The Smell of Death
Tania Rashid
Word Count 622
They had us walk into the room where Aunty lay. Her body was rigid, hands crossed, skin yellowed under the cold light. Two nights back she'd texted me that she was feeling unwell—not to worry, she insisted. Now she was arranged in an oak-brown casket. Her eyelids were half-open, as if caught in an unfinished thought.
I pressed my palm against her chest. In an instant, the smell—the thick, chemical-sweet breath of death, sour and intimate, wormed its way up into my throat. I almost gagged. The mortuary and everything in it dissolved, peeled away. Instead, I was standing somewhere else. Not here, but back across the ocean, years ago. The smallest change in the air could still unsettle me; my chest tightened as the heat crept up through my ribcage.
Suddenly, I was at the site of the Bangladesh Rana Plaza collapse in April of 2013. The worst garment factory disaster in modern history. Over a thousand dead, mostly young women, pressed together in the dirt and dust after the eight-story building gave in and folded onto itself.
At Al Jazeera English, I’d just started. They sent me out to cover it, replacing Jay Khan—their big name reporter, blacklisted by the Bangladeshi government for criticizing the wrong people.
Jay looked tense as he explained what I was allowed to do. “For security reasons, you’ll stay off-camera. Voice only. No public credit,” he announced, barely glancing up from his phone. “Doha approved this arrangement.” I nodded, repeating his rules in my head. Only much later did I realize how deliberate it was: he made sure there was a ceiling over me, claimed it was for my protection. But even with those limits, the Rana Plaza story changed my standing at the network.
Jay’s driver picked me up with his producer Salim, and camera operator Shaon. The car jerked for an hour down roads that got rougher as we went. When I finally opened the door, I didn’t watch my step—I landed ankle-deep in a gutter of sticky blood. Salim reached for my arm and guided me out. We climbed a narrow staircase in the building next door, looking for a vantage point. From above, the devastation was clear. Limbs, desperate and limp, dangled from gaps in the concrete. Some bodies were broken, others still alive, their cries rising from underneath the rubble. There were no fire fighters in sight. Civilians threw ropes and reached in bare-handed, pulling survivors and the dead out from the piles. That was the only sign of hope I saw in the mess.
But what stayed with me, past the images and the noise, was the smell. A dense, rotten-sweetness that never faded. For a month, I couldn’t get free of it. I breathed it in the air as I worked. It haunted restaurants, clung to my food and my clothes even when they tried to disguise it with cheap, rose-scented spray. The odor soaked into everything, dense and persistent. It refused to leave.
That memory was here again, sharper than ever, overtaking the intimacy of this moment. My PTSD flaring up as I stood in front of Aunty’s casket, trying to keep myself steady. I learned once that your body remembers things your mind tries to put away. Today, that memory took over.
I stood next to my friend as she cried for her mother. Something old and silent inside me surfaced. The smell pressed in from all sides, not just hers, but the idea of death itself. Old, honest, impossible to ignore. I thought I’d made my peace with it long ago, but it found me again—here, in Los Angeles, and in the quiet, it felt just as raw
Tania is a journalist, educator, and memoirist based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on PBS NewsHour, NBC News, Al Jazeera English, VICE News, CNN International, National Geographic Channel, among other outlets . She tells stories of identity and intergenerational trauma through a deeply investigative lens.An Emmy nominee and recipient of multiple journalism awards, Tania has earned grants from the International Women’s Media Foundation and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. She has presented at the Women in the World Media Summit with Tina Brown and guest lectured at the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Ohio University. A member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and the South Asian Journalists Association, Tania mentors incarcerated women through the Prison Journalism Project, helping them share their stories.Tania is currently writing her debut hybrid memoir, Where the Truth Took Me,chronicling her path to becoming an investigative journalist while exploring herdiagnosis of Complex PTSD, identity, and inherited trauma. When she is not writing, Tania enjoys teaching barre and hot yoga, gardening, and doting on herone-eyed pup, Sadie.