Tara Zambrano’s second book is a collection of short stories, flash fiction, personal essays, and prose poems
By Ravibala Shenoy
Stories with a distinct voice
Tara Isabel Zambrano is the nom de plume of an Indian American writer who has lived in the US for over two decades. She is an electrical engineer whose day job involves designing integrated circuits.
Her debut collection, Death, Desire, and Other Destinations appeared in 2020. Her latest book Ruined a Little When We Are Born was released in Oct 2024.
The forty stories in this collection have a distinct voice. They range from mostly flash fiction, like the title story to brief personal essays, vignettes, prose poems, and short stories. Most of them are set in India with Indian characters, although Manhattan and Maui also figure in Ms. Zambrano’s stories. A fair number of stories, ‘Tornado Falling’, ‘Calla Lilies’ and ‘Caution, Pleasure Center’, are set in unnamed places in the U.S.
Universal themes
The themes are universal and not confined to one culture but patriarchy and gender inequality are evident. Most of these stories have been previously published in both online and print literary journals.
The Buddha said the world is impermanent and full of ‘dukkha’ or suffering. What binds these stories together are the themes of loss, impermanence, and hunger. In ‘Swallow’, a plotless, surreal flash, Nusrat, a senior in an office remarks “To have a face is to want. To have a face is the beginning of a swallow by something bigger, uglier.”
The book is dedicated to the author’s mother, and the theme of the mother-daughter relationship is evident in many stories. All aspects of motherhood are featured: be it the absent mother, the loss of a mother, mothers rejecting their roles, or having it thrust on them and sacrificing their selfhood.
Like all good flash fiction, the stories start with a dramatic situation. In “Ground Zero”, a college student discovers her unwanted pregnancy on the day when the Babri Mosque is being destroyed and the TV reporter is reporting on a riot during which a thousand Hindus and Muslims are killed. “In Stranger with Green Gloves,” a boy sees a man come through the front gate and kiss his newly widowed mother.
Magic realism
The author has an extraordinary ability with magical realism. In ‘Chorus of Flickering Mothers’, a child’s demands make a woman’s fingertips flicker.
“Nina’s mother cried so loud her limp flesh started falling and drifting away in her tears and wails, like pieces of land in a hurricane. Eventually, what was left of Nina’s mother was only a pair of eyes crawling on the ground or the walls… Once the eyeballs drifted outside and slipped into a storm drain.”
Dinosaurs appear on the front lawn in ‘It’s Crucial Where You Hang the Mirror’.
There are stories inhabited by ghosts and the supernatural. In ‘Soft Harmless Monsters’, the ghosts of her deceased parents appear to console a grieving daughter. ‘Mother Galaxy’ and ‘Earth’s Tears’ are sci-fi flash.
In ‘Skin, Breached’, a mother and daughter in a dress shop use human skin to stitch garments. Some of these stories are so surreal it’s like viewing images by Salvador Dali.
The writing is vibrant and full of startling, surreal visual images. Take this gem. “The work led her from task to task as though a finger slipping through the rosary.” She manages to portray desire and sensuality as well as loss in prose that is both economical and poetic. In the unbearably poignant story ‘White Ash’ about the immigrant parents of a missing child, the wife who has never seen snow remarks:
“It’s like flowers falling from the sky until they hit the ground and become dirt. Some slow, some too fast. That’s the journey, isn’t it? From above to down here.” So much is conveyed in such few words.
The author admits to reading a lot of poetry. The stories are replete with symbols. “A tree upside down is s metaphor of taking birth, headfirst…” the grandmother says in “A Chorus of Flickering Mothers.”
Many themes are turned on their head. Unlike the cultural propensity for the wife to fast so that a long life may be granted to her husband, in ‘Karwa Chauth’ the husband fasts for the wellbeing of his wife.
One moving story ‘Shabnam, Salamat’ is about a Muslim man who takes on a second wife in the hope that she will bear him a son. My only quibble with this powerful story is the reference to the house the husband has inherited from his grandfather who (the author writes) worked for the East India Company during the British Raj. It is hard to sink your teeth into this anachronism.
There has been an explosion of flash fiction writing among South Asian writers as attested by the popularity of the South Asian Flash Writers Group on Facebook. This group gives support and encouragement to flash fiction writers. It is run by Sudha Balagopal who is herself an accomplished writer of the genre.
While there is a proliferation of journals featuring flash fiction, there has not been a corresponding increase in full-length collections of the genre. Dzanc Books is to be commended for publishing this collection. The cover of Ruined a Little Before You Are Born has a fitting psychedelic image created by Sarah Shields.
Read: Book Review: ‘Poetry From The Exile’
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Ravibala Shenoy is a former librarian and book reviewer who writes short stories, memoir and flash fiction
Courtesy: India Currents
