The Devourers

by Indra Das

  “I’m sorry, beast,” I say as I usher the panting animal to me. As it runs, it showers spit and water behind it in a rage. “You are a low thing, but I should have hunted you. You deserve that much. But I cannot leave these bones. I am sorry,” I tell it as it attacks me, charges toward my scarred gut, just healed. I am too quick, and grab its tusks in my hands, whipping its hoofed legs off the ground and snapping its back with the force of its own weight. Landing heavy by me, it drools death into the wetland. The gulls speak their awful language over us.

  As always, my pack watches from afar. I know my imakhr will not be among those watching. I eat the boar’s flesh, tear off its bloody skin, wash the hide in the sea. I take every bone that once anchored Cyrah’s body and soul to this world, and I gather them in the skin of the boar. Knotting this sack in twine from the animal’s guts, I sling it from my neck. For a human, the bones would be surprisingly heavy.

  I look to the forest I grew up in. My pack, my kin, waiting. Waiting with dread, disgust, curiosity.

  Bastard thing, son of Banbibi, eater of Banbibi.

  Khrissal-rakshasa.

  Khrissal-rakshasa-kveldulf.

  I can feel their fear, from far away.

  I reach over, the wooden bed frame groaning. I touch Izrail’s bare back, tracing the furrows of scar tissue that whiplash him from shoulders to buttocks. As if he’d once been mauled by a wild animal. He turns. His body is cold, and damp with sweat or dew. I kiss him, giddy with broken sleep, a teenager again. “How are we still here? It’s not morning still,” I ask him, and he silences me by licking my mouth. “Sometimes we wake and wake, and one night becomes a thousand, each dream a life lived,” he says. Where did his bone trophies go? Centuries of history inscribed on him. I could live with this being beside me for the rest of my life and never tire of him, never know enough. But would I be a historian or a lover to him? He reads my silence, and speaks.

  “Don’t even listen to me, Alok. I can’t believe I’m here, with a human in my bed. It is as much a strange dream for me as it is for you. I’ll make this night last,” he says, eyes taking in the brittle light from the window. His hair falls against my face, black fire thrown from his head.

  —

  And so it is that I leave the country of eighteen tides, my home. Wrapped in a langota, wearing the crown of a tiger’s skull, pelt draped across my back and sacks lashed to my shoulders, long hair oiled with coconut and tucked under the teeth of the dead animal, skin cleaned of mud, Cyrah’s canines in my earlobes, I venture forth as man.

  I am followed by those rakshasas who seek a new life outside the forest, those who want to bear witness to a new age, who want to see what lies beyond the delta with their own eyes and not the memories of their prey. They follow on the trail of my scent, my intent, wearing their first selves of men and women. Curious, willing defectors.

  I carry with me the scroll Fenrir handed to my mother, who handed it down to me.

  I carry with me my mother’s bones.

  “You didn’t want to kill me that night at the baul mela, did you?” I ask Izrail in bed.

  “There is easier and less incongruous human prey on the streets of Kolkata than a middle-class college professor.”

  The room wavers with the light of the hurricane lamp, now lit again. Perhaps because of it, I can hear the insects drumming on the glass panes of the shutters.

  “Then why did you bring me here to kill me?”

  He turns to look at me. I look at the very small notch of scar bisecting the arch of his right eyebrow, and wonder who gave it to him. Or what. His chest rises and falls. His fingers brush against the pulse in my wrist.

  “Humans see through me, Alok. They spend enough time with me and they see a predator, they see something they don’t even believe in, and they run as far as they can, hoping never to see me again.”

  “I saw that, too. I think.”

  “Yes. And you didn’t run. I’ve had listeners before, but never one who stayed till the end. When you stayed, kept listening, I didn’t know what to do.”

  “You always seemed so in control. So confident.”

  “It was an act. Smoke and mirrors, to keep you interested. I panicked. When I panic, Alok, my instinct as a hunter is to kill. I thought it might be the only way to preserve what had happened. What has happened. You remind me of Cyrah. You’re not afraid of me.”

  “Like that baul girl by the campfire reminded you of Cyrah.”

