by Indra Das
I look inside the sackcloth. Nestled inside is a scroll of parchment, made by a shape-shifter.
—
After reading it, I bury the scroll in the forest, in the center of one of the islands. I mark the spot with nothing but my piss, so anyone digging there will have slighted me.
—
The next time I see her, winter has just begun to wane, and she is alone.
I stand at the very edge of the country of eighteen tides, the forest miles behind me. A plain of salt clay stretches before me. It meets the ocean on the horizon, where the falling sun burns and bleeds across the great waters. It is the first time I have seen the open sea, or come this far. I have followed her trail here, through the delta to the end of Hindustan.
Somewhere out there, the cannon-heavy ships of pale-skinned khrissals who call themselves Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, compete on the waves for their futures in this land, occasionally dredging up on the sieve of the Ganga’s mouth, where we hunt them and glean their strange stories, so different from those of the delta people. Though I have dreamed their patchwork lives, learned from their flesh and blood and souls the different ways of this world, I have never before seen with my own senses how massive this orb we all make our stories on truly is. What I see in front of me is but a fraction of it, but it looks like eternity itself.
She looks into that vastness, as if she came from it.
I watch her, small against the wide tidal plain, surrounded by shrieking gulls that pick and feed from the wet ground. Crests of foaming water crash in the distance, a constant thunder in the air.
I follow the glare of the setting sun and walk to her. She turns to look at me.
“Your guardian is gone,” I say to her.
Her face is wet, flushed not just from the carnal red of sunset but from crying. She smiles.
“Yes. He was never at home here. He was lonely, like I am. Even though we always had each other. I knew that, even if he could never admit it, even if he couldn’t face the fact that one way or the other, he couldn’t care for me forever. I’ve never before known loyalty like his.”
“If he cared so much for you, why has he fled, leaving you ready prey to his kind?”
She looks disappointed that I would ask such a question, her brow furrowing. The cloak shifts on her shoulders, heavy but stirred by the hurtling damp wind from the ocean. She shakes her head.
“He did not flee, young rakshasa. I told him to leave. I demanded it. It wasn’t an easy thing for him to do, but he has respected my wishes. Jevah-dan has journeyed beyond the delta, and, I hope, will one day return to his home of France.”
I spit at her feet. “Your friendship is an abomination. You are his prey.”
She takes off her cowl, her hair lashing out across her face as if in anger. Then she slaps me, hard, on the cheek. In that second when she raises her arm I see it coming, and am compelled by instinct to grab her limb and snap it like a twig, but something keeps me from doing so. The crack of it echoes in my skull as her nails rake past the edge of my chin. The blow does not hurt me, but the shock of it is tremendous, makes me stagger back. She is still a khrissal, goddess or no.
“I am prey to you all: to your father, to my dearest friend, to you, my son,” she says.
I bare my teeth. “You’re not my mother.”
She bites her lower lip. I see tiny jewels of blood emerge in the seams left by her teeth. “Then kill me. Devour me,” she says. I see her shivering in the cold wall of knotted air rushing over the desolate sun-churned sea. Somewhere above the thin dark line of forest far behind us, a half-moon waits.
Piss runs down my thighs, spatters and hisses in the silt. The gulls scream and recoil from us, from the vapors of my spoor. I can feel the change coming, but again, again that doubt congeals the membrane between my souls, stifling their separation, sending a crawling ache deep through my chest.
“I’m your prey. Do what you were born to do. Destroy me,” she says.
“Why?” I say between gnashing teeth, spittle spraying against her. She doesn’t even blink, doesn’t back away as I loom over her, my jaws inches from her forehead.
“Why not? I can’t go back to humanity’s shores. And I don’t belong here, either. If I had kept you as my son, I could have gone back, could have tried to make a life for us both somewhere. But I didn’t. I made my choice. I have seen you safely to adulthood, even if it is the adulthood of a creature not human. And I shouldn’t regret that. You’re far stronger this way.”
Still I let her speak, am drawn to her words, want them to keep falling against my ears in that soft, abhorrent, human voice.
