Things I Taught to Air

I.

I painted cotton candy clouds with my fingers today. I don’t know why they’re called that. Cotton candy is pink. My clouds were blue and sticky, and when I tried to lick one off, Mother shouted from the kitchen, “Don’t eat paint, it’s not made for your kind of hunger.” The day was loud, expansive, and brilliant: Yadda team defeated yadda team, the cat gave birth to a stillborn, and my mother called her husband. She needs to get her breasts checked, the verandah needs to be cleaned, and her husband should come home. My mother goes on listing the things that she expects to be done. She does this every few days as a ritual, partly out of need, partly out of desperation. I think of it as her grown-up homework list, but homework implies someone will check if you've done it right. No one checks Mother's list. She makes it, she reads it aloud to the air, and then she starts over.

Our kitchen tap won’t stop dripping. I used to try catching the drops on my finger until Mother snapped at me: “Don’t waste water. Or time.” She had found a fix—a thin rubber band to tie around the handle—but never used it. These fixes are also something she kept suggesting throughout her life, but seldom did she put them to use in her own life. I do it now. It's not hard. You twist, stretch, loop. Done. But for now, she sighs when she hears the plinking sounds. Mother carries her umbrella even when the sun is out. “You never know when the day might get worse,” she says. Her umbrella leans near the door like a soldier: scratched, dependable, always ready. Mother never misses work. Not in mango heat, not in puddly monsoon. She teaches at the big, blue college where everything smells of dust and tea leaves. When I was younger, she used to take me there during summer holidays and let me “teach” the empty benches. I would drape her chunni like a saree, hold a chalk stub up to the dusty blackboard, and scold imaginary students. Once, I tried to copy my Maths teacher’s way of sitting: one hip pressed onto the table, the other leg dangling, like she was balancing a thought. I fell, of course. But I decided that my way was better. I always decided that.

The staffroom smelled like cold metal and the particular disappointment of lukewarm tea. Once, I found a thick yellow-paged book in the staffroom. Its pages crinkled like all old things. “Can I take this?” I asked Mother. She said, “Take what you want. Books don’t complain when they’re forgotten.” She was dusting the chalk off her hands, looking at the window, not at me. I don’t know what that means, but I used to say it to my dolls when I used to leave them under the bed.

They taught us nouns in school that year. A noun is a word that names a person, place, thing, or idea. My teacher asked us to list five nouns from our lives. I wrote:

mother

tap

sandwich

umbrella

husband

She circled the last word in red and wrote: “Unclear. Whose husband?” I stared at that red circle for a long time. I wanted to write “my mother’s husband,” but I wasn’t sure that counted as mine too.

Once, Mother and I had sugarcane juice from the college gate. She spilled some on her sari and dabbed it with tissues like it was no big deal. I thought about asking if her breasts still hurt, but didn’t. She hates when I ask questions that make her blink twice. At the grocery shop, the uncle asked her, “Bhaiaji aaye?” and gave her one extra pomegranate. I hate pomegranate. Too many seeds, too much work. Mother said thank you in a voice that sounded like scratching the bottom of a plate. When we came home, I painted more clouds. This time, I added an umbrella floating in the sky. Mother was lying down with her feet on the pillow. Her left ankle twitched like a bug had touched it. I sat near her and watched.

“Are you dreaming?” I asked. She didn’t answer.

“Are you running?” I whispered. Or trying to leave, I didn’t say.

There was a letter tucked into her pillowcase. I peeked at the edge of it. It had my father’s name and a date from months ago. Maybe she reads it at night, or maybe she doesn’t. I think letters are like homework too, something you should respond to but don’t always. I went to the kitchen, fixed the tap again, and poured myself a glass of water. It tasted warm.

Mother made me a sandwich. Two slices of bread, a line of nani’s lemon pickle, and a soft-boiled potato in between. I said I wanted something else, something better. She didn’t respond. At night, I painted again. The clouds were darker now. Purple maybe. Not quite angry. More like sleepy. Her umbrella is still by the door. Her feet are still twitching. My hands still smell like paint and sugarcane. Books don’t complain when they’re forgotten. Maybe mothers don’t either.

II.