  He shakes his head. “That was delusion, not remembrance. After I devoured Cyrah, I tried to change my first self into her body, by sleeping the trance of ekh’du. To bring her back, in a way, because I had never felt sadness for killing a human before.”

  “Looking at you now, I’m going to guess it didn’t work.”

  He nods. “My human shape remained as it always was, the body Cyrah and Fenrir gave me. But Cyrah’s presence remained, like no other prey before her. I could feel her inside me, as if still alive.”

  “Like a ghost.”

  He nods. “What other human has managed to become both devi and ghost, to so leave behind the human without becoming a shape-shifter? Cyrah is the first and only human that I know of who has asked to be killed and eaten by my kind. I think this gave her power over me.”

  “And you wrote her life down, as her.”

  “I would write in a trance, and wake to see her story in front of me. I waited for it, every day. And then one day she was finished. She was gone again. Leaving me her tale, as if told by a human woman to her human son.”

  I touch him, putting my hand on his neck, my thumb on his throat, the most vulnerable part of him, unable to express myself in any other way right then.

  “Is she still there in some way, in your head?”

  “Every human life I’ve ever devoured is still there. They’re like dreams. I don’t remember most of them, but some linger, many taught me much of the world. But no, Cyrah is not there in the way she was when she wrote her story through me.”

  “Do you wish you’d known her?”

  “I know her better than any human son can ever know his mother, Alok.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He purses his lips, runs a hand over his face. “Yes,” he says. “Two hundred years ago I would never have admitted that to myself, let alone to someone else.”

  “Two hundred years ago you wouldn’t have been in bed with a human, either.”

  “Took me long enough,” he says, still touching his own face. I wonder what he feels under his fingers, whether it is the face of his mother. “Do you like fucking me?” he asks me, staring at the ceiling.

  “Don’t tell me you’re insecure now. Rakshasa of the Sundarbans.”

  “Curious. You were engaged to a woman,” he says.

  “I’ve had sex with men before.”

  “I can tell.” He smiles. “Do you prefer women?” he asks.

  “I don’t prefer anything. I’m all right with a human being lying next to me at night.”

  “I’m not human.”

  “So you keep telling me, Izrail.”

  “Does it irritate you that I do that?”

  “How could it? You’re not supposed to exist. How can that evoke as mundane a reaction as irritation?”

  He smiles, and I imagine it is the smile that Cyrah gave him right before he let out his second self and ended her extraordinary life.

  “Well. I’m sorry,” he says under his breath.

  I wonder what exactly he’s apologizing for. I wonder if it’s the first time I’ve heard him say sorry to me. I wonder if it’s the first time he’s ever said sorry to anyone.

  “Why did you have me type out the scrolls, Izrail?”

  “Alok.” He looks at me. “The fact that I’m here, lying next to you, that you’re alive. It means that maybe, just maybe, someday I’ll stop being a hunter. A rakshasa, man-eater, half werewolf, whatever—the proud thing I was, am. When that happens, I’ll start to age slowly, and to forget. To forget the live
s I hold in me.”

  “Isn’t that what you want?”

  “I don’t want those lives to vanish as if they never existed. I wouldn’t be here lying next to you, if it weren’t for Cyrah and even Fenrir. The Pashto on the scrolls can be read and translated, but the amalgam can’t. I want it all in one place before I forget.”

  “A history,” I say, humbled.

  “I’ve been confused a long time, Alok. The hide of my second self is still gray, the snow and shadow of the evening wolf, not the fire and smoke of the rakshasa. But meeting you has made me realize that I didn’t give Cyrah enough credit for sacrificing herself to me. I didn’t understand that she did it for a reason other than just loneliness. She took a risk. She became a part of me, dormant, until one day she could come back in another time, another world.”

  “Come back. You think she’s going to possess you again?”

  “Before I forget this existence and put my second self to rest, I want to try and molt one last time. And when I do, I believe I will rise as Cyrah. Not werewolf, not rakshasa. Human, woman. And that thought, it doesn’t scare me.”

  Someday, I’ll stop being a hunter. But not today.