“What have you done to me, khrissal? Have you cast a spell on me? Are you truly some devi of your people? You…you really are Banbibi,” I say, my hackles rising, breath blowing the hair from out of her eyes, drying the traces of tears from her cheekbones.
“My dear boy,” she says, her eyes widening. Her small hands hold my wrists, tight so I don’t shake them off, though I could, easily. But again, I don’t. “I’ve cast nothing on you, nothing at all. I’m no devi. I have no powers. I should have died the moment I met Fenrir, or become a shape-changer myself. And I do not want to become a shape-changer. I thought I did, once. The thoughts of a young woman. But devour me now, and perhaps I’ll always be Banbibi, never aging, never seen. I’ve lived my life like no human, and now I can’t die like a human of old age, not alone and mired between worlds.”
I retch, drooling slime at her feet. Her hands stroke my arms. Once again, I feel her fingers against my cheek.
“Don’t be scared. They’re coming. We had a pact, because I gave you to them. Jevah-dan negotiated it. But Jevah-dan is gone now. Our pack of two is gone. They won’t abide by the pact anymore. So I’m dead anyway. You’ll be the hero of your tribe, the one who slew this human avatar of Banbibi, khrissal who wormed her way into living among the rakshasas in their realm, and helped your tribe’s prey escape from them and suffered no consequence for it. Let go, my love. Let your second self out. I’m here, unprotected.”
She’s right. I can feel it in my guts and in my head, the approach of my pack-mates and my imakhr. They have followed. They are coming. Miles away, I see the forest disgorge dark shapes that speed across the silt plain.
The sun shatters through clouds clinging to the edge of the ocean, its million shining pieces flung across the leagues of water, carried from the crests of surf by wind and thrown to burn in her black hair, turning it bloody gold. From over the far forest, darkness creeps across the wetland, as if brought by the advancing harbingers of my tribe. I can feel the rumble of their clawed feet and lashing of their long tails in the soles of my feet.
Her thumb brushes across my cheekbone. I fall to my knees in front of her like a wretched devotee, as if I am my father the exile, author of that accursed scroll, pitiful rakshasa from Europe who gave himself to a khrissal, who spun off the thread of time that ends here between the sinking sun and the floating moon, the ocean and the land.
They’re coming. Her guardian is gone. They will kill her when they arrive. I realize with sudden clarity that I have to be the one to kill her; that I cannot let any of the others touch her or eat of her. I must be the one. I must. I look up into her, and I know she sees this in my eyes.
There is time yet.
She nods, and smiles at me. Blood on her lips, salt water in her eyes. Even though she is shivering, there is no fear in her. I would smell it if there was. I let my second self emerge.
—
For a moment I don’t know where I am, for a moment I still feel an ocean wind in my eyes, still feel the blood of a human demigoddess in my mouth. We’re walking across the field by the forest, heading toward the raised dirt road. I stagger and spit copious, bitter saliva into the furrows of the field, almost falling into the hard stalks sticking out of them. Izrail steadies me with his strong hand, and already has a shawl ready to wrap around my shoulders.
I take deep breaths, as he onc
e told me to. Pins and needles prickle across my limbs. I look back at the blackening wall of the forest against the rich pink sky.
“We were in there all day?”
“Don’t worry, I told Shankar-babu we’d be gone all day. I convinced him we wouldn’t wander off and die. They’re not going to send search parties. Not yet, anyway. We should be getting back now.”
I stare at him.
He smiles, reassuring. “I know. Come. We’ll talk about it later.”
I look again at the forest. The setting sun twinkles between the leaves of the uppermost canopy. In the dense dark between the tree trunks, I sense the shape-shifters watch us depart their realm. I can see nothing, hear nothing of them. But they are there, as real as the insects hammering my skin in the dimming dusk air.
I feel Izrail’s hand at my wrist. “Come,” he says. I look at his eyes. They are dark. There is no green there. He looks weary, and his cheeks, I am shocked to notice, are damp. I nod, and walk alongside him as we return to the road. The forest glowering at our backs, my head spinning from the span of lifetimes I have just lived, I feel like silence is, perhaps, the only conversation for now.
