The Devourers

by Indra Das

sounds like English.

I am his doppelgänger, grown huge on the nourishment of his faith.

“You and your endings, Professor. They’ll be the end of you, someday.”

I’m not going to finish the story I told you yesterday.” “Why not?” I ask. “Because it’s not important right now. It did what it was supposed to, and it’ll come back when and if it needs to.” His face goes vacant as he looks at one of the resident rats of this dank Olympia. It scampers between the tables, darting over the crimson carpet and looking for crumbs to scavenge, unafraid of the many human feet around it. I remember the dead rat by the stranger’s feet last night. The stranger looks young again, unlike yesterday night after he finished the stories.

“What did you do to me yesterday?” I ask, if just to stifle this thought. “What you saw or felt has its provenance in your own head.”

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.”

Professor Alok Mukherjee.

Taken from the back of a boy we found wandering alone near the dusty walls of Lahore, weeks after we crossed the borders of the Mughal Empire and days after we swam across the silt-clouded waters of the Indus. I took the child by his warm brown arm and spoke into his ear in Punjabi, asking him, “Where are your parents?” and he answered in a wet voice, “They have sickened and died,” and I slipped my thumbs under the curve of his jaw to feel him live before I bent his neck and broke it so he cried no longer (some have said I take to pity too easily). I hold him now in my hands, his skin toughened under the sun of his empire that forgot him and over the smoke of our campfires burning earth-fed wood.

How many times have I witnessed such sights across the centuries, and willfully ignored them?

I cannot tell you that you shone out to me first. There were many men and women and children who kindled my appetites in Mumtazabad, where the workmen dwell and the travelers in Shah Jahan’s empire may rest in caravanserais and barter in bazaars. I saw them everywhere, these virgins and sodomites, scented with dusty sweat and the stains of their exploits. Men with gray eyes and drought-cracked lips who prostrate themselves to their Allah, unaware of wolfish eyes that fall upon their upraised buttocks.

“I’d say the more accurate precursor for my journals isn’t your Homer but Columbus, writing in curiosity on the shores of new worlds across the Atlantic.” “Is that right? I suppose that’s fair. Columbus didn’t eat the peoples of those ancient worlds, but he and his imperium have treated them as well as cattle and fowl for the cooking fire.”

Khrissals are not the beautiful, intelligent lambs you see, nor are we impossibly noble wolves. No, khrissals are fierce, wombed, cock-slung spiders—yes, spiders, spewing the filth of excess thought across the earth in the glutinous webs of civilizations that scrabble for space to weave their own webs over those of their brethren.

He pulls off his boots and stands tall and proud and naked on his bare feet, taking his hardening penis in his hands and pissing a steaming circle around his clothes. The rising smell of his waters fills my nostrils, pungent, clinging to the winter air as the ground melts to frothing mud. He stares at the mausoleum rising out of the ground. The many bone trophies sewn and burned into his skin writhe with his movements, the rib shards down his back bristling like the nubs of worn skeletal wings.

One waded across. His voice was deep and his chin hard though hairless, and he had small breasts whorled with tattoos. He had wrapped himself in a wet cloak, so I couldn’t see between his legs.

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.

“I don’t hurt people unless they give me cause,” you said. “Unless you see the very trade you live on as cause for hurting me, I will give you none tonight. I don’t want to harm you.” “It’s not a trade. It’s something I do to survive in this land run by men, as a woman, and one without a husband at that. I told you, no harem protects me.”

I think about this. I know he might well be barking mad, but then again—if he is, so am I. He made me see things, see stories even as he spoke their words. I still don’t know what’s happened between the two of us, whether he drugged me into accepting some hallucinatory reality of his own the first night I met him. But if I’m dancing with a trickster, I’m nothing if not awed by each step, each move. He’s leading, with skill.

The inverse of Romeo and Juliet: two families so eager to be one that the star-crossed lovers can’t stand it anymore. He especially enjoys that last comparison, laughing as I tell him about my farcical tragedy.

The white man dressed like a beast came to me that night in the caravanserai, and he raped me. Though he was far from pleasing to my eye, I would have fucked him if he’d asked and given me some money for the favor. That is how I often paid my way in life, after all, and I’m not ashamed to say it, though most asking for such favors do so in a most shameful manner, and mistake the favor for ownership. But this one didn’t ask, instead getting between my legs by the most convoluted conversation I’ve ever had. He took what he wanted, with no regard for my opinion on the matter.

He talked a lot. I can’t even remember most of the many things he said to me as he fucked me, but they were the ramblings of a madman. Or so I thought at the time. Brevity and clarity weren’t his best talents. Though considering the circumstances, he could have been the best storyteller in the world and I’d still have hated every word. He told me about a Grecian king who was turned into a wolf a long time ago by some god or the other, and he told me about his tribe and how they don’t think of themselves as humans, and how they have two selves and kidnap babies and are forbidden to bear children, and he even cried a bit. He did catch my attention when he said there were others like him who called themselves djinns, a word I grew up with, listening to folktales told to me by my mother. It felt awful to hear that familiar word, which reminded me so of happier times, in that situation, coming from the mouth of a man about to violate me. Mostly, he made a big show of wanting to conceive a child, because his people couldn’t create. I thought he was a broken man, but I felt no pity whatsoever.

When he finished, he was wise enough not to lie by my side, instead getting off me and gathering his clothes. I could feel what he’d left of himself inside me, his seed like tallow down my thighs, hotter than that of any other man who’d ever been in my cunt.