The Devourers

by Indra Das

My part in this story began the winter before winters started getting warmer,

I met a man who told me he was half werewolf.

Half werewolf under a full moon.

To set the stage, I must tell you where I was.

This tent is where the rural bards of Bengal, the bauls, gather every winter to make music for city people.

I’m disarmed by his androgynous beauty before he even tells his secret.

But I’m not here to make things up.

“Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not there,”

For someone who clearly wants to talk to me, he says very little.

I am a professor. Of history,

“If only we had better storytellers, perhaps they would learn more willingly from the past,”

want to tell you a story. Let’s go inside.”

“I am going to tell you a story, and it is true. To set the stage, I must tell you where I was.”

Things are changing, a new century nears. It will be the eighteenth, by the Christian calendar.

They sing, unheeding of signatures on paper, of land exchanges and politics, of the white traders and their tensions with the Nawab and the Mughal Empire.

To the land. To Bengal. To Hindustan, which does not belong to them, nor to the British, nor the Mughals.

They know there are things in the wilderness that neither Mughal nor white man has in his documents of ownership...

More approach from afar, their claws sinking into the mud.

A howl slices the dark.

I remember the taste of her lips, moist but cool from the night air.

She is tired, short, and unarmed, and stands no chance of surviving the attack. Not that the others do, either. I can smell her terror like sweat against the gritty spice of wood smoke.

The insects catch in my fur, wrestling it, tickling like the reeds and plants around me.

The woman knows we are here, beyond their firelight. She knows because I told her myself, as a young man...

Your party will never reach Sutanati and the banks of the river. You are being hunted. You have a day to run away, for we are patient, and dr...

I am a shape-shift...

She heard me, and saw me, though she slept while I whi...

can feel the swamp outside, the city gone, the beasts gathering for the hunt in the misty wilderness.

The full moon watches through the clouds, eager for massacre.

I can hear the howl as I run with this human in my arms, into the darkness, away from the shadows of

slaughter.

I feel like I’ve just woken from the most vivid dream I’ve ever had.

“Immortality is a side effect of lycanthropy, is it?”

A lycanthrope is a person who mistakenly believes they can turn into a wolf. I’m not a person, I don’t turn into a wolf, and I’m not ill. What I am has no basis in science or medicine.”

“Take what you will from my story. I never said that I was the hunter in the tale. It could have been one of my ancestors. A story passed down.” “I closed my eyes and I saw it. I smelled it. I don’t even believe you, and I felt it.

I give him a moment of silence, surprised by this realization, as mundane as it is.

It disturbs me, the ease with which I feel sad for him after he’s told me a story steeped in carnage, not to mention a rather romantic outlook on kissing people

in their sleep.

History has all the stories.

His pack is not forgiving of intermingling with humans, nor sabotaging a hunt, making him an exile from his own kind. They can smell his betrayal from a mile away.”

“You’re the first Indian werewolf I’ve ever heard of.” “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.”

“Everybody knows about us. Most of them just don’t believe that we’re real anymore.” “Why don’t you tell them you are?” “Maybe in this day and age we just want to be left alone.”

“Walk with me, if you like,” he adds.

I’ve always been afraid of street dogs at night, but they keep away, don’t even bark.

As if they smell something strange in the air.

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.

I think of what he’s asked me to think. Of man and wolf, man and animal, man and woman and animal, twisted together, fur and bones and flesh and claws and teeth, glowing eyes and arched spines, human skin peeling and tearing to spill out flea-bitten fur, a mass of memories from literature and film and myth and art.

“And here where we stand, long before India, before its empires and kingdoms, there were human tribes who identified with dogs and wolves, with wild animals. 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.”

sounds like English.

Something neither human nor animal, bristling with an energy that I can only describe as elemental.

leading into the well of a night long past, leading backward into the stinking dark of fermented history.