Sandalwood Remains

Fiction by ​Tara Isabel Zambrano

A woman gets on the bus. The metal door creaks, slams shut behind her. Men with tobacco-stained teeth, on the front row seats grin as she passes. The bus lurches forward. She curses and lands on the seat next to me. Green sari, golden blouse. Red painted nails. She moves the wavy curls away from her neck and face, a nose ring shines. Outside, sand dunes of Thar extend on both sides of the bus, orange and smooth.


Perhaps it started with the desert—the end of line as far as eyes can see, the arid landscape broken up by thorn scrubs, the straight line I drew on the map from Jaipur to Jaisalmer. Here, in the heart of a summer, life is undercover like blood in veins, dreams in mind. I’m out of my comfort zone whether it’s the lodge where I am staying, in the midst of nowhere, or the journals I am reading about the architecture in Rajasthan because I am an electrical engineer.


Moments lapse before I realize the woman’s head is resting on my shoulders. My shirt is wet under her cheek. I am captivated by her. She is asleep with an iPhone clasped in her right hand. Her body leans on me as the bus revs on an uneven road and comes to a halt before a closed railway gate. A train goes past us at lightning speed. A man is staring at us. His hair juts out from his head at weird angles. He reminds me of my step-bother, young and clueless. I saw him six months ago and taught him the basics of engineering drawing, elevation and perspective.


One million years ago, this region was watered by two mighty rivers, Indus and Ganges. Later, powerful tectonic movement distorted the water flow. The rivers meandered away, divorced the land. Strong winds lifted silt particles and deposited them here, etched a boundary in the belly of the world, barren, expanding, because ultimately everything dissolves in the austere browns of the desert.


The woman is awake. When our eyes meet, she smiles. Her side profile resembles a distant relative. Kohl-smudged eyes, a tattoo on her hand. The young man is nowhere in sight. My thoughts go back to the relative. In high school, she came up to me and grabbed me by the arm. We walked toward a small cove behind the bathroom where the janitors kept their cleaning supplies. She held my face in her hands and kissed hard, almost bit me. Her hair and skin smelled of sandalwood. I stared at the bathroom door the whole time, scared that a teacher or a student will walk on us. My bleeding lip left a stain on my white shirt. I did not wash it for a week.


The space between Jaipur and Jaisalmer mutates from flat shrub land to hilly tree-lined roads. The temples, the shops all jostling with each other, noise spilling on the roads and absorbed in the sand. The wind picks up and rushes, pauses and stares, unrolling the stories of brave Rajputs and their queens against the mighty Mughals. The history of this state is a food source and I’m a starving town.


The woman’s thigh is against mine and I don’t know if it’s because of the movement of the bus or intentional. It’s a sensation I’d forgotten. I open the window and it’s as if I’ve opened a door to memory: memory that was a friend before, but now is a bruise. I wonder if my ex-wife still teaches Medieval History in an Arts and Commerce College at Jaipur. If she still stands in the doorway of a classroom just before her lecture is about to start: her eyes gazing at the horizon deciphering a message for the day, her shoulders hunched, bearing the burden of a Hindu-Muslim marriage that everyone in our families claimed would never work and it didn’t. Maybe because we were too afraid we’d prove them right. If she still has the bottle of a sandalwood perfume I left in her suitcase the day she left. Light tiptoes on tree tops and scatters on the road like an inscription as if answering my questions. The bus slows down and the woman gets up, adjusts the pleats of her sari, her midriff exposed. She catches my gaze mid-air. I have seen that look before. Demanding. Moving closer in another dimension, almost touching.


Forts and palaces stand around us: signs of spent time. Grisly, sublime landscape of Thar is interrupted by blue, orange and green turbans of mustached men, large silver bangles of tattooed women. Together they sing of their dead, their eyes glistening with rapture, their voices embalmed with glory. Everything is sharper than it looks in magazines and journals as if it will cut through the light and make room in your heart.


The woman signals me to follow her. I walk at a safe distance behind her, minding my surroundings. Thatched roofs of tea stalls, a grove of trees, and the sound of a distant flute squeezed to the whirl of the wind. Behind the bathroom wall marked with graffiti and the posters of local politicians, she brushes her lips against mine. I kiss her, first softly, then hard, my eyes half-closed, fixated at her remarkable forehead that looks like the map of Rajasthan. I want to remember this instant, a summer sun folded into the desert of my body. She leans against the wall, the blade of my lips against her neck, inhaling deeper and deeper in search of a scent until it gets lost in my head. Until all I smell is the heat emitted off our skin. Until I can no longer taste the past.

Tara Isabel Zambrano

​Tara Isabel Zambrano lives in Texas and is an electrical engineer by profession. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House Online, Yemassee, Slice, The Minnesota Review and other journals. She is a prose reader for The Common.