Tara Isabel Zambrano
Three stories
The Sound of Loss Goes Deep into the Earth
The day Babri Mosque in North Central India is demolished, I realize I’m pregnant. The television in my dorm community hall is a blaring horn of Hindu activists at the demolition site in Ayodhya, about 900 kilometers from the university town. Slogans on raised saffron flags, bandanas with OM written on them. They are shouting, Ram, Ram, and it does not sound holy, but like a warning sign that anything can happen. Back in my room, I make a mental note of my last menstrual cycle—two weeks late. I press my stomach. It bounces back with a light flab and roundness to it. Or maybe I am looking too hard at it. When I step in the corridor, a girl rushes past announcing that the city is under curfew until dawn. Our zip code area has a mix of Hindu and Muslim families and there’s a possibility of a riot breakout.
My eyes cast out of the window, my mind elsewhere. The streets are deserted except a body of winter fog under the streetlights until a series of vehicles with police sirens fill the air with dust and commotion. There’s an announcement in the hallways to assemble in the community hall.
“No one is allowed to go outside,” our hostel warden says, “until the situation is in control.”
“When will that be?” Someone asks.
“I don’t know at this point,” the warden answers and hurries away. Some girls climb the stairs to the fourth-floor terrace to get an overview of the neighborhoods. Now on mute, the TV displays hundreds of Hindu fundamentalists standing next to the debris that was a place for prayer in another century, an artifact of history. I glance at the bright red Hindu thread on my wrist, something my mother tied before I left home for college. My tummy rumbles, my palm is glazed with sweat.
Staring at the calendar, I try to remember when we fucked last. Was it in that unfinished, abandoned building behind our favorite restaurant? My back scratched against the exposed brick wall while your feet slid on the sand while trying to stay in a position. Our whispers and moans boomeranged off the roof and rose as dust. Was it the cheap motel with a shitty bed, next to the bus depot far away from our university? Was it because I inhaled all your lust sitting twenty feet away from you in a Robotics class?
During the day, the city opens for several hours, so I request the gatekeeper to send a message to you. In the next hour, we are outside a clinic. Before the gynecologist, we pretend to be married and because of being full-time students, and no financial independence, convey our unwillingness to have a baby.
“Whatever happened to guarded intercourse?” The doctor asks something to that effect while performing an internal exam. It’s not the same, I want to repeat your words, but I say quiet while she scolds me like my mother. I should have resented her but hundreds of miles away from my parents, it feels right and satisfying. “If you are not pregnant,” she says,” your period will arrive after finishing this course,” and hands me a prescription. I stare at it hard, memorizing the spelling of the medicine. In my head, there is a misunderstanding in my body, a wrong calculation in my bio cycle.
At the pharmacy, a live reporter on TV is canvassing the scene after a riot. Corpses of over 1000 Hindus and Muslims killed so far. The images of dust-ridden bodies, half-opened eyes, their empty palms facing the sky. They look the same—forlorn, frightened, the creases deep on their forehead, pathways of beliefs that divided them. The ground makes no distinction based on their religious backgrounds. Walking back, you try to hold my hand and I push it away. Part of me is resenting you, and part of me knows we are both to blame. You kick an empty can on the unpaved road, but it doesn’t go far. The grass on the playground is yellow and dry, so much is slaughtered around us, but I’m building a life. Maybe. Maybe not.
The sunlight comes smashing into my room, without any regard for the dead or the alive. I feel a slight wetness between my legs and let out a sigh of relief. Perhaps, my body needed a pill to kick it back into its natural rhythm. Perhaps everything will be fine, perhaps the riots will stop today. I walk slowly to the bathroom as if I don’t want the wetness to be sucked back in, as if I need to see it before it flushes in the toilet, as if a part of me needs proof that something is, indeed, not growing in me amidst all that un-want, un-desire, unlove I feel. Inside the bathroom, I find it’s a transparent discharge. A cry escapes my lips and I fist bomb my abdomen. Leave me, I whisper so the girl in the next stall doesn’t hear me, my angst morphing into the clattering of my teeth and the shaking of my body, my sour morning breath filling the space around me. In the minutes, hours, and days to come, I anxiously wait for a stain but there’s still no riot between my legs. Instead, blood is spilled on the streets, the lockdown longer. In the dining hall, a national newspaper shows a picture of a kar sevak proudly holding a broken brick from the fallen structure, his arms covered in dust and ash, his saffron bandana muted like a sun about to die.
Given the constraints of the curfew in the city, it takes a few days to schedule the D&C. In the clinic, while I am prepared for the procedure, I hear the doctor talking to you in another room—instructing you where to put your initials, your full name, your contact address. Father of my child, my husband, my caretaker. I think it’s strange asking you to give consent on my behalf when I am awake and listening. But you are doing as told. A nurse shaves my pubic hair and I feel like ground zero, razed, a small black heap on the ground like dead ants that once crawled on my skin, filled me with muddy desire. Later, far away from the pile of Babri mud and chalk, I go in and out of consciousness, I hear a suction—a soul pulled away.