I taught To the Lighthouse again today. Third time this semester. It’s what I reach for when I don’t know what to say to my students about memory, about absence, about how we misremember the people we love. I watch them pretend to understand Mrs. Ramsay, but I don’t tell them how sometimes it takes years, decades, to realize that some women carry whole households inside their chests like unspoken oaths. The students look bored and beautiful. They don't know that I still feel ten years old when someone calls my name. I wear sarees to class sometimes, Mother’s old ones. The chiffon one with the small yellow tulips gets the most compliments. No one knows it belonged to a woman who never took a day off and always smelled like a Vim bar.

After class, I took an auto home. Jaipur was dusty and pink, same as always. The auto guy kept blasting the same Kumar Sanu song again and again. I didn’t mind. I didn’t complain. I bought guavas from the fruit stall and didn’t bargain. It reminded me of her. I haven't spoken to Aman in three days. He sent me a photograph of a puddle with birds reflected in it and said, “For the archive of our shared silences.” I didn’t reply. I found romanticising yearning an artificial metamorphosis. I wanted to tell him I was tired, that my life feels like one long intermission—but he already knows.

I haven’t painted clouds in years. Not since I left home, not since I began measuring days by deadlines and caffeine intake, not since I learned that clouds don’t mean the same thing to everyone. To my mother, they meant another day of humid heat, another day of jacked-up auto prices, another day of her umbrella coming in handy. To me, they once looked like dogs or castles or cotton candy. Now, they just look like weather. I live in a flat that leaks on one side. The tap drips. Loudly. I’ve bought three new washers and called the plumber twice. He doesn’t come. I tie a rubber band around the handle like Mother always intended to. It doesn't work either, but it feels familiar. But it’s leaking again. And this time, I don’t have the energy. So I let it plink into the metal bucket, like a broken clock marking time that no longer belongs to anyone. Aman told me to move out of this flat. He thinks the leak is metaphorical. Everything, to him, is either cinema or metaphor. Maybe he’s right. He asks me why I always keep an umbrella in the bag. “It’s 2025,” he says, “weather apps exist.” I just shrug. Some things stay. Some habits outlive the people who made them.

Mother had a way of staying present even when she wasn't. She would peel potatoes in the kitchen while I cried over missed school trips. She would slap me once, then make me lassi. Say something like, “No one cares about your tears till they stain their own clothes.” It sounded cruel then. I write lines like that in my stories now, and reviewers call them poignant. I live alone. I eat cold sandwiches. I forget to check the mail. I keep a book on my nightstand. Thick, yellow-paged, abandoned. I’ve carried it through five apartments. I haven’t read past page 30. I don’t plan to. I just need it to be there. I say things to my students like “Books don’t complain when they’re forgotten,” and they nod, thinking it’s literary. I don’t tell them it’s something Mother once said to me when I found a yellow-paged book in her college staffroom and asked to keep it. I don’t tell them that, for years, I thought ignorance was a kind of mercy.

The truth is, I still dream of her feet twitching in her sleep. Sometimes I dream that she's trying to run, sometimes that she’s dancing. Either way, I can never catch up. I don't know what kind of woman she dreamt of becoming. I never asked. She probably never had time to wonder. But I wonder now, all the time—between lectures, between deadlines, between text messages I don’t answer.

Aman once said, “You wear your longing like a cardigan.” I told him longing keeps me warm. He laughed, but I think he understood. Some nights, I light a candle and sit by the door. Her umbrella is not there, of course. But I imagine it. Leaning. Watching. Waiting for rain or worse. And I wonder, how do we inherit weariness? Not just cheekbones and cooking styles, but the deep tiredness of women who lived too long for others. When I was young, I used to think Mother was always angry. But now I think maybe she was just full. Full of lists, and silence, and missed calls, and sugarcane juice, and sandwiches she made when she was too tired to cook, and the sound of her daughter not understanding her.

I understand her now. Or at least, I try to. Every day. In bits.

Tomorrow, I’ll fix the tap.
Tonight, I’ll sleep with paint under my fingernails.

Somewhere, clouds dry on the canvas, waiting for rain.

About the Author

Rajshree Gautam is a PhD candidate and an Assistant Professor of English based in Jaipur, India. Alongside her academic pursuits, she is an avid reader with 94 unread books waiting on her shelf and a film enthusiast with 273 films on her must-watch list. A self-taught painter and amateur storyteller, she holds a long-term aspiration to move towards filmmaking.