Rindu
There is a word for it here. English has to borrow, or explain, or give up. And the sense that speaks it best has no words at all.
Say it out loud and it already sounds like what it means. Rindu. Two soft syllables that end without closing, the way the feeling does. It is usually translated as longing, or missing, and both translations are true and both are thin. Missing is an absence noticed. Rindu is an absence inhabited.
It is not sad, exactly. That is the part the translations lose. You can rindu with tenderness, even with a kind of pleasure, the way you press a bruise on purpose. It has a direction: there is always a someone, a somewhere, a when. And it arrives on its own schedule, unannounced, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, usually carried in by something small. A song on a shop radio. The particular grey of a sky before rain.
Or a smell, which is what this essay is about, eventually.
Missing is an absence noticed. Rindu is an absence you live inside.
Every language that felt this had to invent a word
And almost none of them can lend it to another. Tap them.
Look at that list and notice what it is doing. Six cultures, six climates, six centuries of separate weather, and each one arrived at the same difficult feeling and had to build a room for it inside their language. The feeling is universal. Only the word is local.
Indonesian built two rooms. Kangen is the everyday one, warm, domestic, spoken at the door. Rindu is the one with the window in it. Rindu goes into poems. It is the word you use when a small ache has been given some dignity, and it carries an idea that English resists: that missing someone is not a malfunction of the heart. It is the heart doing exactly what it was built to do, in the only way it knows how, which is to keep the shape of what is gone.
Cinema has spent a century trying to photograph this word
Film keeps failing at rindu in the most beautiful way possible, which is to say it keeps finding new places to put the failure. It cannot show you the feeling, so it shows you what people do with their hands while they have it.
Two neighbours in a cramped Hong Kong apartment building discover that their spouses are having an affair with each other. They rehearse the confrontation they will never have. They eat noodles alone on the same stairs at different hours. They are never together and never apart, and the film is made almost entirely of corridors, of the space between two people who have decided, out of a terrible politeness, not to become what they already are.
At the end, years later, he goes to Angkor Wat, finds a hollow in the ancient stone, whispers his secret into it, and seals the hole with mud. That is the most exact image of rindu ever filmed. You do not get to say it. You do not get to keep it. So you put it somewhere old and quiet, and you cover it over, and you leave, and it stays there, saying itself, forever, without you.
A heartbroken policeman buys tinned pineapple that expires on a particular day, one tin a day, as if grief could be given a shelf life and a deadline, as if you could schedule the end of an ache the way you schedule a dentist. It does not work. Nothing expires on the day it is supposed to. The joke is tender because everyone has tried this: the arbitrary date, the last message, the rule about the drawer you will not open until Sunday.
A Russian poet, homesick in Italy for a country he cannot return to, promises to carry a lit candle from one end of a drained thermal pool to the other without letting it go out. The wind takes it. He goes back and starts again. He shields it with his coat, with his hand, with his whole ruined body, and he walks slowly across the empty basin, and if it goes out he simply returns to the beginning and starts once more.
No one is watching. It accomplishes nothing. It is the purest thing anyone has ever filmed about longing: a small flame, protected with your entire life, carried across an empty space, for a promise made to someone who will never know whether you kept it.
An ocean planet reads a man’s memory and gives him his dead wife back, made of his own longing. She is warm. She speaks. She is not her, and she knows it, and the horror of the film is not that she is a copy but that his memory of her was always a copy too, and now he is trapped inside it.
Keep this one nearby if you ever try to recreate a scent from your childhood exactly. Rindu cannot be satisfied by an accurate reproduction. It is not a request for the object. It is a relationship with its absence.
Three women on a cold island argue about Orpheus, who was told he could lead his wife out of the underworld if he did not look back, and who looked back. Was it weakness? One of them offers another reading: that he chose the memory of her over the woman, that he made the poet’s choice rather than the lover’s.
And then the film ends by proving it. A face in a concert hall, held for a very long time, remembering. Everything she has left of the other woman is what it does to her to remember, and the film argues, quietly and devastatingly, that this is not nothing. It is a form of having.
Two childhood friends, separated by an ocean and twenty-four years, walk to the corner of a street in New York and wait for her car to come. They wait in silence. Everything that could have been a life is standing between them on the pavement, in a coat, saying nothing. Then the car arrives, and she goes back into the house where her husband is, and only then does she cry.
The film gives the feeling a name, inyeon, and refuses to promise anything by it. Some people are yours in one life and not in this one. Rindu is the invoice for that arrangement, and it is always paid in full.
A boy takes a train through a snowstorm to see a girl he loves, and the train is delayed, and delayed, and the film simply sits with him in the carriage while the hours pass, and something ends without anyone deciding it. Years later he crosses a level crossing, the train passes between them, and when it clears she is gone, and he walks on.
Shinkai returned to the same wound in Your Name and found the worse version of it. Not the missing, but the forgetting of what you miss: two people waking with tears they cannot explain and a name on the tip of the tongue that will not come. That is the real terror inside rindu. Not the ache. The day the ache cannot remember who it belongs to.
And then there is ours, which no foreign film on this list can replace, because it is written in the grammar we actually use. A boy who reads Chairil Anwar, a girl who is not supposed to like him, a book lent and not returned, and then a departure with no proper goodbye.
