The Devourers

by Indra Das

My part in this story began the winter before winters started getting warmer, on a full-moon night so bright you could see your own shadow on an unlit rooftop.

He takes out his own hash joint. I glance sideways at him as he lights up. The flame illuminates a slender face, its glow running along hairless skin and brushing against the lines of shadow that hug his high cheekbones. I’m disarmed by his androgynous beauty before he even tells his secret.

“Need a light?” he asks, and I’m startled to find a new flame between his fingers, the hiss of the struck match reaching my ears like an afterthought. Afraid that I’ve been caught staring at his dirty toes and beautiful face, I nod, even though there’s a lighter in my breast pocket. He touches the flame to my cigarette.

I feel a mix of resentment and pleasure from being called young by someone who looks younger than me.

Minstrels’ feet thump on the stage like drumbeats, twins to the sharper pulse of their dugi drums and tremulous drone of the one-stringed ektara. Their saffron robes are ribbons of sound, twirling around their bark-burnt bodies as they dance, their madness set aflame by their own music.

It is cloudy, the moonlight diffuse as it sparkles on the stretches of water hiding under the reeds. The darkness is oppressive.

Her hair is so black, it melts into the night.

She smelled of the stale sweat of travel, of the rich green of sleeping on grass, of the slick of oil on her lips from the roti and sabzi she had eaten before sleeping.

The first kill is silent as our running, a glistening whisper of crimson in the air. The last is louder than the baying of a wolf, and rings like the bauls’ mad song across the marshes of what is not yet Kolkata.

And, Professor, I am merely showing you the benefits of rationalizing a story. There are none. Stories are fiction. Made up.” “You told me that story was true,” I remark, feeling smug. “It is.”

“Werewolf is one word. A European one. We’ve been called many, many things. You can call me anything you like. The shape-shifter is a common thing in the end, and our stories are told here as everywhere else.”

“You know what distinguishes us from the dogs out there?” he asks me. I nod, despite myself. I want to give him a laundry list of things, but I don’t. “We can tell stories,” I say instead.

I can smell the stranger now, as if his storytelling has worked him into a sweat. A smell that on anyone else would make me hold my breath. On him it feels alluring, like the smell of my own sweat on summer nights, sublimating on skin flushed with arousal, pooling in my armpits.

And there were, and still are, tribes who are not human, who identify with humans in similar ways. Who take the shape of humans, just as humans took the shape of animals by wearing skins.”

The stranger speaks, or chants, and it sounds like English. But his accent seems different now, more guttural. I can almost hear other tongues behind his voice, like the overlapping tones of a throat singer’s song.

His fingers are stained with the new red on his lips as well. I see a dead rat by his feet, neatly slit open, though it could be lipstick on the stranger’s mouth.

“If I didn’t trust you, I’d swear you’ve drugged me somehow,” I tell him. “It’s probably unwise to trust me, so you can swear all you like.”

I feel a comfort from his presence as he taps his long fingers against his glass of hot chai, opaque with milk. A comfort, even though he looks at me like I’m a pet, scarfing up the food he’s just poured into my dish.

The refusal to play his part in this human ritual disturbs me.

“Because that would be tawdry. Sometimes intimacy is the only way real magic works.”

Leave, if you think the only way to achieve intimacy is dry custom, the exchange of facts and labels, names and professions. Intimacy lies in the body and the soul, in scent, in touch and taste and sound. A man whose name you don’t know can tell you a tale to move you to tears, just by filling and emptying his lungs, by moving his tongue and lips, his fingers.

“I’ve honestly never felt anything like it in my life. It felt like you shared a bit of lost time with me, shared the memories of something that can’t—shouldn’t—exist, like you had it hidden under that kurta of yours and just, I don’t know, gave it to me.”

I’ve tended to think of him as the stranger. I am a stranger to him. But I can’t shake the feeling that he somehow already knows more about me from two conversations than many of my alleged friends do.

You looked at me, stared at me and my companions clad in strange furs and tunics so foreign, and your eyes seemed to me like no eyes I had ever seen north of the Indus. Yes, you looked at me and I wished you were not human, that I could cleave your soul in two and watch your second self emerge, a beast as lovely as your first.