  “Well, it scares me. I know Cyrah’s stories. I marvel at her, through you. But I don’t know her. I know you.”

  He touches my mouth, fingers drifting down my chin, warm palm on my throat. “There’s nothing to be scared of anymore. Someday isn’t today, and even shape-shifters know nothing, ultimately. But I know something other shape-shifters don’t, because of you.”

  I smile at him, at the effort he’s making.

  “You were saying that no one has ever stayed to listen till the end of your story.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I have. So, is this the end?”

  “For now, yes.”

  “You’re going to leave and disappear, aren’t you? Like any worthy mysterious stranger.”

  “I’m not a stranger anymore.” But he doesn’t answer my question, instead raising his hands to my face and kissing me.

  This time, he guides my hand to his cock until his face softens, his mouth slack with a vulnerability that I’ve never seen on him. “Alok. Human though you are.” He smiles as I clutch him harder, work my hand faster. “I want you to devour me,” he says, and though this is a ridiculous thing to say, his words are weighed with the sublimity of all our potential endings, and I smile as I lower my head and eagerly take him in my mouth as he did for me so many times. For the first time, he comes in me and I devour him as he shudders on the creaking bed. It burns in my throat, my gut, like alcohol, like acid, like the blood of some prophet imbued with divine flame. My tongue tingling, I could kiss him forever on his changed mouth, his face. I do, for mere minutes.

  This time, he asks me to fuck him. So I unzip my bag, take out a squashed cardboard box of Japanese condoms bought at a hawker’s stall on Park Street, and I do. We make love one last time in this country of eighteen tides, his homeland, as somewhere in the darkness the rakshasas watch the glow of our windows from the sundaris and mangroves, their spiny tails lashing, their eyes fireflies amid the leaves.

  As his back arches, ribs and shoulder blades sliding under the sheath of lamplit muscle and skin, long hair tumbling unruly down across the valley of his spine, he is again Izrail and Cyrah both, and this thought makes the lifetimes I have experienced through this creature cascade across me like a tide. My body shudders under his, and I come into him, crying out like a man speared through the chest.

  —

  The storm returns, eventually. That is the way the world turns.

  In summer’s dusk on the swamplands beyond the delta, the dimming air rains with insects. Grasshoppers, crickets, beetles, moths, cockroaches, flies, mosquitoes, rippling across the shallows. They gather on the spined hides of our second selves in rustling cloaks, many-winged armor that bristles around our bone trophies and piercings. I sit quiet and let them gather in droves on me as the sun sets, until I am as a mound of earth amid the brakes of sweet cane grass, the million legs and fluttering wings over me picking blood and dirt from my fur as my claws sink into the brackish ground like the heavy roots of the trees around me.

  I become part of the planet, and digest the memories of all the khrissals I’ve devoured, feel the vibrations of other lands and kingdoms and empires across the orb of the world, those foreign shores that Fenrir once wrote of, and hailed from. Across forest and marsh I see the shapes of my pack crouched in their second selves, dotting the Bengal plain, meditating by the glimmering ghost fires of their human prey. In such moments I think I am king of a great court, a king of wolves in a land of tigers, and Cyrah is goddess and queen, empress of all these lands, using my two bodies as her palace of bones and meat. It is a strange rule, but it brings an imperfect peace to my inconstant souls, a temporary calm that has eluded me since Cyrah-Banbibi came to me and gave me her stories on that winter night in the delta.

  As the day melts from dusk to night with the stars coming out and the caravans tinkling miles away, I feel something different in the air, sense something I cannot place. Thunder in the distance, though I see no lightning.

  I search the horizon. Our hunt is over on this day, and we have raided a caravan. The wisping ghost fires of souls unchained from flesh light the jaws of my pack, presenting the illusion of a khrissal city in the falling dark: a city of the dead. I hear a chital dance through these lights in delight, and hear it fall to tooth and claw thrashing in the oil-black mud and water. I raise my hackles, lift my head to the breeze to cast my senses farther afield to the edge of our territory, where travelers pass, their own earthy fires encased in lanterns, diamonds hung on the threads of their caravans as they weave through Bengal.

