by Indra Das
“Don’t get meta on me. You know what I mean,” I say. “Well, anyway, it’s probably a good thing you’re claiming not to have written it, because your ‘narrator’ is an awful man—”
“Not a man…” The stranger smiles.
“Yes, yes, shape-shifter, not a man. Poor, benighted soul, raped a woman, and I’m supposed to cry for him because he wanted to ‘create’? Both this story and the one you told me, they’re supposed to be somewhat sad, right?” I almost stop because I remember exactly how melancholic the stranger’s narration had been, when he told the story that hypnotized me at the mela. I become a bit nervous that he might get offended, but I see that he’s waiting placidly for me to continue. I go on. “But even ignoring the whole human-hunting thing, they’re from the point of view of a kidnapper, and then a rapist, and both times there’s a woman who only exists in their story to suffer for their strange needs. And whether or not they’re not human, they look and act, for all intents and purposes, like human men. I mean, am I supposed to be sad for the narrator here?”
I become even more nervous when he doesn’t say anything.
“I’m not, am I? That’s ridiculous. I hope he’s not supposed to be sympathetic. Is he?”
“You’d have to ask him that, now, wouldn’t you? Will you just relax for one moment, Professor? Just relax, take a breath, enjoy this bright summer day. You ask so many questions, I hardly know which ones to answer. Do you want some jhaal moori?”
“No, I’m okay.”
He drinks the last of his chai and tosses the clay cup into one of the piles of garbage that punctuate the hawkers’ stalls lining the pavements of Chowringhee. Walking to one of the vendors with their metal carts, he buys himself a paper bag of jhaal moori. Pouring out even handfuls of the spicy puffed rice in his palm and tossing them into his mouth, he speaks between munches.
“Thank you. For typing that out. I told you I’d pay you for your services, and I will,” he says, stopping to savor the moori. His thick beard moves up and down over his slender neck. I see the green bulge of a prominent vein snake up that long trunk of sinew and skin, and avert my eyes from it.
“Okay, what’s my payment? I’m intrigued,” I ask, clearing my throat.
“Have you ever been to the Sundarbans?” he asks, sniffing the myriad scents in the air. To me, everything is overwhelmed by the stink of pollution from heavy traffic just a few feet away from us.
“The Sundarbans? No, why?” I ask.
“It’s a pity that most people in this city barely even realize that one of the largest delta forests in the world lies just hours south of here.”
“Well, I’m aware of it. I just haven’t gone.”
“I’m paying you in travel, Professor. You can thank me later. I’ve booked a trip to the Sundarbans,” he says, lapsing back into familiar presumption. He smiles, small flecks of puffed rice crumbs sticking to his lips and black beard. “I’ll pay you in money, too, in case you’re worried. Think of this as a bonus.”
“You want me to visit the Sundarbans. With you.”
“Unless you don’t want your bonus. It’s nothing to me.” He shrugs, rolling oily peanuts around his palm with his thumb.
“Why the Sundarbans?” I ask.
“It’s close. And I want to show you where I grew up,” he says. The peanuts and stray rice disappear, crunching loudly between his teeth.
“You grew up in the Sundarbans?”
“I just said so. You really must stop with these incessant questions, Professor. Come with me and I’ll tell you about it. This is neither the time nor the place.”
“I’m just a little surprised. It’s not every day people ask me on trips into jungles. Or anywhere, for that matter. I barely even know you.”
He munches his moori, squinting, placid. A sheen of sweat shines on his high forehead, catching the burning sunlight.
“Can I think about it?” I ask.
“Of course. Should you decide to accept payment, I also want to continue our arrangement. Professional or not, you’re just fine at the job, Alok. You should give yourself more credit once in a while,” he says.
“There is more to the story, then?”
“Quite a bit more.” He nods and unzips his worn backpack. He hands me a mustard-yellow manila envelope, just like the first time. This time, it has loose sheets instead of a notebook, but filled with the same handwriting as before. “Another manuscript,” he says. “If you can call it that. Another journal of sorts, translated. You might be interested in it. You seem most concerned, after all, about the woman in the previous journal. Compile this one and type it out, like before. If you’re willing. Again, payment will be arranged. Simple money, if you like.”
