by Indra Das
I was tired. I wanted it, too, I knew I did.
“You must carry my clothes and my blade. The rest of my things I’ll leave. None of it matters,” said Gévaudan.
I felt some regret at leaving behind all the meat in his fardels from the chital he’d—we’d—killed that morning, but I let it go. I couldn’t eat anything right then anyway, hunger the last thing on my mind despite my stomach growling like a cub. I burst into coughing again because of the fever all over my limbs and lungs, the thickness in my head waiting to loosen. After the stillness of traveling with Gévaudan as human and human, there was a tensing in my arms and legs, my thighs and calves tightening at the memory of sharp fur and spines and clinging to something too fast to hold on to. I stopped myself from giddy laughter, I was so overwhelmed by what was happening. Finally, it was approaching—a reminder that magic was real, that the morning’s ride through the mudflats and the river actually happened.
I watched Gévaudan strip. As if we were adulterers hiding among the millet, out for an illicit night of moonlit romance. I watched him just like I’d watched so many strangers, all men, strip in anticipation of my body. Like I’d watched Fenrir strip as he prepared to squirt his own idea of fate into me.
I told myself that Gévaudan was disrobing for me, that this being of raw magic was stripping down to its true self just for me. That I was the rider and keeper of what lived within his naked body. I saw again what looked like a young man leave himself utterly bare. And this time he looked to me like little else—a lean boy, healthy but so very vulnerable despite the fearsome bones and scars sewn into his skin. His skin milky with moonlight and sweat.
I wanted to go up to Gévaudan, hold his face in my hands and pull open those blushing cheeks, take out my blade and cut that skin off him to help free what hid beneath. He bared his teeth—a movement of his lips and face so familiar to me now—and shoved his clothes and boots and knife into one of his fardels. He handed me this bag of his possessions. It was very heavy, and the straps hurt against my shoulders. Gévaudan took a rope from the thrown fardels at his feet, uncoiled it in haste, and wrapped it around his neck.
I wondered if he was about to throttle himself in front of me, full as these shape-changers’ lives were with strange ritual. Though honestly, I think humans are no less bound.
He slipped his fingers under the noose he had tied, testing it. He then threw the rope to me. I caught it instinctively.
“The knot is loose,” said Gévaudan. “When I emanate, the noose will widen but hold. Let the rope guide you to my second self. When you are upon its back, tighten the rope and don’t let go. The rope will help you stay on. Tie it around your waist, so we’re—” He seemed to lose his breath, wiping his mouth. So we’re bound.
I looked at the rope in my hands, pale under the moonlight.
A leash, I didn’t say. “Thank you,” I said. I tied the rope around my waist with both hands as he walked away, letting the coils fall beneath the stalks and disappear. An umbilicus also, I thought, seeing the rough hemp trail away right below my navel.
Gévaudan stood in the millet rubbing his genitals, the rope hanging from his neck. I should have felt horror at this sight. But wearing this man’s possessions on my back, having seen this once before, I knew it wasn’t a desire for my body that heated his blood and stiffened his cock. It was a desire for emanation, for his second self, for what was about to happen. But despite the glow in his eyes, he was scared like he hadn’t been when he changed this morning.
And there was also the rope around his neck, in my sweaty palms, around my hips.
“The blindfold,” he said.
The ritual was little different from the first time—the blindfolding, the cutting of my arm, the wait. The rebirth—the tapestry of the universe itself torn and woven again twenty paces from me. The rope whipped through my grasp as the noose expanded.
My blood against the stalks, an offering taken rustling, serpent-tongue licking my arm.
The smell of the thing filled my lungs and cleared my heavy head, banishing the trembling in my limbs. So overwhelming it made me gag, flushed me with new energy, new spit in my mouth.
Somewhere, Fenrir answered the newborn—reborn—creature’s roar with a lowing that stirred the earth and caught in the treetops, emptied them of birds awoken from their roosts. I only heard their wings from under the blindfold as they burst into the night sky. With the rope in my hands I climbed on my companion’s second self, carrying my belongings and the belongings of its first self. Feeling for the rocky blades of its spine under hide and mane, I straddled that ridge and pulled hard on the rope to leash this mighty djinn to my hands. An illusion, perhaps—but a powerful one.