On the road, we see a twinkling line of lanterns in the distance, returning to the village. I hope to myself that it is the honey-gatherers, returned from the deep forest safe and alive.
We eat dinner in haste, tolerating Shankar-babu’s conversation, giving brief words of explanation about being tired from our long walk around the island. He laughs and asks if we saw any tigers, and we say that we didn’t. We are bid good night, and we retreat into the darkness beyond the dining room, the electricity gone again for the night. We hurry upstairs to our room, shut and lock the door with the rattling rusty dead bolt. Izrail unwraps the sticky whiskey bottle full of honey. We both drink from it, and in silence we kiss with our sweetened mouths, hungry, drawn to each other after the day gone by in that dream-filled forest. By the dim glow of the hurricane lamp, we make love, slow and patient. Again he never comes himself, only bringing me to climax, never asking to be fucked by me.
Again he devours me, licking every spilled part of me like a benign monster.
—
When I kill my mother, I am a shape-shifter, rakshasa, strong and bold, with a second self to make even the bravest of khrissals run from me.
But I am still a child who does not know what it is to have a mother, or a father, and finds that it has both.
Or, in the case of my mother, had. She was khrissal, but she did not run. She did not run from me.
I am slow, sluggish from devouring an entire human body so quickly, with such ravenous desperation. I am surrounded now by my pack, who watch in their first selves. My imakhr leads them.
When she sees me crouched over the stripped bones of Banbibi’s human avatar, her brief smile is one of regret. Perhaps she thought she could hide my bastard birth from me all my life, protect me from the curse I carry.
She looks at Cyrah’s bones with something approaching fear. The bones of a human goddess. But she approaches despite this, and squats near me, her legs spread wide to let the trinkets hanging from under her thighs show. The baby teeth that fell out of my mouth as I grew faster than any human into the shape of a boy and then a man, burned like tiny pearls into the lines of her imakhr tattoos, shards of tusk and bone and shell hanging off wire and string entwined into scarred bumps, tracing the history of the first animals I ever hunted by myself. I remember clinging to that body as a growing rakshasa in the shape of a human child, hunting with tools as she showed me, yearning for the day I could free my second self, touching and kissing it in mimicry of khrissal sexual ritual right before fucking our second selves when I was grown. Memories poisoned by the khrissal I have just eaten of.
I wait, refuse to react until my imakhr does. Cyrah’s remains between us. I want her to embrace me, to comfort me, to give me explication, forgiveness for taking Banbibi’s death from our pack, for taking it as my own.
But I know better. I may be Banbibi’s devourer, but I am no hero, because I am also Banbibi’s son. My imakhr knows me too well. Perhaps she was only waiting for this day, as Banbibi circled our territories on the back of her European vahana, lurking in wait to take back what used to be her son.
I reach out for my imakhr’s face, to give her contact, to let her taste Cyrah’s blood on my hands. But she grabs my wrist and bites it, quick, and shoves me back. I look at the imprinted half-moon in my flesh. She will have no leftovers. I have kept my tribe from tasting this human goddess, from kindling and sharing her ghost fire.
She gets up. I try to stagger up as well, but she kicks my face and stamps on Cyrah’s ribs.
The sound of Cyrah’s bones breaking under my imakhr’s mud-caked feet.
I leap. My hand cracks against the mouth that fed me as an infant, that kissed me and pleasured me.
My nails have left dark slashes across her cheek. She steps back. Her expression doesn’t change. A bead of red oozes from the corner of her mouth. She spits on me. She licks her dark lips, doesn’t touch her ripped cheek.
She shakes her head, because she knows. I am changed forever. I have tasted the human life that created the body I wear.