We share the pieces of his life as his stories evaporate, his ghost fire invisible to his fellow humans who toil for the emperor of this land.

But it is always the strange intimacies of humans, differently expressed yet prevalent across all their empires and lands, observed in the darkest hours of night, that stick with me and stir my appetites in unexpected ways.

They have a fire in them, I’ll give them that; no other animal has it, this Promethean fire. And I will forever cherish the taste of that fire dancing on my tongue. Oh yes, there is no substitute. But it is ultimately a destructive flame, and eventually it will consume the planet and turn it to ashes.

In hinterland of Raska wanders A boy with a cunt, Hounded from home, now parents dead, this one revealed by love: Branded abomination with bruise and burn, Ugly with pain. I watch, follow, eat whole this Child, sweet. Now I am abomination, their fear Returned, I grow my nails and weigh my wattles with stone in skin, chisel my teeth So they see their abomination Better before I eat them in second self. And so I am judged beautiful by pack hag.

Nothing too surprising in and around a city, terror and loneliness bleached to mundanity in newsprint, dulled by repetition.

You think yourself old. I ate of sacrificial children on the altars of Arcadia before even Europe came to be, before that tricksy carpenter of Bethlehem died to conjure a new god for the nations to come.

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?”

But if I’m dancing with a trickster, I’m nothing if not awed by each step, each move. He’s leading, with skill.

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.

“Your teeth are sharp stones, dulled by civilization,” said Gévaudan.

“My life is my own to gamble. Tell me what your stake is here. Take off my blindfold. If we’re to play a game, let us play it together at the very least.”

Perhaps this is a fable, even though it is true; perhaps this world I stumbled into when I met your father and his companions is the place where fables come from.

The smell of it was overpowering. It smelled like birth, the birth of god or demon, raw and animal and steaming in the morning air. Sweet and musk, like frankincense and myrrh; heavy and pungent, like the juice of living things, blood and piss, sweat and spit; rancid and fecund, like waste, shit, and earth. It stank of both life and death, both so intoxicating I found myself flushed with my own blood, my heart aching.

You should leave these white folk behind. They are wild and not of this world, a different evil from the traders in their companies.

The day died like fire in the leaves. Gévaudan looked up at the sound of a howl in the distance, squinting at the sky as if it were parchment burned dark by a sun gone out, the stars emerging like the leftover embers of scorched letters.

“You are the one who cut off contact.” “No. They did, emotionally. I just matched their move.”

In his eyes the sparklers of strangers, held out over balconies, showering footpaths with glowing rain.

The scuffing sound of their relaxed gait stops right behind us, replaced by the familiar singsong whistle of a man leering at something he wants power over.

Who’s to say the stranger would even allow me to walk away? The thought that he might not is actually comforting. This is why I have trouble sleeping.

There were many tents pitched as well, glowing like serried cloth lamps in the darkness, the shadows of their occupants flapping against them, trapped moths.

The beast was like no animal I’d ever seen on this earth. Glowing red in the flickering light of rain-swathed fires, with its war paint of blood and tattered flesh, which hung like ragged pennants off its spines and slicked fur, it was rakshasa of the Hindus, it was asura, lord among their demons. It was glowing, infernal ifreet of the djinn, it was Iblis made incarnate, rising from cold wet earth instead of the arid sand of the desert. It was a towering impostor god of Europe resurrected in this empty stretch of Shah Jahan’s empire and worshipped with fire and violence.

Only once did Gévaudan speak, to ask: <<What will happen to Cyrah if I lose?>> And to that Fenrir only shrugged and said, perhaps truthfully: <<I don’t know.>>

But they did fight, and it was a battle to be seen, though I didn’t see it. But I dreamed it, so caught was I in the poisonous glamours the two had cast over me to keep me unconscious during their duel. Glamours that were, I imagine, strongly tied to them, making their violence mine. Or perhaps I just dreamed a dream, which was nothing like the actual battle.

His memories drift off him on the curling fumes of his sweat, igniting my imagination.

The stranger hands me his cigarette, and I take it with gratitude. It’s damp against my lips, from his mouth.

It has been years. It has been even longer since I’ve had sex with a man. But it all comes back in an instant, the yearning, the ache for immediate intimacy, immediate consummation.