The djinn that lived in Gévaudan didn’t maul me. It didn’t devour me. For the second time it accepted me as its passenger, its rider. One soul, upon two.
—
Cold wind hit my blindfolded face, pushing out tears that dried quickly on my cheeks. There was nothing like that release, and it was only after I had it again that I knew how much I craved it. Darkness, yet freedom from everything, from life, from the growing child in my belly, from thought and worry. It was a waking dream, like flying across the earth as I did in my sleep. So freed that I couldn’t think of anything but the wind against me, the animal miracle holding my body up—a blessing. The fur underneath the only thing keeping me tethered to my real, easily broken flesh. A cloak of insects followed us, caught in the thundering djinn’s fur. Their wings and legs flickered all over me, tickling my skin and eyes and mouth. The rope taut in my hands and around my waist as I held on for life, my thighs locked and cramping against the shifting crags of sinew and spine, warmed by strange fire raging in the heart that pounded below me. I wished it would run even faster so that I’d fly off it like a bird and come crashing to the earth, the breath of my child-to-be driven from my body by the impact.
Always I was aware of the other presence behind us, so near that I wondered if the beast under me was running or being chased.
Yet on Gévaudan’s heart-locked djinn I could feel little fear of what followed us, or anything, really. I let go of the rope and clung to the beast’s back as if I were its offspring, clutching its thick mane with my hands and pushing my face and chest into sharp fur and muscle, not caring that my chafed palms were getting cut. With my fingers and toes in the tangle of its hide, the crags became warm earth, and the wind that swept over us felt like time slipping away from me.
Under that blindfold the fur in my fists became wild grass on a late-summer night, and next to me on the dewy earth was my mother sitting on her side, and above us were the same stars we rode under, Gévaudan’s second self and I, but much clearer without winter’s mist to fade them. I lay on a djinn, and I also lay on the ground on my belly, safe and warm, a small fire of twigs crackling next to us. My mother patiently held her blade to the flames till it glowed like a slice of orange peel. Squinting against the sparks, she dropped a bead of hashish on the blade and huffed the milky smoke that sprang out. Her eyes were amber in the glow. “Careful. And go easy, child,” she said, voice heavy as she exhaled and I leaned in. We shared the sweet smoke and let gobbets swim from our mouths to the night sky. Just the two of us on a little broken island of the past, hurtling across a river of time, carried on the back of the djinn that swam it. Somewhere else, the Bazigars we traveled with washed their hands and feet in a river of water, not time, performing ablutions after supper. My mother spit on the blade and drove it in the ground to cool. A tarnished but valued tool, bartered off a farmer for some of our food, to be carried by me if, when, she died. She had, as far as I knew, never used that old blade for violence.
“Hold on tight, Mama,” I said to her. “This ground, it’s carried on the back of a great djinn who hides within a white man. It’s running as it carries us on its back, years from this moment. It runs fast, very fast, so hold on tight.”
My mother’s eyes rolled in pleasure as she leaned her head back, hair s
pilling out of her dupatta and falling to the ground. “You’re stoned as a goat with a bellyful of ganja, sweetheart,” she said, her laughter coarse from the hot smoke. I nudged her arm lightly. Her skin was cool against my knuckles. “Shh. Goats have cooler heads than you or I. They don’t get high from eating ganja trees,” I said, though I had no idea what goats did or didn’t.
She looked at me and smiled. “Always took after Scheherazade, you. Night after night, finishing every story I told by yourself, outdoing the queen herself.”
“You’re here,” I said.
She laughed as if I’d made a joke. “I’m here,” she said, taking my hand in her rough fingers and blowing on my knuckles. Her breath raised goose bumps on my hand. I stared at the little hairs blossoming under my mother’s breath, until I remembered to grab hold of the grass so I wouldn’t fall off the world.
