and by the other smells around it — the mustard oil in the kitchen, the brass in the prayer room, the dust in the courtyard. So I had to recreate the context, not just the note.'
The experimental Kewra Morning formulation explored, in addition to kewra absolute: a trace of dry mustard, vetiver for the earthen-floor quality of the courtyard, a frankincense resin note for the prayer room's lamps, and a top note of crushed green leaf that approximates the neem-water floor wash. These prototype notes do not describe any of the six launch fragrances. Together they explored something that is not, strictly speaking, a smell — it is a room.
"I could not go back to that house," Arya says. "So I made it portable."
Room of Sora