I think about this. I know he might well be barking mad, but then again—if he is, so am I. He made me see things, see stories even as he spoke their words. I still don’t know what’s happened between the two of us, whether he drugged me into accepting some hallucinatory reality of his own the first night I met him. But if I’m dancing with a trickster, I’m nothing if not awed by each step, each move. He’s leading, with skill.
And if everything he says is real, I don’t even know. I don’t know what that means. It means I’m to be a historian like no other, my lack of ambition be damned.
So I take his second manuscript and agree to be his unqualified contracted transcriber once more, if only to give us a reason to keep meeting, to wear away my remaining rational impulses to stop all of this and never contact him again.
I won’t say I’m not scared. I am. But being afraid rouses me, in a way. It makes me interested in what’s to come in the world. In my world. I haven’t felt that for so long. Not during meetings with Gitanjali at the coffeehouse, eating greasy chicken cutlets and trying to figure out whether we really want each other (or whether I want her, to avoid presumption on my part). Not during endless classes and lectures, or writing and editing textbook drafts. Not during nights alone drinking whiskey and wondering what my parents, my family, are doing, my inflamed love for them in absentia only matched by my hatred at them for disowning me.
At the end of our walk, I also agree to go on the trip to the Sundarbans with him. I don’t know if I actually will, but it seems the best thing to say for now. He doesn’t react in any significant way, but he seems happy at my decision. He also hands me a thick envelope of thousand-rupee bills, as additional payment for the first transcription. He says we’ll meet again, but once more doesn’t say when or where. It has been six months since our first conversation at the baul mela, yet here we are, shaking hands and saying goodbye with the confidence of common acquaintances, at least. And he does shake my hand, I’m not making that up. As if we were business partners, and I’d just sold him something more substantial than my ability to type out handwritten documents. It is a strange and uncharacteristic gesture, but he is the one who initiates it. His grip is warm, very firm. My own limp academic’s hand slides out of his, tingling with the shock of touch. We part at the red-brick façade of New Market: he vanishing into the pungent-aired warehouse at its center, filled with animals and carcasses, glistening, clucking, braying under bare bulbs; I wandering off to buy brownies at Nahoum’s.
Several months pass us by with no mention of the trip to the Sundarbans that the stranger promised, so I assume he was lying about having booked it when he first told me about it. I don’t mind. I might even be relieved, since I’m still not sure I’m going to go with him. We start meeting often. I hand over portions of the typed manuscript every time, over coffee or cool bottles of Kingfisher beer. When monsoon rolls around, it’s whiskey doubles over fibrous beefsteak at Oly Pub. On the days it isn’t raining, we pick apart cheap chili chicken under the violet night sky on the Lindsay Hotel’s rooftop bar, surrounded by white tourists smoking cigarettes and gazing out at the lights of Kolkata (by now, the new law has kicked in, and this is one of the few bars where you can smoke at a table, because it’s outdoors). He is utterly delighted, always, by the v
arious ways humans prepare food and drink, and the various venues in which they partake of it.
We talk. I’d try to put down every conversation we have here, but they wouldn’t all be interesting to a reader, which may be surprising, considering the unusual nature of our relationship. But many of these talks we have in the interim are actually genuinely uninteresting in a way that shocks me, and also gives me a lot of pleasure. At times, it feels like talking to an old friend—that’s how normal it all is. He spends a lot of time asking me about my life, and I indulge him, to a sensible degree at first, and then with a complete lack of restraint. He’s a far better listener than I would have expected of such a consummate storyteller. An excellent one, in fact, never interrupting, and always completely rapt in even my most boring recollections.