  The tinkling of bells on their cows and oxen sends me into a trance. I think I hear Cyrah speaking to me from afar, her voice on the wind.

  And then my eyes snap open, and I see it.

  I see among my land, among my kingdom, an unfamiliar hillock that heaves with the breeze on the horizon, one that begins to reek in my mind under the bright eyes of the Great Bear. I see the shapes of my companions stir with me, but I let them know to keep back as I bound across the marshland toward that strange shape as the sun burns in the trees at world’s edge, doused by the milk and water of the rising moon’s light. My two hearts pound war drums for Cyrah as I approach the shape amid the cane grass, and I slow down. The hill sways and groans, the grass on its back snapping in the dying sun.

  I let my throat open, let the rattle turn into a deep growl, let my spines stand.

  The hill changes. Among the fireflies are lit two great lamps of green fire, and they are eyes. Barren stalks and branches wave into bladed spines. It rises out of the mud on four bent pillars, sucking the ground up with it, its grass rippling and changing color in the dimness, fading to dark black and gray. The fireflies rise off it like sparks. It is a shape-shifter in its second self, with skill greater than mine. Though its form has a throat and mouth unsuited to human languages, it opens its maw and lows a single Farsi word, elongated and barely deciphered: << farzand. >> It speaks, revealing fangs the size of elephants’ tusks, its ragged tongue shedding boiling spit into the ground, its forest of bone trophies sounding among its tangled hide, and it calls me its child.

  Without warning I am face-to-face with my father, slouching out of nowhere stinking of me.

  —

  We are ringed all around by my pack. But I keep them back. Fenrir attacks me. It is larger and older, but I am quicker, and bound away wearing the stripes of tiger. Somewhere over Bengal the sky opens and washes the land with rain. High winds whirl dervish-like with robes of cloud across the earth in thunder that calls far away. Lightning cracks the edge of the world, rewriting the vanishing sunlight.

  It calls me its child and attacks me, and I know from the longing it trails, I know from every bead of musk that clings to the strands of its fur as dew clings to blades of grass. I know it smells Cyrah still burning within m
e, just as I hear her whispering to me just out of reach, and it knows that I have killed her. It shakes its dark gray mane as if nodding, agreeing. A misshapen fool, a monster that wants vengeance for the death of a woman it raped.

  I reveal my own fangs, to mirror its display. It tears the earth stomping, its rage shaking the ground. A roar erupts across the marshland, sending a veil of birds to clothe the sky and speckle the storm-flickers to the north. I take my chance at this unnecessary show, lashing across swamp water and grass, soaring to meet Fenrir. My tusked maw closes around the great wolf’s singing throat, a vise of cruel bone. I silence its war cry even as the scythes of its clawed hands rake trenches in my hide and meat. Our mingled blood hisses and rains across the swamp water. The panicked birds rush across approaching dark screaming, and the ground hums with the stamping of my pack all around lighting new night with their eyes. Fenrir and I embrace, just as he and Gévaudan once held each other close, drunk on their own bloodletting in the distant, empty city of Fatehpur Sikri. I ignore the chasms of fire opening across my back under Fenrir’s claws, and keep my jaws shut on its thick neck, letting each tooth snag on sinew, tying a knot between me and my father, a bond that cannot be broken. I drink of Fenrir, and Fenrir drinks of me. When the moon has crossed the sky and the sun is lit again in the east, when our shed blood running from Fenrir’s throat and my back has cut a crimson stream across the earth of the marshy plain, I let go of Fenrir and let him crash into the dark waves.

  Fenrir’s second self becomes as a hillock again. Panting, I look at the great wolf fallen, though it looks like no wolf or animal on earth, no more than my second self looks like a tiger though it wears its colors. My pack are phantoms against the rising sun, shades of human man and woman. The insects have returned, drawn by the powerful taste of this opened being, and they crawl over it thick, dying in the breath of its open mouth. Fenrir’s maw yawns in pain, and I lower my head to it. Our tusked teeth clatter in the dawn, raising sparks, and our tongues lap our shared blood and spit. Our eyes meet, guttering with sunrise.