The Devourers (27 page)

W
hen I wake with him still next to me, arms around me, I turn and ask him, because I have to.

“Why me? I've never understood that.”

The sunlight at the windows is dim and muted, inoffensive. A cockerel crows somewhere in the village beyond the lodge.

“Let's go to the roof,” he says, and gets up. In the morning light, the delicate lines of tattoos still weave across the contours of his naked body. The scars, too, linger. I didn't dream them by lamplight. He gets dressed, brushes his teeth—a shocking revelation—all in silence that isn't uncomfortable as such. It feels somehow appropriate, after my night of visions, of his whispered words soothing me into a different time as I slept, lending me fragments of his life. It is a sacred silence, in this chamber where we've declared our intimacy. I perform the same mundane rituals of waking, and together we make our way to the roof. It is just six in the morning by my watch, but I feel awake despite the little sleep I've gotten. From the roof, we can't see beyond the courtyard garden. Everything is submerged in the haze of dawn. The sun, filtered by this milky cloud, hangs low like a perfect orange droplet of magma glistening in the ash-gray sky.

“Will you answer my question?” I ask him, my breath emerging to blend with the mist.

“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.”

“I smelled of loneliness.”

“You did.”

I laugh, without humor. “I don't think I can deny that, though I don't know what loneliness smells like.”

He looks at me. His eyes are dark, earth brown in the morning.

“It's not something to be ashamed of, Alok. It's something we have in common.”

“I've known you for—a while now. And I don't. I don't know. Will you at least tell me your name?”

He sighs. “I don't have one, Alok. Not in the way you're thinking. We have many names, or none, sometimes. This body, this face; it's the one I was born with, the one that Cyrah and Fenrir gave me. But I can change it, if I will it, though after so long it would be difficult. But I can. Just like I can change my second self as well, if the circumstances are right. Identity doesn't mean the same thing to us as it does to you. Names are arbitrary in such an existence. I didn't leave one out just to sound mysterious.”

I nod, looking at the treetops of the garden, half there in the moist air.

“It was part of it, though, wasn't it?” I ask.

“What?”

“The reason you didn't give me a name. It was partly to sound mysterious,” I tell him.

He smiles.

“When we first met. At the baul mela. Why did you introduce yourself as a werewolf if that's not what you identify as?”

“Half werewolf,” he corrects me, as he has so many times before. “Though I suppose that's not correct, either. The simple fact is that the werewolf is more easily identifiable, iconic. Recognizable.” His mouth twists as he chews the inside of his cheek. “And I have actually called myself that, in the past. Werewolf. I've used that word to shape my second self in ways rakshasas don't. When I left the Sundarbans, I thought of myself as more werewolf than rakshasa, though I didn't know the word then. It was because I knew I came from Fenrir and a human; I saw myself as different. For better or for worse, those stories changed my life. I formed a splinter pack. Some of them even mimicked my ways. The first werewolves of Hindustan. We traveled up the delta and came to the swamp jungle that would be Kolkata. We made that our hunting ground, our land.”

“Were you sad to leave your imakhr? The home you grew up in?”

He smiles, squinting into the brightening orb of the sun as it thins the mist with patient persistence. “Cyrah and Gévaudan once had this very conversation,” he says.

I remember reading that conversation even as he says this. I remember typing it out.

“I don't know,” he says. “I don't think I knew sadness as an emotion I could really feel, then. It was something we tasted in humans, not something we experienced.”

The shrill brassy noise of a bell rings through the air from downstairs, setting the dogs in the garden barking in curiosity.

“That's breakfast. Shankar-babu will start wondering where we are. Let's go,” he says, touching my arm as he turns to walk to the doorway that leads to the stairs.

W
e have a quick breakfast of onion pakoras, biscuits, and sweet milk tea in the dining room, listening to Shankar-babu talk about his family and his plans to one day move to Kolkata, while squares of sunlight brighten the floors, shifting with the hours.

Afterward, the stranger and I set out for a walk beyond the lodge and into the village. Shankar-babu tries to insist on the guide coming with us, but the stranger is persuasive enough to convince him this isn't required.

The garden is jeweled with dew, catching the light of the sunrise. Everything glows, spider silk tracing ghost lines between plants and trees, leaves and flowers blinding and hyper-real to eyes weakened by lack of sleep. I squint at it all, again feeling caught in a dream as the stranger walks by me, his ubiquitous backpack slung over his shoulders. It makes him look youthful, not immortal, and this gladdens me. I realize that I prefer it when his hair is down instead of tied into a ponytail.

We see the first glimpse of other guests at the lodge—a couple sitting on the swinging wicker chairs set up in one of the grassy patches between the trees. Other than them, we seem to be the only ones staying here. Perhaps it's off season.

