The Devourers (26 page)

O
ur room is spacious and clean, sparsely furnished with two beds and a hurricane lamp to see by. The mattresses are thin but comfortable. There is an adjoining bathroom with a toilet and a shower. Two windows look out onto the fields behind the lodge, and the forest beyond that.

“Well, this is quite nice,” I tell the stranger. “I wouldn't have expected you of all people to be a champion of gentrified forest tourism.”

He smiles, sitting on the bed, looking dazed. I wonder why. “I can hardly lead a civilized man of the city into the wilderness without taking a road well worn and comfortable,” he says.

“Fair enough.” I return the smile.

He continues sitting. He has brought no luggage except his now familiar, dirty backpack. It lies on his bed. I set down my travel bag in the corner. The chilly air feels like a film of oil, a dim yellow spilling from the lamp set on the floor. The flame dances in its glass case, as if to entertain us.

“Are you all right?” I ask him.

He nods. “I am. It's just been a while since I've been here.”

“What's a while to you?”

“A long time to you. Let's just say there was no lodge here last time. Actually, there was no village, either.”

“Well. Thank you, for bringing me here. It's…this is wonderful. I don't think I've ever experienced a place like this. I'm glad I came here.”

“As am I,” he says, and takes a deep breath. He takes a straight razor with a mother-of-pearl handle out of his jean pocket and unfolds it. I am suddenly petrified. He gets up and walks into the dark bathroom. I sit down on the bed, my heartbeat humming in my ears. After a while, I realize I can hear scraping.

When he emerges, he is changed. His face glossy with water in the jaundiced light, long hair sticking in spirals to his neck. His beard is gone, his tapering chin and jaws smooth as a woman's in the dimness. I am astonished by his beauty.

He sits down on his bed, opposite me, so we are facing each other. The hurricane lamp lies between us on the floor.

“Alok,” he says.

“Yes.”

“I'm lucky.”

I remember him saying I ask too many questions. I think I've asked very few of him since he said that. Still, I just look at him. The lamp casts dark smears of shadows across his face, its light catching on the sharp lines of his skull. Once again, I am reminded of a totem of some sort, a carved idol sitting here in the dark with me. The water glimmers on him, making his skin look fresh-painted, the yellow of an idol of Durga.

“To have found so compassionate and patient a listener,” he says. I look away, should he look at me.

“Am I?”

“You are. The most, perhaps.”

“There've been others.”

“In so long a life as mine, it would be difficult to assume otherwise.”

There is silence. I feel like I've interrupted something.

“Well, thank you. For saying so. I've done nothing, really. You've been an interesting companion, to say the least. You must know that about yourself. You do, I can tell,” I say.

“Can you?”

I laugh and clear my throat, nervous. The bed creaks under me.

“Yes, I think I can. You were different when I first met you. It felt like you were trying, somehow. To be interesting. But you don't need to try. Of all the people I've ever met, you don't need to,” I tell him.

The bed creaks under him, his hands grasping the edge. I decide to meet his eyes, and am filled with a churning, intoxicating fear as I do. I don't know what's happening. I can't tell what will happen. His smile isn't defensive—it's boyish, shocking. His mouth glistening and soft, not the jagged maw of a monster. My throat dries out. The room is tight, cold.

“I'd keep listening,” I tell him. “I'd be glad to. For however long you wanted.”

“Would you?” That smile, a thing of terror, unknown to me in that face. It's been so long since I saw his features without the beard. A drop of water falls off his chin. I think I can hear the minute pat of it hitting the cold stone floor.

“Are you…” I feel breathless. “Are you angry?”

A sound emerges from his throat. A cough, a laugh. He gets up, the bed rattling as chilled wood pops and groans, and I straighten up. In a second he's right in front of me, bending down, and I feel his lips against my own. My hands remain at my side. He pries my mouth open with his, slides his curried tongue against mine, and I exhale into him, feel my weaker breath against the scalding desert wind that rushes from his throat. Our heartbeats clash in our mouths. Water beads off his face and onto mine as I let him bend my head back, his long-fingered hands grasping the back of my neck, thumbs caressing the curve of my jaw, nails feather-light daggers against the arteries nestled under skin.

