Tara Isabel Zambrano

Slumdog Wives

     Let’s face it—we’re not all that beautiful, we have bad postures due to heavy lifting at the construction sites, sleeping at odd angles in the limited space of our chawls, cleaning agents roughed skin with constant laundry and dishwashing in several houses where we work as maids, premature worry lines around our eyes and chins, half-broken teeth due to negligence—all of this magnified by our endless appetite for sorrow because we’ve buried our parents, our first, sometimes our second husbands and several kids to drugs, alcohol, gang wars, police heaping crime on them and torturing in the name of  justice which made us leave homes, jobs and languages, clothes and ideas in haste, our bodies wrapped in cold rage but we’ve always had an intense desire—enough to electrify this dingy slum like Mumbai on a Diwali night, so when we spot Lucky— shirtless, a shimmering yellow bandana on his forehead, his abs and biceps taut like Salman Khan, climbing on the backs of boys and men dressed as cowherds forming a human pyramid to reach and break a pot of sweetened butter and curds suspended midair, a custom followed on Janmashtami, we whistle and shout—Yay Lucky, Hey Lucky, right here, Luckyyyyyy from the loud speaker into the dazzling, fluid crowd assembled for Lord Krishna’s birthday, he looks in our direction—his lips smeared with sweet curd, yeah, those creamy lines of liquid dripping from his chin and his eely tongue swiping over them like contrails disappearing in the sky, we lick our lips tasting salt of the air we share with him as if it’s his skin because our slumdog husbands have lost their steady jobs when they went on a strike and since then have been at home—useless, sleeping logs, demanding food, and sex so quick we don’t even realize it has happened until they withdraw their limp love dripping between our legs and from our eyes all day long while they get drunk on our savings, fall in a ditch by the roadside smelling like dead rats, dressed in failures two sizes larger when they come home crying and who wants a crying man, huh, we say but pull our shame and anger above our urge to get laid properly and yeah, we know when all the money is gone, our husbands will lick their ego clean and go to the same sleazy contractors who in the past stretched their bodies beyond days and nights doing their work—whether it was operating machines past their inspection dates on construction sites that had disabled some of them and the authorities declared those incidents as Worker’s Fault on the forms, or raising money for political party leaders who visited our homes asking for votes in the local elections to uplift our community and slid their shades down their noses we could see their middle-aged lust settling on our daughters while calling them beta and stroking their sixteen-year-old backs in the name of affection making us realize everything that’s ugly devours what’s beautiful and the longer you live the bigger beast you become and now alive and hungry we open our mouths—chanting our charms from our hot slender throats, our cheeks red with our needs as Lucky walks in his Akshay Kumar gait, his muscles twitching, the pulse quickening in his neck, oh so pure and innocent even from a distance his sweat climbs our noses and yeah, doesn’t he remind you so much of this guy we’ve read about in a tabloid, the one who lived with three women, one of us say—the one who tongued so deep between their legs, it flamed their vaginas like sun and in return they starched his body with their love and for a while they were all happy until the sex became a chore and for many days in a row the women brought him food, bathed him but he started ordering them around and yeah finally, annoyed, they left him and he starved and ate his own appetite, chewed up whatever was left of him, rolled on the streets like a kicked can and slithered into a gutter and never came back up and for months the women suffered headaches and nightmares, called each other beasts for what happened—one of them even named her baby after him however, yeah, they also said it could have been worse had the roles been reversed and despite all the warnings in our head from that story, watching Lucky smile at us it feels like a bunch of birds are released from the spaces between our breasts, his arms like pythons ready to embrace us so tight it might break our bones and he keeps getting closer but oh so slow it seems forever, so slow we can feel the earth hush on its axis draining the light from our shadows but we know we have each other and we have got time.

Tara Isabel Zambrano is a South Asian writer and the author of Ruined A Little When We Are Born, forthcoming from Dzanc Books in Fall 2024. Her work has appeared in Post Road, Tin House Online, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and other notable venues. She lives in Texas.