The brick path takes us beyond the lodge and turns into a dirt path as we venture into the village. Through the trees bowing over the road, we can see the river shining in the gaps between leaves. Our boat is still moored there. The village is scattered and spaced out, clay and thatch huts clustered into separate cliques under the eaves of the forest. Some of the huts squat next to the water, where men and women both wade knee-deep with nets in the morning chill, trawling for fish and crustaceans, their faded red lungis and sarees ballooning and flattening on the brown waves. We pass shacks by the side of the road that shelter shops selling supplies from civilization, mostly, I assume, for visitors to the island: sachets of supari (same as on Park Street), packets of branded potato chips that are deflated from the journey from there to here, dirty glass bottles of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Alongside these wares are more exotic local produce—rows of whiskey and rum bottles of different sizes, their labels washed off, filled with the thick amber of honey procured from the forest, right from under the noses of tigers and shape-shifters. Liquid gold from the realm of Dakkhin Rai.

We stop to get a taste, using little wooden ice cream spoons. The honey is thick and grainy with sugar crystals, flecks of wax. It is the best honey I've ever tasted, but that could be just because I know the danger involved in procuring it. It could also be because the only honey I've had all my life is from jars with anthropomorphic cartoon bees on them, bought at grocery stores.

In Bengali I ask the seller, a wiry man in a collar-shirt and lungi, if he believes in Banbibi and Dakkhin Rai. He nods, happy to answer. But it's also obvious that he is used to being asked this. His resigned nod indicates that it is a silly question to him, that belief in those entities is self-evident in this world. I look at the stranger to see what he thinks of the seller's response. He just smiles.

The seller points to a group of men walking down the road, wearing cheap plastic masks of a bearded man on the backs of their heads. Barefoot and in lungis, despite the cold.

“They're going to gather more honey and beeswax,” he says. “They'll get in a boat and go downstream into the deep forest.”

“Why are they wearing those masks on the backs of their heads?” I ask.

“To trick the tigers. That way the tigers always think that we have our faces to them, that we are always looking at them, even if we aren't. And they stay away because they think they can't sneak up on us.”

“Does it work?”

“I'm still alive,” he says with a laugh, showing his big teeth, bright against his dark skin. I laugh with him, wondering whether that's because of luck or the masks.

“That is Dakkhin Rai's face,” he says, pointing at one of the masks, hanging from a wall behind him. The shape-shifter king. The plastic face of a bearded man, wide eyes and pink skin. He doesn't look too demonic.

“That also helps. If they see their master, they won't attack.” He says this with a bit of a smile, as if he doesn't quite buy that the tigers know who their master is. The stranger remains silent throughout.

Even if the masks trick a tiger, I know they wouldn't trick a shape-shifter.

But I don't ask the man about rakshasas. I buy a bottle of honey, which is wrapped in newspaper to keep from getting too gummy. The stranger keeps it in his bag.

We keep walking. By the road, we see fields that seem to have been harvested, and we take a shortcut through one of them, my sneakers sinking through the soft tilled ground and making me unsteady, the dry yellow stalks of whatever crop was grown on it scratching at my jeans. The stranger walks on ahead as if he were treading on pavement, as is to be expected. I wonder if someone will chastise us for walking on their field, but no one does. A black goat watches our progress and decides to distance itself from us, ambling away toward the raised road.

“Where are we going?” I ask, panting a bit.

“I want some privacy. We're going somewhere a bit more isolated.”

The forest looms uncomfortably close, looking very dark in contrast with the bright, open field, with its sunlit mist burning away as the temperature rises.

“Wait. We're not going in there, are we?” He says nothing, striding on.

“Are we?” I demand, louder.

“Yes, we are.”

I stop walking. He keeps walking. He realizes I'm not following and looks back.

“You can't be serious. We can't go in there,” I tell him.

“I am, and we are. It's not exactly the deep forest. There's a village right here.”

“There are still tigers in there,” I say, incredulous. “Aren't there.”

“Yes.”

“And—” I pause, peering into the dark tangle of trees and undergrowth. “And shape-shifters.”

“Yes. There are.”

We both stare at each other. The goat brays from afar, giving us its indecipherable opinion. The stranger looks down, nudging the clods of earth that have congealed in the cold with his open-toed sandals.

“I thought you wanted to know more.”

“I do, but why do we have to go in there?”

He doesn't answer, instead walking back to me. He stops when he's right next to me, looking in my eyes.

“You're scared,” he tells me. I nod.

“I won't let anything hurt you in there,” he says.

“Tigers. And shape-shifters.”

“Neither will come near us. I promise. I'm an exile, but this is still where I come from. As long as we don't stay in there too long, they'll stay away from us. You won't even see them.”

“That's not very comforting to me.”

He takes my hand in his. Mine is cold, his warm. As always. The gesture is sudden, and makes me jump. “Alok, I won't let anything hurt you. You'll be safe with me. All right?” He stares into my eyes. If he's crazy, if all of this is a lie, I could be walking straight to a foolish death.

I sigh and nod. “All right.”

We walk toward the forest fringe. I don't let go of his hand.