There under the new stars, my imakhr springs her second self. The first falls away a sheath of digested dream. Her second self rises on its hind legs and towers over the beach like a hill thrust out from the sea-damp sand. In that moment it has chosen to bear male and female genitals both, and looming over me it displays the twin rows of flaccid teats running down its massive torso, framed by the embroidery of old bones burned into its skin. A reminder, that I have no mother, no father. Only imakhr. Only pack and tribe. To remind me that I once hung off those swollen teats as a human infant, a pale khrissal maggot stuck to the belly of this gigantic, gorgeous rakshasa, feeding on the oily soma of swallowed souls as it turned me more than human with each suckling breath I took, as it killed that little human being Cyrah gave birth to and began to create what I am now.
I kneel in my imakhr’s shadow, desolate. Cyrah’s blood dries under the burning breath of the rakshasa that raised me. It lowers its huge head to my torso, a gesture of affection. Its flowing mane snaps in the wind. With its tusks it disembowels me, spilling my entrails on my mother’s bones.
Then my imakhr is her first self again. She bends over me as I cradle my own insides, tears and blood drenching my lips. She holds her hand to my bloody mouth, twitches her head toward her wrist. I look into her eyes. She nods. I hold her wrist and bite her flesh, one last time, letting my teeth scrape blood onto my tongue.
In those droplets, my imakhr leaves her first memory of me. Ripening khrissal baby wrapped in palm leaf ripped fresh from the trees and European fabric from a French shape-shifter’s fardels. Held out in the hands of Cyrah, her face set rock-hard in resolve but eyes red as a rakshasa’s from wiped tears, her companion and negotiator Gévaudan hovering by her shoulder like a ghost. It is a memory my imakhr has never let me experience before, in the innumerable times we have shared our blood, flesh, and humors. The last living moments of the true human being that became me, dappled by sunlight through the leaves, passed from the hands of a mother and into the hands of an imakhr.
I open my eyes and she is walking away down the mudflats, her hair now a sheet of black fire, her feet bare and small on the sand. My imakhr departs with her pack. I used to be a part of that pack. She leaves me to mend myself with my mother’s fresh-devoured flesh, to punish me for my betrayal.
I watch her go, crying blood and bile from my mouth. I watch till she is miles away, watch till she walks into the trees naked, letting the verdant tongues of the forest lap her into the dark.
—
I gather my guts off the ground, the spilled remnants of a life suddenly in the past, already swarming with the insects of the beach. I feel them inside me, crawling and darting in hungry panic. How things change.
I make a torch of broken driftwood and burn the great gash my imakhr left on me
, stitching it with string made from my own gut and sealing it with my own weeping fat. Vomiting and pissing, I sink into damp ground and lie on the beach as gulls peck at my body and little leaping crabs explore the earthly legacy of my mother. I feel fallen, human. I don’t know what that feels like, and yet I feel it, in this misery of mortal pain and confusion.
I capture the gulls and eat them, wet white feathers clinging to my skin. For days I lie there, Cyrah’s life coursing through my agonized human shape, in a fever so scorching that I become in dream’s eye a pyre at the edge of the ocean, and see Cyrah’s bones glow with a faint green flame at night. The sun rises and sets, dancing with the moon that shifts its shape with shadow and light. Far away, I see the glimmering eyes of my pack-mates watching. But I am alone. I have never known what it is to be alone. I call to my mother, my dead, human mother, like a dying khrissal child, and it is the most pitiful experience I have ever known in my short life.
—
When I am able to walk again, I gather Cyrah’s bones, stripped clean by salt sea and air, by the days I have lain by them. I choose some of her teeth, and the porous shards of her disconnected fingers, her broken knuckles, and I make them a part of my skin with fire. Newly pierced, fingers still stained with pus, I wash myself in the foam of the tide, snatch the streaks of fish from churning water and eat their silvered flesh with my bare hands.
A smile on my face after what seems an eternity, I piss in the sand and make the ground steam, swallow half my tongue and ululate at the sunrise slicing the horizon. I watch as a wild boar comes to me across the miles of mudflat, galloping with abandon. I pound the ground with my fist, calling it to me with glamour, standing within the yellowed ivory crown of Cyrah’s skeleton spread across the sand and silt. It takes it a long time, but it doesn’t stop running. I wait.