ZZ DUPLICATE — safe to delete (use /scents-of-india)

India is the most fragrant country on earth, and you cannot buy a candle that smells like it. The shelf reads vanilla, lavender, fresh linen, sea breeze — a scent vocabulary borrowed whole from somewhere else.

So we went and found nine places instead. Jasmine outside a Madurai temple before dawn. Coconut and lemongrass on a backwater path in the afternoon. Naag champa in a Puri courtyard, burning long enough to be in the stone.

We are not perfumers. We are cartographers — we map India by what it smells like, one place at a time, and every candle names its place before it names a feeling.

Nine places to begin. There is a whole country left.