A storm loomed in the distance, a thundercloud blotting the stars above that island in time, lightning showing the form of a ravening dog—a great wolf humbled to terrible rage. Tusk and claw unseen, spit a hissing rain on the leaves.
INTERVAL
Before I know it summer’s gone like the blink of a firefly’s abdomen, and it’s puja season. The stranger and I walk around the city in the midst of festive crowds, taking in the illuminated drawings that decorate the streets—tableaux made out of strings of Christmas lights, twisted with pagan irony into designs and animals against bamboo banners and arches to celebrate Durga Puja.
We visit a few pandals. Inside, the stranger smiles at the idols of Durga, wrapped in human-woven sarees and garlands and bedecked in human-made jewelry, holding cheaply fashioned but shiny human-made weapons, towering over slain asura Mahishasura, also given modesty in the moment of his death by a human-woven loincloth. Of course, their flesh was also shaped and given the color of life by human hands. The blood pouring from Mahishasura’s wounds paint mixed and applied by brush. The stranger looks at these deities incarnated in dried earth and made to represent good and evil, and he tells me they are iconic human representations of witnessed shape-shifter battles from millennia ago. That the devi and her monstrous asura foe were from different tribes of the race he belongs to.
In the pandal at Maddox Square, he points to the lion, the vahana by Durga’s side, her animal vehicle, and tells me it is either a representation of one of Durga’s non-human selves or a fellow shape-shifter in its non-human self. Like a teacher the stranger then points to the fanged human shape of demon god Mahishasura emerging from the lion-mauled carcass of the bull—mahish—that he turned into to trick Durga, and knowingly comments that it is a stylized way of showing the inexplicable—a shape-shifter transforming from a non-human self to a human one.
“Why does human-shaped Durga have so many arms then? Did she try and turn into a giant spider and fail?” I ask him. He ignores my admittedly weak joke. Though I also meant it as a real question. Who am I to judge the normality of shape-shifters in a remote prehistoric past?
“Maybe that was one of her shapes,” he says. “Durga and Mahishasura might not have been restricted to that duality, the first and second self. Apollonian and the Dionysian, as someone once said,” he breathes out, stirring the hair that hangs over his forehead.
“Shape-shifters were once more powerful than that,” he says loudly, almost shouting in the midst of all the people, but the collective babble inside the pandal is so loud no one even looks up. With a flourish of his hands he makes even the act of wringing sweat from his beard graceful. Wiping his hand on his kurta, he lowers his voice again, leaning in close to me. His breath warm against my ear. “We held in ourselves the multitudes of this planet, the birds and the beasts, the trees, the wind, and the sea. We could be anything, make ourselves in the world’s image. We touched the infinite. We were the infinite.” He puts one arm around my shoulder, fingers grasping, caught in this sermon given under a goddess and a demon that he claims share his origins. We sway with the waves of the crowd ebbing and flowing against us, shoulders and arms damp.
“All your oldest tales show it. Now we have fallen far from the myriads we once held in ourselves, the legions and illusions we could emanate. The beings that humans of this subcontinent memorialized as the goddess Durga and the demon god Mahishasura were more divine, in a classical sense, than I or my kin. Closer to the infinite than anything in this world, this time, could ever dream. Me, I have only myself, and the other. We are powerful, my second self and I, but we cannot be anything, only ourselves. We can change, of course. I can become someone else.” His fingers slip away from my shoulder, tracing a brief tingle across my back. “But so can any human, with some effort,” he says, and it feels like his eyes have fallen on me. I look, and he’s staring at Durga and Mahishasura with the ardor of the devout.
I’m fascinated by all this, but ask no more, because it feels like he’s sunk once again into one of his unpredictable bouts of melancholy.
“Or maybe the many arms of Durga are just an embellishment,” he says, fingers raking through his beard again. “Creative license. Maybe the notion that shape-shifters ever held more than two selves within them is a fabrication based on your stories. Our own myth. Sometimes I think we’re just making all this up as we go along, like you.” He shrugs.
“Like me? What do you mean?”
