The half wet and half dry clothes on a clothesline in the mid morning, the strong smell of cheap incense with the mild glow of fire at the tip of its stick from a neighbourhood convenience store right after the golden hour, and the home where grandmothers with oiled and neatly combed hair chat away the time in the evenings. In all of these three sensorial affairs, there is a permanent discipline working against the temporariness of life.I live in a coastal small-town in Tamil Nadu. Most houses here have sprawling or humble backyards for clotheslines so it is rare for me to come by one walking across the street. I don’t know if this is why I’m drawn towards fresh laundry drying under the mid morning sun in the balcony of buildings with worn facades when I go to cities. I have a huge fascination for Art Deco buildings and seeing a string of drying clothes in the first floor of a curvilinear balcony absorbs me to it. I’m an avid watcher of drying laundry and I keep distinct memories of where and when I saw one and what aroused my senses there. A very fond memory is from a recent episode.A few months back I was in Bombay for a work trip. I was meeting a friend in Dadar on a working day at 11 am, whose grandparents were from there. So, his memories and knowledge of the neighbourhood are both personal and rare. He promised to walk me around the neighbourhood a month before, when I was planning this trip. He is also an occasional walk leader for a private group of individuals with an eye for art, music and urban life. As a musician and vocal artist himself, he shared stories from 1960s Dadar when families hosted private mehfils with visitors hopping from one house to another, sometimes watching from the windows too. Dadar is also a hotspot of Deco houses in the city; windows and balconies contain in them what people call an ‘old world charm’. But my attraction for Deco buildings comes from the fact that I grew up in one such house.That day, we started from a cafe and circumambulated Shivaji park. As both of us were walking parallel to each other, I was not looking into my friend’s face. Instead, the visuals to the fantastic aurals about Dadar to me were the clotheslines of the buildings we were passing by. I was folding each story he shared together with the visual of drying clothes from a certain balcony in my mind’s eye. To be present there physically, enjoying the view of a balcony of colourful clothes stringed together, listening to the history of the neighbourhood, may sound meaningless for many. But to me it was equal to bearing witness to someone else’s domesticity. The walk ended at the end of the afternoon, by dunking a naram pao (soft bread) into a cup of chai at Light of Bharat cafe.If drying laundry of the urban mornings visually captivates me, the smell of incense from the tiniest altar space of a neighbourhood convenience store, just when the sun dips when no one notices, holds an intense olfactory delight. Convenience stores or maligai kadai as we call them in Tamil in the evenings instil in me a sense of restart. Mostly these shops are counter front and rarely allow you to walk in by creating a narrow aisle flanked with packets of dosa batter, dish wash scrubs, sachets of shampoos that flow from the top in a free fall, and glossy vegetables atop the wilted ones kept hidden. Unlike the mornings, where the smell is the smorgasbord of rice and thick detergent soaps together with super processed packets of flour, noodles, masalas and plastic pails, in the evenings, it is the smell of the live incense that pierces through your nostrils before you smell anything else.There is one last thing I enjoy participating in. The evenings of my grandmother. I grew up and continue to live with my maternal grandmother. In the evenings, her sisters, one septuagenarian and one octogenarian, meet in our house. I call this my grandmother’s congregational evenings – a majlis of sorts. The day’s grocery prices, new and old gossip of the neighbourhood, the achievements of their relatives in the diaspora are dragged in, dusted and discussed. But what stands out to me from these evenings is the way in which these old women come neatly dressed and freshly combed. They don’t take the short one hour gathering with their own siblings for granted. It teaches me to practice permanence in the temporary.Sumaiya Mustafa is a writer and culinary ethnographer with interests in culture, tastes and human stories.We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.Read the series here.