Tara Isabel Zambrano

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.