“Don’t be deliberately obtuse, Alok. I mean humans, obviously,” he says and walks out of the pandal. I follow, wondering whether to laugh. I do, a little, but it’s just to get rid of the uneasiness in me. Even in my most relaxed moments with him, I cannot, in all honesty, ever get used to him referring to humans as something he isn’t.
I feel protective of him as I watch him walk into the throng in the square, as if he might dissolve into it.
—
I take him to a packed Café Coffee Day nearby, though he hates Kolkata’s franchise coffee shops, with their deafening music and blinding lights, their young baristas eternally stunned by their own mandated politeness and their customers’ lack thereof. Surely you don’t need to be half werewolf to have that original opinion, I tell him, and when he is unmoved I ask him for the first time in our admittedly short relationship if something is wrong.
He seems alarmed that I’d ask him that, and he quickly drinks his coffee to cover up that alarm, that slight blush that touched his face. “No,” he says with finality, grimacing at his drip coffee, taken black.
For all the fantasies he’s fed me, this seems the most certain and blatant lie I’ve heard from him.
But I nod along. To ease his mood, I talk about myself, the way he likes. I tell him how much I miss my parents during the puja season, because it reminds me of when they took me pandal-hopping as a child, telling me to pray quietly in front of the idols for a minute before letting me run around dodging the legs of the other visitors, pretending I was Durga chasing the demon bull through a forest and hacking it to bits so the asura revealed its human form. Then we’d go and eat out somewhere like Mocambo or Peter Cat (there weren’t a ton of choices back in the day), followed by a visit to New Market and Nahoum’s, where the floors would be muddy from all the puja shoppers walking in out of the rain, and I’d leave my little fingerprints all over the glass panes of display cases asking for this and that, and my parents, basking in my joy, would splurge on multiple boxes of brownies and fruitcake and whatever else I desired.
“Have you tried going back and establishing contact with them again? Just saying hello?” the stranger asks.
“It’s not like I stopped seeing them. I went over occasionally, but it’s so awkward, so bizarre to talk to the people who created and raised me as if they’re acquaintances that I stopped doing that, even. It was too much to take.”
“You are the one who cut off contact.”
“No. They did, emotionally. I just matched their move.”
“All this over a canceled engagement.” The stranger raises an eyebrow.
“Well, it’s complicated. Families are complicated. History is complicated. Yo
u know.”
“I certainly do, Alok,” he says, looking down at his cup. “So you haven’t spoken to your parents since you stopped visiting. Even though you live in the same city.”
“On the phone sometimes. Not really.”
“You’re hoping that if you wait long enough, they will call you and ask you to come over, and the ice will have melted a little.”
“I suppose. Yes.”
“And the puja season would be a likely time for them to call, considering that they share the same memories of their boy running around pandals and asking for brownies at Nahoum’s.”
I nod, and give him a weak smile. Without even trying, I seem to have matched the stranger’s melancholic mood.
“Your parents haven’t obliged this narrative,” he says. I shake my head.
“You’re their only child. Give it some more time.” I shrug.
He is silent.
Then he says, “Did you know that I actually visited Nahoum and Sons bakery when it first opened its doors in New Market, perhaps a decade or so after the twentieth century began. I met the proprietor, a Jewish gentleman from Baghdad, and shook his hand. I was still getting used to mingling into the populace of a human city, so he didn’t take to my demeanor, but he served me like everyone else who’d lined up. New Market was actually still new back then, its bricks red as a robin’s breast instead of the brown of dried blood.”
I laugh. “Now you’re just making things up. I’m sure you just happened to be at the bakery my parents took me to regularly. When it first opened. In the 1900s.”
The stranger smiles. “No way to tell.”
“No way to tell,” I agree, and sip my mocha.
“Well, we’re not in Nahoum’s,” he says. “But at the very least, let me buy you a brownie this puja season.”
“If you insist.” I shrug and laugh, though to be honest I feel like crying. How could he say something like that in this moment, something so lacking in his mystique, something so sappy and simple? I’m almost sickened by the sentiment. No commiseration, no telling me about whatever utterly strange family life he might or might not have, and yet his appreciation for my matching of his mood, giving him company, is palpable enough to break me.