A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 404

From the exporter came the rancid smell of copra and the heavy smell of sacked sugar, a smell quite different from the fetid, sweet smell of the sugar factories and buffalo ponds Mr Biswas remembered from his boyhood. From the importer came the many-accented smell of pungent spices. From the road came the many-accented smell of pungent spices. From the road came the smell of dust, straw, the urine and droppings of horses, donkeys and mules. At every impediment the gutters  had developed a wrinkled film of scum, as white as the skin on boiled milk, with a piercing, acrid smell, which, blended  and heated  by the afternoon sun, rose suffocatingly from the road and pursued Mr Biswas as he turned off into the sudden black shadow of an archway between the tenement and the exporter's.