On our way back to my hostel, despite the cold, I’m sweating as if I have escaped narrowly from a crime scene. When I stare at your face, you look away, avoiding my gaze. Perhaps you are crying. Perhaps you are looking for a spot to bury your wordlessness. You are twenty, I am nineteen, and now we have something unspeakable between us. For the next few days, we don’t meet, we don’t pass on messages to each other, we halt to be us. When we come face to face in a grocery store within our campus, you force a smile and raise your hand to say hello, but my legs feel too weak to rush into your silhouette, my arms too scrawny to overcome the anxiety I feel. It seems like our days together have come to an end. I wake up late, I hardly eat. I watch the news, I look at the demolition site and think of my mopped womb. For hours I try to come up with the sound of loss. If it’s the pounding of hammers and grappling hooks bringing down a 16th century mosque. If it’s the swipe of a blade against the throat of a child of a different faith, his shriek so distinct in the slogan shouting mob. If it’s the quiet hum of an operation theater or the clank of the instruments on the surgical tray, stained with a life that once was.
In the cold darkness of the nights, alone in my bed, the word abortion cuts my tongue in half. I try to keep you at the edge of my thoughts, not letting you cut through the fence of my mind and penetrate my body. I try to sleep and dream of a clean place, a clean faith, a love unblemished by desire. Our bodies without the skin tainted of our memories. Do we ever cleanse? Does the dirt ever get tired of absorbing the mortar and the bricks, the bones and blood of the dead? Does it ever pause and wish for the healing to begin? No, the dirt goes on. And the sound of loss sinks deeper into the earth and echoes forever.
A cramp arises and I almost let out—Hey Ram, a God I have known all my life but don’t recognize anymore. The sound that once was of redemption is now buried under the rubble of the Babri. I pray it resurfaces while I toss and turn, my body rough on the sheets resisting to let go what is left of you in me.
Falling
We know the sound of these men who return at dusk fall in jeeps and bikes—the taps of their boots crack the horizon and quadruple the darkness; we know these men by the way their tall shadows fall on the walls of our home and creep through the openings between the ground and the wooden frames, the cuff of their sleeves rolled up we can see from the slit between our locked doors, their golden chains, and bracelets wild and shinning. We recognize the guffaw of these men, like a freight train slamming the levee, the white smoke from their beedis misted with their breaths stick to the panes of our old windows fogging our presence. We hear these men walking in the streets, the rub of their AK-47s on their backs, their whistling on a moist, summer night, glancing at our locked doors since they took our land and our husbands and brothers and sons. One of us, a mother dims the light and one of us, a daughter gets up in the dark—a toe hits the table, a muffled scream, a series of shhhh . . . .and heavy breathing. Outside, the chatter stops. We can’t see the men but feel their eyes on us. A long, quiet stare we’d do anything to break it, for hope. Then a man starts whistling again, and other hollers followed by a gunfire. Switchblade explosions light up our living room and we shiver, wipe our tears and running noses with each other’s dress. A helicopter goes over our home, so close as if it’s about to crush us. We hold our hands and pray the men go away, we pray they never know our names, they never see our faces. And if they knock on our doors, we must pretend we aren’t home until our walls break, until they claim us. Then face to face, we must act as if we like them, even love them. We must say we don’t want our husbands and lovers because they were cowards who didn’t fight for us, and when these men swipe their tongues on our cheeks and curl their fingers over our breasts and whisper, close your eyes, we must obey because maybe, just maybe, they’d let us live. Holy Shit, one of us exclaims, as we hear the footsteps on the stairs to our front door and we hold our daughters and our mothers closer, weep into their hair, our nails digging into their skin. Our names are called one by one like a match starting and going out, hissing before snuffed dark, damning us when abruptly our front door comes crashing down followed by a series of silhouettes falling at the edges of our faces blending with the darkness about to come.
An Uneasy Peace
First, the feet. They bleed. The wide, blunt wood chips on the floor of this cell in Tihar jail, they turn at weird angles and pierce inside my soles. I am thin as a stick and yet, my blood is still so bright. It’s in contrast with the blood that flowed out of the side of my husband’s head when I hit him with a stick, brown as if pigmented with his treachery. No, just dark and sticky. One of his eyes half-submerged in this pool wedging between the toes of my feet, as he looked at a faraway place.
I sit, my back against the wall. On the other side of the wall, Parvati, an inmate on a life sentence, hitting fists on the wall. She’s missing her children again. Once, I tried to talk to her outside while pulling out weeds. She whispered that she killed her children by mixing rat poison in their food. She said she was barely making ends meet by working in the fields all day, and exhausted when she returned to her cottage they’d fight and scream, never let her sleep. Her husband, a drunkard, would steal all her money. Then she grabbed my hand and bit my finger. I screamed. The guards were far, at the other side of the compound. “Shh . . . ”, she said, holding my finger and sucking my blood, staining her cracked lips. I watched her in shock and silence, by the cruelty with which she took my hand and the ease with which she licked it. She released my finger when the skin was clean except pink marks of her teeth.
