The Perfume Maker

Bi Farida makes perfumes.

Not the cheap oils sold to tourists—real perfumes. Custom blends for Zanzibar's oldest families. She sources ingredients from Arabia, India, the forests of the mainland. A single bottle costs more than most people earn in a month.

My bride's family has commissioned a scent for me.

"A wedding gift," her mother explained. "So you always smell like a man worthy of our daughter."

Bi Farida's workshop smells of a thousand things at once.

Oud and amber, jasmine and rose, musk and sandalwood. She's sixty, heavy in her silk wrapper—two-fifty-five of aromatic authority. Her fingers are stained from decades of mixing.

"You're the groom," she says, studying me. "Hamza bin Said. The coffee trader's son."

"Yes."

"Sit." She gestures to a cushion. "The process takes hours. We begin with your essence."

"My essence?"

"Every person has a unique scent. I must find yours before I can enhance it." She moves closer. "Remove your shirt."

She smells me.

No other way to describe it. She leans close and inhales—my neck, my chest, my arms. Her nose traces my skin like a finger.

"Cedar," she murmurs. "And something darker. Soil, perhaps. The earth after rain."

"Is that good?"

"It's you." She writes in a small book. "Now. I need you to work. Sweat. Let your body reveal more."

"Work how?"

"There are weights in the corner. Lift them. Let me smell you at exertion."

I lift. She smells.

"There. The musk comes out. And something spicy—like ginger, but warmer." She nods. "Good. Now I need the rest."

"The rest?"

"Your full essence. All of you." She sets down her book. "Remove everything."

"Bi Farida—"

"This is the process. The intimate areas carry the strongest scent markers. A perfume that doesn't account for them is incomplete." She waits. "Unless you want a half-finished gift for your bride."

I remove everything.

She's clinical about it—at first. Her nose moves across my body, cataloguing. My thighs. My groin. The places I've never let a stranger smell.

"Strong musk here," she notes. "And pheromones. Your bride will appreciate these." She looks up. "But they're dormant now. I need them active."

"Active?"

"Aroused." She says it matter-of-factly. "The scent changes with desire. I need to capture that as well."

She arouses me.

Her hand, clinical at first, then less so. She strokes slowly, observing my body's responses.

"There. The scent is changing. Deepening." She inhales. "This is what I need."

"This seems—"

"Unorthodox? It is. The best perfumes always are." She doesn't stop stroking. "Your bride will smell this on you and think of pleasure. That's the goal."

"By pleasuring me yourself?"

"By knowing what you smell like at your peak." She moves faster. "I've been doing this for forty years. Every great man in Zanzibar wears my scent. Every one of them was made this way."

I shouldn't let her continue.

But her hand is skilled, her voice is calm, and the idea that my wedding perfume requires this—it's absurd and arousing and impossible to refuse.

"There," she says as I approach the edge. "I can smell it now. The final note. The climax."

I come in her hand.

She immediately raises her fingers to her nose.

"Perfect. Sandalwood and musk, with high notes of sea salt." She wipes her hand, writes in her book. "This will be a magnificent perfume."

The perfume takes three weeks.

She calls me back twice—for more testing, she says. For refinement. Each time, she brings me to completion, smelling the changes in my scent.

"The aroused notes need multiple captures," she explains. "For accuracy."

The third time, she does more than capture.

"The perfume is almost complete," she says.

We're in her workshop, late evening. The bottles and oils surround us, their combined scent overwhelming.

"But I've discovered something. Your scent needs to be mixed on skin. Real skin." She begins unwrapping herself. "Mine."

"Bi Farida—"

"The old perfumers knew. The best blends are created through intimacy. The oils on my body, mixed with the essence of yours." She lies on the cushions, massive and naked, bottles of oil beside her. "Come. Let's create your wedding scent properly."

I mix perfume on her body.

She guides me—oil here, oil there, then my skin against hers to blend them. Her heavy breasts become mixing bowls. Her belly becomes a palette. The space between her thighs becomes where the deepest notes combine.

"Inside me," she instructs. "The final mixing. Where the perfume truly melds."

I slide into her—sixty years old, the finest perfume maker in Zanzibar—and we mix scents I've never imagined.

"Yes—there—I can smell it combining—"

The perfume is extraordinary.

My bride's family weeps at its beauty. My bride herself can't stop breathing me in. The scent makes her desperate for me.

"What's in this?" she asks on our wedding night.

"Secrets," I tell her. "Old recipes."

She doesn't need to know whose body mixed them.

I return to Bi Farida monthly.

"For adjustments," I tell my wife. "The scent needs seasonal changes."

In the workshop, the perfume maker welcomes me.

"Time for more mixing," she says.

We mix until the oils are exhausted.

Manukato.

Perfume.

Created on skin.

Blended in secret.