I close my eyes and remember the first time I kissed someone. Swapan, a boy my age, twelve at the time. A family friend and next-door neighbor whom I flew kites and played catch with on the rooftop of my family's house in summer, the grainy stone floor scorching under our bare feet. We pressed our mouths to each other, salty with sweat, surrounded by the low rooftops of Ballygunge Place, watched only by the beady eyes of voyeuristic crows. I remember the last time I kissed someone. Shayani, tear-stained lips warm after fucking, both of us aware that we were done being engaged.

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.

I've never been so physically close to anyone whom I trust could kill me with ease. His thumbs could press down and squash my arteries till I spasm into an endless sleep. He could throttle me, use his jaws and shining teeth to rip out my throat. But it is all potential energy, made all the more powerful by how gentle his hands are, rising across my neck and through my hair, tingling with the promise of carnage. They move down my shoulders, to my chest, and they guide me down. Not a push, a direction. I lie down, legs dangling off the bed. He pulls my jeans and boxers down to my knees, that hidden strength ignoring the buckled belt so that the friction of the pants pulls hairs from my legs. I wince at the pain, the sudden cold air on my bare erection.

He takes off his kurta, takes off his jeans. In his lithe body, the thick waves of hair that gather at his sloping shoulders, his suddenly emerald-green eyes, I see man and woman both, I see a being so human that it becomes inhuman, an animal perfection. War paint of shadow defining the muscles and sinews under his smooth skin, interrupted with long, pale scars. There is a story written on him in small, intricate tattoos, indecipherable symbols and language that crawl along the lines of his body—the ridge of his hip arching out of the dimpled line that demarcates thigh and pelvis, the valleys between biceps and triceps, the slope that turns pectoral to rib. Besides the dark tangle around his erection and clinging to his armpits, he has almost no body hair.

He bends down, folding his tall form with grace, as if performing a dance. I let him take me in his mouth, trust him with my flesh lying inert between his teeth and pushing tongue. The unheated room is cold, and I shiver as he runs spittle-glazed fingers across my torso, sliding them against my hard nipples. His mouth is boiling. I feel consumed, so divinely vulnerable, exposed like a deer in the mud, belly pale and white as it is splayed and ready to be torn and eaten. I lift my head and look in his eyes, which are open, the lamplight hanging in those green irises. He definitely doesn't have green eyes. In them, in his scars and tattoos, the chiseled architecture of hard muscle hiding under lean velvet soft hide, I see Fenrir, gentle and awful as he rapes a young woman, hungry for something he'd never known. His wet hair tickles my thighs and sticks to his face. In those lips, the graceful contours of skin-clad skull, his long black hair struck with silver, that aquiline Persian nose, I see Cyrah, brave and fire-bright.

Not for a moment is he ferocious, even as my bared body burns with the expectation of violence. He licks and kisses, and guides me into his mouth as if I were a fragile, brittle creature. To him, I am. I know this, I believe it. I am human.

I feel the orgasm rip through me like a claw, my jaws clenched to keep from crying out, hands clutching at the sheets of the bed. I feel a part of myself spatter into his mouth liquid and alive. He gasps, barely heard, a sound of satisfaction, of revelation finally delivered. I hear the click of his throat as he swallows that part of me while I soften slowly against his tongue.

I
feel awkward afterward, lying there in that cold room with the smell of spit and sweat hanging there as a reminder of what has just happened. I don't know what to do, or how to behave. But he doesn't mind the silence, and he pulls the blanket from his bed and climbs into mine, naked. Seeing that I am cold, he drapes the blanket over me, his hard penis brushing against my bare thigh underneath it. He reaches down and douses the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. The smell of kerosene wafts up to mingle with our scents. We lie there together.

“I don't think Shankar-babu would approve of how we've used his room,” I tell him after what seems like hours of dozing in and out of consciousness, but is probably just minutes, moonlight from the windows softening the dark.