I fall asleep to the vibration from the blows. I am used to that since I was fifteen and got married to a man twenty years older to me. A man who noosed his fingers around my neck on our wedding night, my eyes up to the sky, because my father promised a gold necklace and earrings but gave tiny ear studs. A man I killed when he came home drunk again and picked up a stick to hit me but missed and fell.
The dawn comes rushing in like a riot, orange red, spilled on the walls, on my skin. The bright colors remind me of Satvinder’s turban. I imagine him making a trip from our village to Delhi and waiting in the line outside the jail, holding a potli with my favorite scented soap, a kajal stick and a lipstick the color of gulmohar flowers. I think of the last time I kissed his chest, his neck, his inner thighs. He moaned softly like the rustle in the sugarcane field, he smelled like ripe wheat to be picked, to be separated from husk, to be put between the teeth, soft and chewy, light green and tan like earth.
Some days I wake up angry, very angry at fate, at myself, for not being able to see Sattu. With a charcoal rock, I picked outside, I draw on the wall. A wide forehead, a lock of hair, eyes wide, a vague resemblance to Sattu. It irritates me that I cannot draw his face properly. So, I curse God’s name while time falls everywhere, seconds, minutes, hours. Being born, crawling, walking, my mother said I had my mouth open, always hungry. But she thought it was just the after effect of being poor, though I never starved for food. At eleven, I longed for touch, then at thirteen I let a boy from the village move his hands up and down on my torso. When my thighs were stained by blood for the first time at fourteen, my father found an old man for me.
My husband never met Satvinder but was suspicious I had someone. He taunted me as he rode me, his sweat falling on my face, my neck. More than anything, I hated the way I smelled him on me afterwards. Now he is dead, but his odor has stayed, mixed with mine. My smell is corrupted forever. The thought drives me crazy, and I understand why Parvati hits her head and fists on the wall, breaks her bones, but the wall never gives. When her hands heal, she starts pounding her chest, screaming until her voice goes coarse. I chant, Sattu, Sattu—hoping to tear his fragrance from his name but the air comes in and goes, leaving no mark on me. Eventually, I stop. Eventually, Parvati stops. In my sleep, I dream Sattu is locked in a cell instead of me, his face morphed into mine. Then I wake up sticky-chested, a constable calling my name, the sound so harsh as if each syllable is a curse, a summon from death.
I walk towards the opening where the light splits into a thin line. A small potli is shoved in. It drops like a loud clap. Things spill in my black hole. A round sandalwood soap, a dibbi of homemade kajal and a dried-up rose. “How long ago did Sattu come?” I yell. No answer, just boots walking away, disappearing shadows.
I inhale the sandalwood, imagining the tight drum of Sattu’s abdomen where I lay my head listening to his bodily noises. The clap, gurgle and hiss of his gut, his fingers in my hair untangling. Like me, he is part animal, part vessel. His fingers tucked into openings of my body until my voice gives out. Then I watch him cry when he comes. The only conversation I remember clearly. Like me, he simmers in his sleep, a crackle of sighs across his pillow. I dig my uneven nails into the soap cake, it’s surface slippery as the night. Bits of sweet scent on my finger pads. I rub them on my neck, behind my ears, sandalwood glowing on my body. What does Sattu think of me now? Brave? Strong? A murderer? Will they let him see me before I die? From the ventilator of my cell, I watch the sky poked with bright holes, a rectangular, sparkling love nest, out of my reach.
A month later, as the date of my hanging gets closer, the jailor and other authorities ask me once again if I regret killing my husband, if I feel remorse, their faces hard with anticipation, with pity and hatred, certain that this is what I deserve. But I stay quiet, hearing their murmurs and whispers, my mind escaping to golden wheat fluttering around us, Sattu’s head on my lap, a folk song on his lips, the air around us cool like the surface of a lake. Back in my cell, the sun is bright, blinding, but I don’t block its glare. I soak in the heat and the light because I know I’ll be soon slipping into a long darkness of afterlife.
The night before the hanging, moonlight filters through the ventilator bars, falls on the floor. With a moon like that, the insects are singing louder, everything is on the move. Parvati is not fighting the walls today, only sighing and sobbing, liters of grief around her. October is sneezing, it needs a rajai on it. My teeth clatter, the hair on my arms like needles pointing to the sky. I can smell the air free of my odor, I can sense Sattu’s hot breath on my ears, hear the confessions of his love and desire–a currency I’ve spending since I got here. I can hear my thoughts of wanting this night to end, to never end, a constant buzz curling around my neck much softer than the rope from the next day.
Tara Isabel Zambrano is a writer of color and the author of Death, Desire, And Other Destinations, a full-length flash fiction collection by OKAY Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Contest 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Award 2020, been a Finalist in Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and Mid-American Review Fineline 2018 Contest. Her flash fiction has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2019, The Best Micro Fiction 2019, 2020 Anthology. She lives in Texas and is fiction editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.