Aroma

If you were a person in Asia with a habit of frequently catching cold, chances are that Axe oil is your great friend. Unless you are one of those who prefers the Vicks inhaler, that is. I belong to the former category. What was once a relief during cold, gradually morphed into something that I used to avoid motion sickness. Given that I travel over 2 hours every day, and Bengaluru’s roads have the habit of not being straight for more than a kilometer and a half inside the city, a vial of Axe oil stays inside my bag always. One fine day, I use it on the way to office and shove it into the side pouch where all last minute things and generally my earphones go(think of it as a low latency cache, #selfthoo).
Bengaluru’s weather is nice unanimously if you’re from a place that has both extremes of weather. But if you’re from a place like Chennai, where the seasons are Summer, more Summer and 11/10 Summer, Bengaluru’s winters will bear the curses that you hurl at it for making you shiver. Accompanying your shivering is the coconut oil bottle’s irritating habit of freezing up. That’s what happened to one of the roommates at the Madiwala house. Except that, roommate is insistent on oiling his hair that weekend day. Roommate goes to kitchen to heat the oil up, except that he holds the bottle too close to the stove :D 
The bottom of the bottle melts slightly with oil oozing out of the newly created deformation. Roommate grabs one of the unused measuring cups they give with Surf excel(the only other regularly bought provision other than coconut oil at the Madiwala house). 
Hacks being hacks, in this case, the bottle’s width being small enough to fit inside the cup, but the length tall enough to tip over the bottle and cup placed on the study table(Is it even morally justifiable to call it, that? Although it sounds better than “Temporary shoving open area” ). 
My earphones also being one of the occupants of the temporary shoving open area, becomes a candidate for an oil massage. I try to rub it off using paper and my own oil deprived hair, but the flavor on the oil(oh yes! Did I tell you it was flavored oil?) is too strong. Meh, I didn’t care as long as it was working. 
Fast forward to Monday morning, and as usual after I board the cab, I take out my vial of Axe oil, take a pinch drop of it, only for my nose to curse at the pungent nonsense that was the aroma of Axe oil’s eucalyptus, pudina and coconut oil’s fragrant flavor all mixed up. It surely didn’t help with the motion sickness, I can tell you that.
If you’ve read till this, thank you for that. I’ll just leave you with a moral- don’t fucking heat a plastic coconut oil bottle over a gas stove.