Book Title: Hot Water
Author: Bhavika Govil
Publisher: Fourth Estate India
Number of Pages: 256
ISBN: 978-9365690354
Date Published: Apr. 11, 2025
Price: INR 400
Book Excerpt
MIRA
Pages 117-118
Some days Ma is like a butterfly. She is flying from room to room. She is running from home to office. She is going out for dinner and making us clean the house fast fast. She plays the globe game and the how-was-your-day game and the guessing game and all the games in the world one can play. She is shiny and colourful and her eyes are bright. She reads ten books at a time and moves so fast that she is like superwoman, and I have to say Maa stop! I can’t see you! but she is flying everywhere and can’t stop, won’t stop.
But some days, like today, Ma is a moth. She is black, she is dark. She still moves from home to office and school but she moves slowly. She looks a little bit like me and Ashu in the morning when we’re sleepy, except I don’t think Ma is sleepy.
Ma is just sluggish. She sits still in her bed for hours and watches the TV even though the TV is not working properly. Maybe Ma doesn’t even need a TV to work to watch it. She just has to think of the movie name that she wants to watch and it goes pop! and starts playing inside her head. That’s because she is bigger and has also seen many more movies than me. So that’s why she can watch them in her head, that’s the rule. I want a TV head too. Sometimes I imagine twisting my hair up like an antenna reaching the sky so that I can catch the signal, but sooner rather than later my ponytail falls, and no TV comes.
On the days that Ma is not Madame Butterfly but is Sire Moth, she is smelly. She doesn’t take a bath and doesn’t put on perfume from the small bottle that fits in the palm of her hand and makes her smell like honey. She doesn’t tell me and Ashu to take a bath either, which I don’t mind, especially on those days that it’s so cold outside that our teeth go brrrrrrrrr.
She doesn’t say anything to Ashu when he shakes his leg under the dining table so much that it feels like the earth is quaking around us. She doesn’t even say anything to me when I make my hair wet from the tap and shape it all spiky like the top of a pineapple.
She picks up a book and forgets to flip the page. She takes us to school but forgets to turn the wheel. Sometimes she even forgets to cook, but Ashu knows how to make a yummy cheese sandwich—with corners cut the way I like it—and he makes one for himself and one for me for school. If I start to get worried and cry about Ma and her Moth Days, he says shush, puts one arm around me and tells me to wait. Don’t worry, silly, he says. Wait for a couple of days.
He is right. Ma’s Moth Days only stay for a while. No one knows when and why they come. But we know they always go.
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Excerpted with permission from Hot Water by Bhavika Govil, published by Fourth Estate India.
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