He laughs, just a little bit. But his whole body shakes, and it is something I've never seen or felt from him. I try to match my breathing with his, and stop myself. I haven't lain next to someone for so long.

We sleep, and we fuck. It feels like a dream, but is not. He wakes me often, kissing my mouth, my neck, my shoulders, pushing into me from behind. He masturbates me using his hand as he fucks me, telling me to say when I'm coming. Every time I do, he makes sure I spill nothing outside of his mouth, ravenously licking any stray droplets from my thighs or stomach. I become accustomed to his pungent carnality—the raw sea-smell lingering in his armpits and hair, the ammonia-and-cinnamon scent of his sweat and saliva, his hunger, the way he gently coaxes me to orgasm after orgasm with his hands and mouth. Continuously, he consumes me.

He never asks to be penetrated or pleasured by me, except by hand. He never comes. I don't ask, not now, not here, not with him. I am grateful. It has been so long.

—

“Cyrah. She's your mother. And Fenrir is your father,” I whisper to him.

“I thought you'd have figured that out earlier,” he says, his voice low.

“I did. I just didn't want to ask you.”

He turns to me. “I was born here. Right here on this island, though it was shaped differently back then, and didn't have a village on it. It feels very strange, to come back here.”

“I can imagine.”

“Tourists come here, and they stay in their comfortable rooms and eat their ready-made meals and relax on tour boats. And they have no idea of the things that happened here. There are still shape-shifters living in the forest. I can smell them. And they can smell me. I can see their traces in the air.”

I say nothing, but my gut tightens at the thought. It is the first time since the night we met that he has mentioned his fellow shape-shifters as still extant and around us, and it is jarring. I'm lying next to one, if I choose to believe it, and yet him just saying that makes everything so much more real.

“Will they hurt you?”

“I don't think they will. As long as I don't bother them.”

“Do they still kill people?”

“Don't be naïve, Alok. There are animals to live off, but the occasional human has to be slain. It is our—their way. To the villagers who live on these islands, they've become indistinguishable from the tigers in the forest now. Avoiding man-eaters has long been a way of life in these parts.”

“What happens if they stop eating humans?”

“We start aging faster. Too gradual to notice at first. It might take a very long time, but we'd die out. Or turn to cannibalism.”

“And in the cities?” I ask.

“In Kolkata, the occasional missing beggar isn't even noticed, let alone cared about. Most of the people who get picked off the streets are probably glad to be given freedom from their miserable lives.”

“Do you need to justify it to yourself like that?”

“No. I don't. I thought you might need me to, though.” He sits up, the blanket slipping off his bare legs. The bed rattles. My hand moves to his forearm, the sheen of downy hair on the hard cord of muscle.

“Wait.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” he says. I can't see his face very well, but I can tell he's smiling. “Don't worry. No one's going to eat you here. Not if I have anything to say about it.”

I run my fingers up and down his arm, trying to feel for the symbols of his tattoos.

“You're saving me for yourself, aren't you. The sex is just an appetizer,” I say.

Gooseflesh under my fingertips. I wonder if the faint glow in the room is still moonlight or dawn. It has been a long night. I feel a sudden, drowning discomfort and surface from it by asking the first thing that comes to mind.

“Do you want to tell me about your mother? What happened to her?” I ask.

“I was raised by one of the tribes. They worship the Lord of the South, the shape-shifter king Dakkhin Rai, and they have ruled the forest for centuries. I grew up as one of them—a rakshasa. Not a bastard ‘werewolf' spawned by an unwilling human and a wayward kveldulf from northern Europe.”

“So Cyrah left you behind.”

“Not entirely.” He looks at the two windows, at the murky blue beyond the stippled glass panes set in the wooden green shutters.

“She stayed in the Sundarbans with Gévaudan, living outside the tribes as exiles. When I was born she gave me to the rakshasas, to raise as one of them. Her life was spared, for the gift.”

“So she never let Gévaudan become her…”

“Her imakhr. No. But she never rejoined human society, either. In a way, she watched over me.”

“Did you know she was your mother?”

