The Devourers

by Indra Das

  Fenrir knows as it looks me in the eye, it knows that Cyrah burns in me by choice, that she asked to be devoured. That she is now forever devi among the rakshasas and khrissals I have left behind in the country of eighteen tides. Pitiful monster, lonesome exile, unasked-for father. Perhaps it feels a gladness in its two hearts for the first time in centuries.

  Slowly and painfully it sheds the form of its second self, letting it fall to dream. I look upon the false man who cruelly spared his prey death in Mumtazabad, and thus became father. He does not seem worth the mud on Cyrah’s bare feet when she lived. He looks like a defeated, fallen hero from the myths of pale humans from the farthest north. He has been burned by the sun and reddened by our battle, his visage broken and scarred, his long golden hair knotted into shaggy vines. His eyes are different, one grayed by a scar crossing his face, another a blue so bright in his dirty face it becomes iridescent in the early light. He looks at me with these eyes now.

  Even as Fenrir’s second soul retreats into his khrissal form, the worst wounds of the battle remain, his neck torn to shreds and feeding the red water that licks my ankles. “I had a friend called Makedon once,” Fenrir gurgles. He speaks in amalgam. “His throat was cut. I’ve always wondered what it feels like. It itches.” He laughs, convulsing. “He, he told me to let my blood flow, to give my life as penance for. For raping Cyrah. I refused. I refused. He’s dead.” He coughs. His throat whistles.

  As the blood runs off my back and patters off my slick fur, I bend close, the breath of my second self blowing the wet hair off Fenrir’s face. He heaves with shuddered gulps, rapt in the scent of my life as it steams off my fangs and tongue.

  “Please, show me. The other half,” he says.

  Growling, I close my eyes, feel the marks Fenrir has made on my back, my life, Cyrah’s life. I can feel Cyrah whispering from somewhere within the worlds that nestle between my bones, revealed by Fenrir’s claws. I can feel my entire pack watching. Two hearts in me enfold. I open my eyes in the body Cyrah gave birth to, my back flayed by a great wolf, each mark shining in the rising sun. In revulsion and glory I feel Fenrir’s mismatched eyes on me as I stand over him. Every cord of muscle under my skin taut as I hold back the victor, for this moment.

  He nods, slowly, and gets up even though this should be impossible. He can make it only to his knees. He is barely able to speak. “I’ve seen. My son,” he manages, and smiles with his teeth. Not child this time, but son. I want to deny him, but cannot. I too am monster, after all. I know, as Fenrir stares unfailing into my eyes, that he is speaking to Cyrah as well as me. To Cyrah in me.

  “Do it,” Fenrir spits. I let my second self return, a drowned man breaking to the surface. In front of my pack, by the light of new day and the death of old night, I devour a shape-shifter for the first time.

  It is like death.

  —

  A thousand upon thousand deaths and lives burning my self to a husk in that summer morning. I don’t know how far my cries carry across Bengal, whether the humans in their villages look to the horizon and wonder if their world is ending, whether my pain echoes the distant nor’wester spending its rage across the forests and sending its winds howling across the swamps. My pack watches, but does not interfere. It is my choice to do this, to eat of a shape-shifter and risk destruction. They are impassive, even repulsed, by this act. But they are also witnesses to my victory over an ancient hunter, and they are my companions. They are, also, curious.

  I see Fenrir long in secret for human love over and over again, and forget that he has done so over and over again as he devours these men and women he thought himself in love with. I see Fenrir battle a Norse wolf-man gone berserk, and take from him the body he wore till his death, molting into the warrior’s shape over a single night. I see moments older still, memories faded to worn parchment. I see him as woman in dim pasts long lost to him. I see her in ancient tribes, attacked and ostracized by pack-mates for wearing a female first self, until she dwells in barrows alone and drags travelers to their deaths in the sunless days of northern winter. I see her prey, their bloody throats entwined in locks of golden hair that whip away into silvered hide as she springs her second self. I see Fenrir (as him) swallow Fenrir (as her) to nothing over the centuries. I see him live among humans in secret as a Norse mercenary in the Varangian Guard, protecting some long-dead Byzantine emperor, feeding legend by allowing his second self to come free in the battles of human men. I see him marvel at a Thracian woman with the Aegean Sea in her eyes and phoenix-fire in her hair. I see him watch as she runs a spear through one of his human comrades who tried to rape her. I see him fill with pride when his fellow men give her their dead friend’s belongings to honor her bravery. I see him kill and devour that very Thracian woman in the throes of what he thinks is love, not daring to recognize that he, too, could rape like the human man he saw shitting out of a hole in his gut for attempting such an act.