I tell him about my engagement to Shayani, a fellow history student I met while doing my master’s at Presidency College. About our long and blissful courtship in classrooms and hole-in-the-wall eateries, spooning soggy momos into each other’s mouths in dim Tibetan restaurants. Sheer relief after long hours lulled by professorial droning. The quick kisses in the hallways between classes, the bliss of ending those eternal summer days by fucking beside the open windows of my little apartment in Jodhpur Park. I tell him about my quiet proposal in bed, taking the ring from the bedside drawer while the sun rose outside. Shayani’s calm, clear-eyed delight, the ring a cold new hardness on her finger when her hand wandered down between my legs, spit on palm, and she kissed me till I came. I tell him about my parents’ approval of Shayani being a pretty Bengali girl, and the various elaborate lunches and dinners and receptions over which our two families bonded and became one, using our romance as an excuse. About the collapse of all our plans and the cancellation of our impending betrothal—a tortuous, mutual decision to respect the beauty of our courtship and not have it be rotted away by the boredom we felt after our relationship became a performance for our families. About the rift between my family and me that followed—my rejection of their hysterical reaction to this breakup. The inverse of Romeo and Juliet: two families so eager to be one that the star-crossed lovers can’t stand it anymore. He especially enjoys that last comparison, laughing as I tell him about my farcical tragedy.
I don’t, however, tell him other, more complicated reasons that provoked the end of my engagement to Shayani, and exacerbated my parents’ unhappiness with me.
I don’t tell him about the men I slept with on occasion before Shayani, usually fellow students during my undergraduate days, sometimes strangers. I suppose this is because he is, at least going by appearances, a man, and I don’t want to draw attention to the fact that we’re meeting alone. Despite this concealment, I’m more candid with him than with anyone else in my life. It feels reckless and wonderful, as if pouring out the details of my past intimacies to him might make them new again. I wonder sometimes if he is as hypnotized by these stories of my unspectacular human life as I was by his tale telling at the baul mela. If this is what he craves—the memories of an unremarkable man.
Anyway, the point being we talk, like human beings. Like two normal human beings, whether or not he is one.
He almost never talks about himself. When he does mention himself, it is always an offhand remark taking us back in time. He might wave at the grumbling blue flickers of lightning on the horizon as we sit on the roof of Lindsay Hotel, telling me how they remind him of the flashes of musket fire from skirmishes between French and British colonials, back when they were still vying for domination of the area. How the chaos and confusion of battle made for exciting hunting. He might ruminate in the now cleaner-aired Oly Pub on the smoking ban in bars and restaurants, mentioning his forays into the dank opium dens of North Calcutta once the nineteenth century rolled around and the city was a thing that could no longer be avoided. I take these morsels, and the pages he gives me, grateful for them in the absence of whatever magic he worked on our first night together. He doesn’t seem willing to demonstrate that again, and I don’t push him.
It becomes clear over the passing months that he has a taste for nostalgia. I listen, always, captivated, letting him speak more and more. He never mentions the baul girl he might have rescued (kidnapped), or his exile from the alleged tribes. He never goes into too much detail about his present or past life, lives, or those of his fellow hunters of the swampland that became Kolkata, only giving fragments. I wait, not pushing, not commenting, letting him talk. I ask nothing of him. I doubt nothing to his face.
He seems to enjoy my company.
In Mumtazabad I first saw him, that rapist, that coward monster, that filthy dog-man, that self-pitying deceiver, your father.*
His Pashto was flawless, and that wasn’t even the start of it. I had never come across foreigners who seemed so utterly foreign before. Three white men (though one of them was brown enough to pass for one of Shah Jahan’s subjects) walking through the caravanserai so casually, like wolves stalking through a den of tigers without a care in the world, was something to see. We had seen white men in the town before, more in Mumtazabad and Akbarabad than anywhere else I’d been in the empire, but certainly none of them had looked or walked like these three (who walked alone, instead of with the vast retinues that white folk usually had following them everywhere).
The courtyard of the caravanserai was cleaner than the streets outside—but there was still foot-stirred dust to clog the nostrils, and pats of camel shit simmering in the sun, and squirts of piss left on the walls by dogs and mischievous children with full bladders. And yet I could smell them from twenty feet away, your father and his companions, as they strolled in behind the camels of a merchant.
Your father was the one who lingered in the courtyard when his two fellows disappeared inside to bathe or rest. He was the one who came up to me, without a word, sniffing as if taking in the rank air he carried with him like an invisible cloak.