“No. I knew that she was a human that lived in the forest. The villagers here would catch glimpses of her riding through the forest and rivers on the back of a great beast, and she became, to them, an incarnation of the divine guardian of the forest, Banbibi. Gévaudan was her vahana, her animal vehicle. We started calling her Banbibi as well.”

I've heard of Banbibi, who is worshipped by both Hindus and Muslims in the Sundarbans. On our drive from Kolkata to the launch dock, we had seen a shrine to her on the side of one of the roads—the garlanded idol representing a woman in a saree and a crown, armed with trishul and club, sitting on the back of a tiger, her vahana, with a baby in her lap. The figures were painted in garish colors, housed in a little concrete alcove just a foot from the asphalt of the road. The small size of the shrine against the trees at the side of the road, the simplicity of its art, like a child's crayon drawing made real, made all the more real the human veneration of this deity. To the villagers who live in the tiger-haunted forests of the Sundarbans, she is real, and their only protection against the demon king Dakkhin Rai (whom they also worship) and his minions, be they tigers or rakshasas. The driver of our car had stopped to place some money at the feet of the goddess, as an offering. At the time, I hadn't noticed the stranger's reaction to this shrine.

Somewhere beyond the lodge, something howls. The dogs we saw earlier, probably. The sound makes me shiver.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “That she was so distant. That you didn't get a mother and a father.”

“Don't be sentimental. It's—” He paused. “—sweet of you. To be sorry. But why should you be? I grew up proud and strong, a shape-shifter. I needed no parents. I wanted none. I had an imakhr, a tribe. That was all I needed.”

“But Cyrah abandoned you. In her writing she seemed so protective of you, by the end.”

“She spared me the misery of a human life,” he says, curt. I regret saying what I did. “She spared me the misery of being torn between two worlds, trying to claw my way back to my so-called roots, like Fenrir and his pathetic scrabbling to be human as his first self once was. I was rakshasa, hunter, man-eater. She gave me that.” He pronounces each sentence like an ultimatum. My hand slips off his forearm as he moves it. I wait.

“Until she gave you the journals that she and Fenrir wrote,” I ask, or tell him softly, perhaps in some false hope he won't hear me.

The monotonous shriek of insects beyond the windows. Another howl turning into low barks in the distance.

“Yes. Until that.” I hear the sigh of expelled breath. He lies down again, breath sour and close.

I think of Cyrah, illiterate young woman, impossibly writing out her tale on a scroll. There are answers yet to be given.

“Go to sleep,” he says, and kisses me on the cheek. I don't want to go to sleep. I have so many more questions. But my eyes begin to droop as soon as he says those words, and I begin to fall away from wakefulness as words trickle from his lips and into my ears.

—

I am an infant, taking my first steps, tottering on young, chubby legs, miniature feet sinking into the warm mud of the forest. My imakhr smiles, her teeth red with carrion. She looms over me, a giant, naked and brown, caked with forest and gristle, dead deer at her feet. I cough small giggles as she waggles her long red tongue at me. My quivering legs fail me, and I topple into the mud. Pondering whether to cry, I watch my imakhr stoop over the carcass on all fours, dipping her head into the crimson cavern where the deer's chest has recently been opened by her second self. She comes up trailing tendrils of blood from her chin, cheeks swollen. Her powerful hands pluck me off the ground like a fallen fruit, lifting me up into the air, making me dizzy, making me forget to cry, making me burp in delight. My legs pinion, feet coming to rest on her muddy bare breasts, where bone necklaces draw fresh lines in her clothing of dirt. She lifts me to her face, carefully parting my tiny mouth with her lips. The deer's blood rushes into me, warm, bubbling, dripping off that snake-sharp tongue and into my growing belly. I suckle, legs and arms twitching as my food splatters down my body in comforting rivulets.