  I see him leave the yellow-haired men of the Varangian Guard and hunt in the streets of Byzantium, eventually return to the tribes. I see him roam with and without packs, as beast and man, watching human love unfold from the fringes of civilizations, carrying between his two selves an envy as heavy and old as passing history.

  Over and over.

  And I see him see Cyrah, in time not so far in the past. I feel her uncoil within me.

  I vomit into the rich soil, my second self twisting and snapping. Flickers of flame run up and down my body, flashing in the heat of this trance. My pack takes the wet mud in their hands, takes the red water, and runs it over my hide to cool me, splashes it into my gaping maw, my weeping eyes. I purge these lives as Cyrah, somehow, somewhere, helps throw them from me. She crushes the single memory of Fenrir fucking her, throws it out from within me, so it lives only on parchment, and in her own memories that she still keeps from me.

  For a day I live as Fenrir and his thousands upon thousands of prey, purging them to stay alive. When I am myself again, I see my reflection in the twilit blood-waters under me, and I see my hide washed of its fire, gone to dark gray and black, to glistering silver that shines with the moon.

  I wear now the colors of the great wolf.

  —

  Over the years, I keep on my second self the dark blacks and grays of the wolf and the bear. Some of my pack-mates imitate me in curiosity, though their mimicries look different. Others keep the brighter colors of the rakshasa tribes alive in our pack.

  I lead my pack out, farther into Bengal. Into the slowly dying Mughal Empire, where once in a far-off town called Mumtazabad a trio of shape-shifters, each from a different land of Europe, walked past a young Persian woman sitting in the courtyard of a caravanserai.

  —

  By the time the Mughal Empire is dead, and Hindustan is under the British Empire, I am alone, an exile with no pack. Cyrah wakes in me, and writes her story as if she still lives and breathes, writes on the skin of a dead baul, a woman I killed. A second scroll.

  —

  Then, in a Hindustan now independent, a nation and republic known to the world as India, in a lodge in the Sundarbans, I hold you, warm and real and wrapped in a crumpled blanket. You of one self and one soul.

  I am truly my father’s son.

  And I am truly my mother’s son.

  When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world. I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, & read by them on earth.

  How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,

  Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

  —WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  I return to civilization alone.

  But I urge you not to think of this as a betrayal on Izrail’s part. No, it didn’t surprise me to wake up on my last morning in the Sundarbans without him by my side, even though I’d wis
hed even in my sleep that it wouldn’t happen that way. I didn’t go around asking everyone if they’d seen my companion, like some desperate and abandoned lover. No, I knew he’d paid for the trip, knew he’d already informed everyone at the lodge right from the beginning that he’d be returning to Kolkata separately by himself. I don’t know if anyone asked how, and it doesn’t matter. He has his ways of persuasion, after all.

  So I went along with it, said my goodbyes to Shankar-babu and his small staff, and took the boat and the car back to the city I grew up in, as was arranged. It was a strange journey, sitting alone in that cabin under the deck, watching forest eventually give way to concrete bridges again; dozing in the car to waking moments of forest and farmland, small village markets by the road, people haggling over bright heaps of fruit and vegetables; leaving those behind, watching the green and farm-yellow landscape sprouting clusters of suburban buildings and billboards, which then unceremoniously gathered into the sprawl of the Kolkata metropolitan area.

  I returned to my apartment tired, so disoriented to be back in the life I once knew, that I was facedown in my bed and asleep before I could even take my shoes off.

  I hope, someday, to see him again. Perhaps molted into someone else, perhaps not. I keep my eyes open as I walk through the streets of Kolkata, as I plow through the crowds on Gariahat and Jadavpur and Park Street and Chowringhee, the places I walked with him.

  Maybe one day, among the millions, I will see Izrail, or Izrail molted into a woman I will know, somehow, as Cyrah. Or I will see nothing at all, except the flash of tusk and claw before a sudden death, before I am made one with this being I’ve shared my life with.

  I am alone once again.

  —

  I have a new pet—a cat, its cloudy white fur spotted with black. It showed up one day without preamble, slinking in through the grilles of my living room windows and looking at me with expectant green eyes, as if I’d always been the person who feeds it. It looks quite obviously familiar to me, considering how I first met the stranger. It might be my imagination. But I’m glad for its—her—company. I don’t name her, calling her variations of Hey, Oi, Aw, and, inevitably, Kitty.