The sequel arrives fourteen years later, in real years, on real faces, and finds them in Yogyakarta, and everything is polite, and everything is unbearable, because the whole film is two adults being extremely careful around a wound that is old enough to vote. That is a very Indonesian way to long for someone: quietly, courteously, in the presence of friends, with poetry doing all the shouting.
A man with a supernatural nose decides that a smell can be captured, owned, distilled, kept. He kills to do it. He succeeds, technically, and the success destroys him, because what he wanted was never the molecules.
It is the necessary counter-argument to everything a perfume house does. You cannot possess a scent memory. You can only be visited by it. The man who tries to own the ghost ends up with the chemistry and none of the haunting.
Why smell speaks this language and words do not
Notice what every one of those films had to do. Not one of them explains the feeling. They hand you an object, a candle, a tin, a hole in a wall, a train, and let the object do the work, because the feeling itself cannot be said, only pointed at.
Smell has the same problem and the same gift. There is no vocabulary for an odour; we can only say what it is like, which is to say we can only compare it to a memory. That is not a poverty of language. It is a fact about the wiring. Smell is the sense that goes almost directly into the old parts of the brain, the ones that handle emotion and memory, arriving before the part of you that names things has had a chance to look up. Which is why a scent can put you in tears on a Tuesday morning in a lift, three seconds before you understand which year you are standing in.
Rindu behaves in exactly the same way. It is involuntary. It does not ask. You cannot decide to feel it, and you cannot decide to stop. And you cannot summon a smell in your imagination the way you can summon a face or a tune: try it now, try to conjure the smell of your grandmother’s house, and you will find you can recall everything about it except the thing itself. It will not come when called. It comes when it wants to, and then it is total.
Two things in this life refuse to be summoned and refuse to be dismissed. A smell, and a longing. They are the same weather.
There is an old image for this at the beginning of the great Sufi poem, where a reed flute is played and its music is described as the crying of the reed, cut from the reed bed, singing about separation. Every note is homesickness. It is not a metaphor that ages. It is why the blue note exists in jazz, a pitch bent slightly away from the true one, sounding wrong on purpose, sounding like something remembered rather than something present. Music invented longing as a harmonic device. Perfume, if it is any good, does it with materials.
A local catalogue of the ache
Because rindu is not abstract. In this country it has a very specific list of smells, and everybody’s list overlaps with everybody else’s, which is how you know it is a culture and not just a mood.
Notice that not one of these is a perfume. That is the point. Perfumery does not invent this vocabulary, it inherits it, and every serious composition is in conversation with a list like this one, whether it admits it or not.
What a perfume can and cannot do
It cannot bring the person back. Let us be honest about the size of this failure, because a house that sells beautiful bottles has an obvious interest in overstating what they are for.
A perfume cannot return your grandmother. It cannot rebuild the house with the woven bamboo walls. It cannot undo an airport, or a fourteen year silence, or a train that left. Anyone who tells you a fragrance is a time machine is selling you a candle and calling it a candle factory.
Here is what it can do, and it is not small.
It can build a door. It can put a shape in the air so exact, so unfairly specific, that the part of you which is still eight years old walks through it without asking permission, and for about four seconds you are in the room, and the room is warm, and everyone in it is alive. Then you are back, holding a bottle, on a Tuesday. And the strange thing, the thing that took us a long time to accept, is that you will want to do it again.
That is the whole trade. Not possession, which is what the man in Perfume wanted and what destroyed him. Visitation. You do not get to keep it. You get to be visited by it, and to keep the visits.
A perfume cannot return the person. It can return you, briefly, to the room where they were.
Do not cure it
There is a certain kind of advice, very popular and very confident, which treats longing as a fault to be fixed. Move on. Let go. Do not dwell. It is offered kindly and it misunderstands almost everything.
Rindu is not a wound. It is a receipt. It is the proof that something mattered enough to leave a hole shaped exactly like itself, and the hole is the last honest record you have of the thing. To cure the longing you would have to erase the person, and there is a film about that too, in which two people scrub each other out of their memories and then, being who they are, walk straight back into it, knowing precisely what it will cost, because a life without the ache is not the same life with the pain removed. It is a smaller life, with a person missing from it.
So we do not recommend the cure. We recommend the opposite: keep the door. Wear the scent that opens it. Let it come on a Tuesday and take its four seconds and go. This is the sanest possible use of a beautiful thing.
It is also, for what it is worth, the name of this house. Harum oleh memori. Fragrance, through memory. Not fragrance instead of it. Not fragrance as a cure for it. Through it, the way light comes through a window that somebody left open in a room you no longer live in.
“You do not get to keep it. You get to be visited by it, and to keep the visits.”
- In the Mood for Love (2000) and Chungking Express (1994), Wong Kar-wai.
- Nostalghia (1983) and Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky.
- Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Céline Sciamma.
- Past Lives (2023), Celine Song.
- 5 Centimeters per Second (2007) and Your Name (2016), Makoto Shinkai.
- Ada Apa dengan Cinta? (2002), Rudy Soedjarwo, and Ada Apa dengan Cinta? 2 (2016), Riri Riza.
- Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), Tom Tykwer, after the novel by Patrick Süskind.
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Michel Gondry, for the argument against the cure.
- On the words: saudade, hiraeth, Sehnsucht, toska, natsukashii, inyeon. On the reed, the opening of Rumi’s Masnavi.