"The Museum Smelled Like Bleach"
Words by Mysha Manaal Taj
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Recommended Reads:
The Museum Smelled Like Bleach
On the Sterile Silence of Museums in India and the Grief They Don’t Let Us Feel.
I. The Museum Smelled Like Bleach
That was the first thing I noticed, before the Mughal miniatures, before the soundless footsteps of schoolchildren in socks, before the domes and chandeliers and silence. Not the scent of varnished wood or oxidized bronze or jasmine-scented dust that might have once clung to a Rani’s letter or a scholar’s scroll. Not even the smell of old paper or forgotten metal. Just bleach, sterile, sharp, clinical.
Someone had scrubbed history clean. Disinfected the dead. Wiped the fingerprints off memory.
We had come, apparently, to remember. But all we were given was a silence heavy with something close to mourning, not personal, not profound, just performance.
In museums I had visited in my country, I remember the marble floor being cooler than the air. I remember the velvet ropes and bored guards and artifacts locked behind thick glass like patients in quarantine. I remember beauty. So much of it. Persian rugs, ivory carvings, Chinese porcelain, French clocks, an 18th century dagger still glinting like betrayal. Everything beautiful. Everything untouched. Everything unloved.
And yet, I wanted to leave.
Not because I was bored, but because the building didn’t want me to stay. It was too quiet. Not sacred quiet, sterile quiet. A silence you couldn’t sit in. A silence that didn’t invite reverence or memory or rage. Just compliance. Like grief that had been carefully curated, labeled, boxed, and archived.
There are no ghosts in Indian museums. Only shadows with nameplates.
It’s strange how even beauty, when embalmed, becomes unbearable.