He was an ugly man: huge and covered in the crudest clothes I had ever seen, stitched from animal pelts, leather, and some kind of coarse cloth. Necklaces of trinkets and bones, some brown with age and others white and fresh as ivory, hung from him and sang a constant clicking song. Slung from his back were great fardels, swollen with weight and carrying who-knows-what, the kind you would expect hung from between the humps of a camel or on the back of a mule, not hanging off a man. The hair that covered his great head was knotted with dirt, braided into thick coils like dusty snakes—it might have once been the wheat gold of those men from the far northern reaches of Europe, but was now a copper brown. His face was monstrous, one eye blue, the other gray and speared by a thick scar that ran from socket to corner of lip, skin the ruddy leather of a white man gone too long under the sun.
He was like no man I’d ever seen, really. I couldn’t tell where he was from, or what his calling was. I guessed that he was some northern tribal man from the mountains or that far Arctic land some wanderers call the Rus, or a traveler from one of the European settlements on either shore of Hindustan, now come to see the great tomb that was being built for Shah Jahan’s dead wife.
When I began to cool in his shadow, and it became clear his eyes were not simply passing me by, I asked him what he wanted in Pashto, just to see if he would talk to me in some clumsy language from Europe. Not that I could have asked him in very many other languages, as I spoke only a few.
“As a foreigner, I want to talk to one who isn’t foreign to this land,” were the first words he said to me, answering my question. I remember them so clearly because the last thing I expected him to do was speak Pashto, let alone Pashto so clear the words poured from his mouth like springwater.
I admit, right then, I was enchanted. Not in love, or in lust. But I couldn’t have turned away from him even if I had wanted do. So I let him talk to me, and gave him a lock of my hair for a few coins from Europe.
Trading words with him had a strange magic that I’d never felt before, because he gave no regard to custom. I spoke with him in ways I wouldn’t dare in any m
oment outside of that one, as a commoner and an unwed woman, a woman with no family or harem to fall back on. It didn’t matter who I was talking to, foreign or not, woman or man. I just wouldn’t, the way I did with him.
I felt like a woman from another time, another world.
It was this that kept me from taking my leave of this smelly, ugly man, that led me to accept his strange and unclean request, even though I regretted that the moment I did it. Still, I was definitely grateful for his blasphemously unconventional company. I should have left Mumtazabad right then and there, ran and not come back, but then I wouldn’t be writing this for you, and should I regret that? I don’t know.
The white man dressed like a beast came to me that night in the caravanserai, and he raped me. Though he was far from pleasing to my eye, I would have fucked him if he’d asked and given me some money for the favor. That is how I often paid my way in life, after all, and I’m not ashamed to say it, though most asking for such favors do so in a most shameful manner, and mistake the favor for ownership. But this one didn’t ask, instead getting between my legs by the most convoluted conversation I’ve ever had. He took what he wanted, with no regard for my opinion on the matter.
Anyway, if I can say one good thing about him, it is that he promised not to hurt me that night, and he didn’t. Not in body, anyway. He was as gentle as a virgin boy, and as clumsy and unsure as one, too, though he loomed like a giant above me, and I nearly drowned in the stinking drizzle of his copious sweat. If you ever venture into the world of men, they will sometimes tell you that some women all but ask to be raped, that women complain to make the lives of the opposite sex hard, that it is all just a game to drive men crazy. I’m your mother, and I can swear to you on your life and mine that I found nothing but fear and regret on the night of your conception. As ever, I say this not to hurt you but to make of you something more than your father.
He talked a lot. I can’t even remember most of the many things he said to me as he fucked me, but they were the ramblings of a madman. Or so I thought at the time. Brevity and clarity weren’t his best talents. Though considering the circumstances, he could have been the best storyteller in the world and I’d still have hated every word. He told me about a Grecian king who was turned into a wolf a long time ago by some god or the other, and he told me about his tribe and how they don’t think of themselves as humans, and how they have two selves and kidnap babies and are forbidden to bear children, and he even cried a bit. He did catch my attention when he said there were others like him who called themselves djinns, a word I grew up with, listening to folktales told to me by my mother. It felt awful to hear that familiar word, which reminded me so of happier times, in that situation, coming from the mouth of a man about to violate me.