  I teach my classes. Grade papers. Go for coffee on College Street with ever-dependable Gitanjali, who doesn’t deserve as neglectful a friend as me. I even ask her out, finally, in a fit of loneliness over continental breakfast at Flury’s, and she puts to rest any doubts about whether she’s been meeting me all this time in the hope of a romantic relationship. She hasn’t. She nearly brings me to tears by inviting me over to dinner anyway, saying that she’s got my back because we’re both “scarlet-lettered” in Kolkata because of our failed marriages. She says she’ll make vindaloo. I don’t actually cry, but in that moment she blazes like a saint in the morning light pouring in through Flury’s windows. Scarlet-lettered, indeed. I feel an enduring shame for having asked her out. I haven’t taken her up on her offer of dinner yet. I will, or so I tell myself.

  I buy books and read them. Watch movies, sometimes about werewolves. There are very few good ones about werewolves, and even fewer about other shape-shifters. I make a point to rent An American Werewolf in London, and adore that one, though the ending in particular leaves my chest heavy. I read about mythology and folklore, between the histories that I am used to.

  Outside, a storm brews in the cloud-churned sky. Monsoon has arrived again. The curtains billow with damp air like the sails of European ships tumbling on the crests of the Indian Ocean, using monsoon to take them to this far land and its foreign monsters and gods and goddesses. The leaves of the tree by my apartment shimmer in anticipation outside the window, looking in the cloud-twilight like the rustling walls of mangroves.

  I like to imagine that Izrail disappeared into that forest from which he once came, to tear away the gray of his hide, hang it on a tree and burn it, to return the fire and smoke of tiger and rakshasa to his fur before whatever comes next.

  I sit here typing out the story of his life, his mother’s life, his father’s life. A part of my life. I do this to keep the promise I made to him—to finish the work I started, or rather, that he started.

  I feel an anxiety, a yearning that compels me. This is a history that only I can tell. This is our afterlife, should I die the only human audience for this tale. This is a record of the souls Izrail holds in his body, and one, perhaps, that he holds in his heart. This is what we are left with at the end of Fenrir’s Ragnarök, his quest for a new age that culminated in a land far from his own.

  At my feet is the dirty blue-and-black JanSport backpack Izrail left in our room at the Sajpur lodge. I looked through every pocket and zipper on it, and found the following: a very stale cellophane-wrapped brownie that is undoubtedly from Nahoum’s, a mangled white toothbrush, an envelope containing a wad of thousand-rupee bills, a crushed pack of Gold Flake cigarettes, a depleted pack of rolling papers, one and a crumbled half sticks of aromatic hash wrapped in plastic, a straight razor with a mother-of-pearl handle, a broken pencil, an eraser worn down to a small gray nub, a dog-eared book of the poetry and prose of William Blake.

  And, of course, two scrolls of parchment, tied together in twine like mummified stories. There is also a third scroll, separate, by itself.

  I could make my career by giving those scrolls up, but I don’t, of course.

  The third scroll has not been written on except in the script of flesh, the blemishes and scars of the unknown skin it came from, the textures imposed by curing and treating. The scrolls have a powerful, pungent smell that fills the apartment, like leather and soured milk. They lie spread out on my bedroom floor, three uneven swaths of parchment, two burdened with stories, one blank. I don’t know whose skin the third one was created from. It could be Fenrir’s, stripped from his gutted corpse hundreds of years ago by Izrail.

  What happens when you drink the semen of a shape-shifter? Do you give yourself over to wishful thoughts, to dreams of transformation? For all I know, I am not myself, I am dead, consumed by Izrail on that last night in the Sundarbans, resurrected as his new first self. If Fenrir could have molted over one miraculous night under the aurora sloughed off a younger sun, so could Izrail, in one miraculous night sharing the bed of his lifelong prey—maybe that blank scroll is my own skin.

  Or perhaps Izrail has already left the world, given his first self over to the ghost of Cyrah, molted into her somewhere in the emerald country of eighteen tides. Perhaps she is the one who waits to return to me, drawn by some distant memory belonging to her son and devourer. This thought makes me terrified, it makes me sad, because if it’s true I’ll never see Izrail again. But it also gladdens my heart, that such a thing could be true, that I am forever amid the possibility of the impossible, that I might one day meet the woman whose story I lived in these pages.

  I don’t know. Either way, Izrail is gone, and I am here. I must write.

