The Devourers

by Indra Das

I surprise myself with the eagerness with which I tell this story of possibilities to the stranger.

The sizzle of batter in oil and babble of voices only aggravates the sense that I am treading on the tune the bauls are playing—everything here seems to be part of their music, as if the field itself were one stage, and all of us musicians.

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. Things to be found in stories. Then again, they also claim to be mad.

After all, whose heart hasn’t been broken by someone?

“And humans have the arrogance to say they’re the only animals capable of cruelty.”

I like dogs, myself, but they can be a tad cruel sometimes. So can cats. So can we all.

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.”

I am more than human, but less than my second self.

With the stranger next to me, it feels like a watering spot, an oasis for human animals to gather at night, ravenous and thirsty, from late-night lorry drivers and laborers to students and wealthy young clubbers.

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. Even after, you might never know him.”

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.

“That is unusual.” “Is it? Would that I were lucky enough for the privilege of purdah. Sounds like paradise to me. If you like, you can call Shah Jahan’s guards to drag me to the nearest harem for your pleasure. Perhaps that would suit the eyes of a white man better than seeing a Muslim woman uncovered?”

But this giant nest of stone and mineral gathered from across the empire is raised not to shelter the thousands that build it, but to place on the skin of the world a memorial to one human’s mate.

On Taj Mahal

But I find it ever strange that we ignore these storms within our prey’s bodies, simply because we ourselves have forsaken such things.

If I were a religious being, I’d say our purpose on this earth is solely to keep them in check.”

Keep humans in check

“Well said. Tell me something, in honesty. Why do you write?” “Why? I write to record, to study. For curiosity. To keep our stories in the worlds beyond our bodies.”

On journals

“Not everything humans write is poetry.”

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

“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.”

“If this misery is love, it’s no wonder humans have their poets to pine about its mysteries, and palaces to tell the stories of their dead mates,”

I know that times have changed since, that this might seem rather extreme, that people might value their lives a little more now than they did back then.

I don’t need to believe anything.

A devourer says this... and yet he/she believes in betraying their kind if he/she mates with a human. Although this individual calls it a rule instead of a belief. However, acts like it is a belief by killing for the belief.

We are the devouring, not the creative.

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.

Gévaudan held me and said nothing more, as if he were human.

Said Nothing more as a human… Wow!

I wondered if he was about to throttle himself in front of me, full as these shape-changers’ lives were with strange ritual. Though honestly, I think humans are no less bound.

“It’s not like I stopped seeing them. I went over occasionally, but it’s so awkward, so bizarre to talk to the people who created and raised me as if they’re acquaintances that I stopped doing that, even. It was too much to take.” “You are the one who cut off contact.” “No. They did, emotionally. I just matched their move.” “All this over a canceled engagement.” The stranger raises an eyebrow. “Well, it’s complicated. Families are complicated. History is complicated. You know.”

But something feels off, as if he’s doing this, telling his stories, to achieve some kind of symmetry, because it’s usually me telling him about my uninteresting life. As if he fears silence between us. But I let him, because it feels like he needs to talk, even if his heart isn’t in it.

Most of us fear silence when being with people

honestly I don’t understand anything that’s going on, and I never have. The world makes no more or no less sense with shape-shifters in it.

“Bah-get.” He grinned again as I repeated the French word. I wondered if I would ever get to taste such a thing, though I don’t think any kind of bread can be better than naan.

Well, naan is the best bread

As they tangled into one beast in that blazing winter morning, I observed their dance, and I marveled that these were beings that didn’t know love. Then again, they were fighting because they had, each in their own way, found the same—and their violence was, perhaps, to purge their disgust at that stray human emotion.

I see khrissal men take their women all the time, with no regard for whether they want it or not, in every kingdom and empire I travel through. Women create. Men inflict violence on you, envious and fearful, desperate to share in that ability. And it is this hateful battle that keeps your kind extant.

“Only my child,” I said. “Mine. You lost your claim as a father when you forced yourself on me.

and I know that any man who rapes a woman is unfit to be a father by my side, even if he is capable of kindness.”

I could not imagine killing another human being, but I had faith that would change if I transcended humanity and became something else entirely, just as I’d always had faith that Allah exists in some way even though I couldn’t see him or feel his presence through the daily struggles of my life. I didn’t know whether I still believed this in the same way after everything I’d been through, but I believed in a god more than ever before.

I am not all human women, Fen-eer, and you’d do well to remember that while you devour and rape and preach and lament that humans will never love you. You—you are what all women fear in this world. This is why I am here by your companion’s side, and not yours.”

But it all comes back in an instant, the yearning, the ache for immediate intimacy, immediate consummation.

“Why me? I’ve never understood that.”

“Yes, Alok. I chose you for no good reason at all.” “There are millions of people—” “I know. But there you were. You smelled of loneliness. So I came to you, like a wolf to lonesome prey. Or a tiger. A man. What else can I say? It’s the truth. I’m not dictated by currents of fate or any other mystical force, just because I’m a thing of magic. I make choices like anyone else.”

Goes along with the previous highlight… when Alok asks "why me?"

“I’m going to tell you, of course. You deserve to know,” says Izrail,

Almost as if saying to the reader

Though I have dreamed their patchwork lives, learned from their flesh and blood and souls the different ways of this world, I have never before seen with my own senses how massive this orb we all make our stories on truly is.

The sun shatters through clouds clinging to the edge of the ocean, its million shining pieces flung across the leagues of water, carried from the crests of surf by wind and thrown to burn in her black hair, turning it bloody gold.

So beautiful explanation of a sunset

I feel like silence is, perhaps, the only conversation for now.

I take every bone that once anchored Cyrah’s body and soul to this world,

Sometimes we wake and wake, and one night becomes a thousand, each dream a life lived,”

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

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