Tara Isabel Zambrano

The Sound of Loss Goes Deep into the Earth

CW: Intercommunal violence

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.

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.