—

I am a boy, dragging the slick, heavy shape of a beaked turtle out of the delta water, its flippers and neck trapped in barbed vine. A fellow whelp wades out of the water, dripping white foam from his mouth in excitement, his taut body glistening in the moonlight. He holds a blade fashioned from hewn stone, and punches a dark gash into the shell. I join him, with my own blade, which cracks open the pale moonlit belly, freeing the fish-scent of the turtle's guts. With a shriek, I bite into the turtle's tough, leathery throat, tearing the blood free so that it bubbles in the mud. Its flippers twitch and thrash. Small silver fish glint and leap around us like inverted rain, thrown to the shore by our hunt. I bite into the turtle, succulent cold skin, warm flesh, the contrast making my entire body shudder with pleasure. It tastes water-filled but fat; it tastes of the sea beyond our forest home. I plunder its corpse, digging into the ripped hole in its underside, fingers closing around the soft orbs of its eggs while my hunt-mate hacks at a flipper to sever it. The mangroves whistle in a sudden wet night breeze, and I know from the clatter of bones that our imakhr watches from the trees, squatting somewhere in between the branches, her eyes green stars poked into the dark between the leaves. I know she is proud, I can smell it, carried in the breeze like incense.

—

I am a man, grown tall and muscled from climbing the mangroves, from running across the mudflats and swimming in the delta rivers, from leaping into the air to catch seabirds in flight and snap their brittle bodies into fresh meat between my teeth.

I feel the second part of my soul clawing upward from deep within my chest, disengaging from its sticky embrace with the first, ripping away and turning me inside out. The rakshasas bark in the trees, howl in the undergrowth, clawed hands and feet pounding the mud. The human honey-gatherer runs to a freedom he knows is lost. The world expands, I expand, the scents that I grew up with filling my head with mad potency. The touch of trees, of soil under me, of leaves slithering off my back, or feet tearing through stiff roots, all so intense that the mere chase becomes orgasmic, the wind against my naked, beast-bent body a blanket of voices. I scream and it is a grating howl that wakes the forest into terror. My roar bursts out across the country of eighteen tides, becoming one with the chorus of baying rakshasas, a thousand green flames in the foliage watching me. We mark the realm of our king Dakkhin Rai with this war cry, remind the animals and the humans that the deep forest is our land. The villager tumbles to the ground and I am upon him in an instant, my speed closing the twenty-foot gap between us in a second. For the first time, I truly know my second self. It has waited long to be sprung.

I make my first kill of khrissal. I am rakshasa, man-eater. My tusks sinking into the man's back, I taste him. He tastes of his life, his stomach spilling the warm slush of rice he has eaten every day since he could eat solid food; his liver soft with liquor to drown the burden of poverty; his sinews tough and burning with years of gamy resilience, of escaping death in the forest; his blood tinged wine-bitter with sorrow at leaving his wife a widow and his son fatherless; his love for them meaty and thick in the saturated ventricles of his tough heart. I am a god, swallowing his life whole, using it to strengthen my two souls. For an infinite moment, I am him. Beyond the blood-haze, my imakhr paces in her second self, her spined tail whipping the ground, waiting for a bite of the young one's first human prey. Her growl of approval a rattlesnake whisper that makes my fur bristle with delight.

I am a shape-shifter.

—

I watch her. The human we do not kill, for reasons unknown to me. She is distant, on the silver-blue sheet of a moonlit mudflat stretching away for miles from the forest. She sits atop her vahana, a beast that looks both similar and different from our second selves, from the shapes we know. It is clear that it has grown itself in another land. I cannot look away from its rider because she is both human and unafraid, her legs shaped strong from clinging to the sides of the great monster. Her hair flows long, pouring down her back to her buttocks, down her shoulders and to her thighs in curtains of black that clothe her, tangled amid the flapping pennants of the torn cloak she wears over her saree of white cloth. A leathery flutter of bats speckles the glowing night sky above them. I have never thought that I could find a khrissal beautiful, but she is. I know she can see me, too, lurking here among the trees. I have always found humans to be weak, sad creatures; I have feasted on that sadness, thanked them for it, reveled in my freedom from it. But this one's sadness gives her a power that makes me frightened, that fills me with unease. The beast bristles, as if holding back an urge to gallop over the flats and attack me. I know it is far older and stronger than me, that it can easily kill me. I also know that she wouldn't let it. I know she is watching me, too. I don't know why I cannot look away.