Between eighteenth-century accounts of the Black Hole of Calcutta and contemporary predicaments of breathing in the wake of a global pandemic, the act of breathing (and the conditions necessary for breathing well) has acquired a new intensity. Over this period, neither the body, nor the air being inhaled, has been universally the same. Breathing is not a simple physiological act either, being inflected by social and political relations. Thus, when differently situated bodies meet with diversely saturated airs, a colonial, gendered, and racialized politics of breathing emerges. It is this history of differently vulnerable bodies and variously toxic airs that I write of in this essay, paying attention to the question of ventilation of homes, and to the space of the zenana (women’s quarters) and the kitchen, in colonial India.