  —

  I grow my hair out, inch by inch till it curls against my shoulders. From Gariahat, I buy a plain white saree, telling the shopkeeper that it’s for my wife. When, night after night, I wear the saree, painstakingly relearning how to wrap it around my body from the Internet, of all places, I look at myself in the mirror and take off my glasses to smear its reflection of reality. I have a disgustingly old tube of lipstick in my desk drawer that I’ve kept since my engagement (and used a few times in between after Shayani left), but I don’t use it. I lack the lithe grace of Izrail’s body and long limbs, his tapering chin and long neck, but looking at myself in that saree without my glasses, my thankfully still-healthy hair, and clean-shaven face, I pass in my eyes for someone who is not a man, is not merely Alok. No, in those moments, I am not merely Alok. Not a second self, but a self, my self, one I’ve been afraid to let breathe for so long. One who drove my parents to remoteness. One whom Shayani couldn’t live with, breaking both our hearts. One I long to be in front of them all one day, their fear be damned. My cat mewls in appreciation at the change, winding her body ’round
my legs so the edge of the saree strokes her spine. I feel my shape shift, if ever so slowly, without the magic Izrail’s kind knows. But his kiss, his saliva and semen and sweat, lingers in me, in my memory, ignites and strengthens me.

  I spend a lot of time looking at myself in those moments, and I feel an inkling of happiness, of some mounting expectation, of pride, a clawing against my heart. I close my eyes and in the darkness tell myself that Izrail is inside me, and so is Cyrah, because I am him, he is me, that he devoured me that night as I devoured him and I am secretly a shape-shifter. Then I open my eyes, and brush away tears.

  —

  From Fenrir to Cyrah. From Cyrah to Izrail. From Izrail to me.

  And now, from me to you.

  Perhaps he just wanted to tell his story, to have people listen till the very end, like I did.

  An end, at the very least.

  —

  I am Cyrah of Lahore. I am Fenrir of the far Norse lands. I am Izrail of the Sundarbans, son of Cyrah and Fenrir, bastard khrissal-werewolf-rakshasa. I am Alok of Kolkata. I give birth in the swamp waters of the country of eighteen tides, guarded from blood-drawn beasts by my closest companion. I slide out of my mother and into the hands of Banbibi’s vahana, in his first self of pale young Frenchman. I am reborn at the end of bitter winter’s long night, kneeling by the carcass of an Úlfhéðinn who nearly killed me. I walk beside a djinn from France, and realize that he has become my most loyal friend. I rape the woman I love, the khrissal I love, the prey I think I love. I am not capable of love. I want to love. I am raped by a false man who is in truth a monster. I am born at Woodlands Nursing Home in Calcutta on a sweltering summer day. I become a goddess among my fellow humans. I take a bowl of milk-soaked rice from a chanting villager who holds it out as prasad to me: Banbibi, Bandurga, Bandevi. I run with my imakhr across wetland and marsh, mangrove and river, and we fuck under the moon as villagers wish away the howl-haunted dark with their tapers. I watch my son change into rakshasa, as I chose for him. I make love to my wife-to-be, huddling close under the blankets to stay the morning light from the windows. I leave the woman I love with my broken pack-mate in the ruins of abandoned Fatehpur Sikri. I leave a human become something else, a khrissal turned Valkyrie, proud and fierce, guarding a fallen warrior. I die at the edge of the Indian Ocean, between land and sea, eaten by my son. I eat my mother down to her bloody bones. I feel Cyrah, my love and prey, consummated and unconsummated, die, not by my hand. I leave lipstick traces on Shayani’s mouth as I kiss her, and know that she’s only pretending to be comfortable. I stand before my son in the swampland that is his home. I stand before my father, shape-shifter to shape-shifter. I see Cyrah in my son’s eyes, and know that it was her own wish to depart the worlds of this earth. I kill my father. I let my son kill me, because I do not remember the human I first sprang from. I kiss a boy named Swapan on a rooftop in Ballygunge Place. I devour my father, my own kind, my own kin, become cannibal, anima-eater, because he is exiled, because I am exiled, because it doesn’t matter anymore. I digest centuries of life, anima shaped in different lands. I sleep the trance of ekh’du at the edge of the ocean, buried deep under salt clay. I watch a stranger come up to me and offer me a hash joint at the baul mela. By the grace of Allah I am reborn in my son. I am reborn under a winter moon in Kolkata as a stranger tells me stories of impossible lives. I am Dionysian. I am Apollonian. I am the great wolf at Ragnarök. I tell my son the story of how he came to be, and I tell it by his hand. I write the story of my mother on the skin of a young baul woman I killed, and thought I loved. I am reborn, in language. I listen to stories whispered in my ear as I sleep. I look at the two scrolls, side by side, wrapped in twine. I killed my parents. I am my mother. I am my father. I am a shape-shifter. I am devi. I am deva. I am sura. I am asura. I am male. I am female. I am neither. I am rakshasa. I am djinn. I am werewolf. I am not a khrissal. I was once a human. I want to be a human. I want to love a human. I am a human.