The Devourers (17 page)

I
NTERVAL

B
efore I know it summer's gone like the blink of a firefly's abdomen, and it's puja season. The stranger and I walk around the city in the midst of festive crowds, taking in the illuminated drawings that decorate the streets—tableaux made out of strings of Christmas lights, twisted with pagan irony into designs and animals against bamboo banners and arches to celebrate Durga Puja.

We visit a few pandals. Inside, the stranger smiles at the idols of Durga, wrapped in human-woven sarees and garlands and bedecked in human-made jewelry, holding cheaply fashioned but shiny human-made weapons, towering over slain asura Mahishasura, also given modesty in the moment of his death by a human-woven loincloth. Of course, their flesh was also shaped and given the color of life by human hands. The blood pouring from Mahishasura's wounds paint mixed and applied by brush. The stranger looks at these deities incarnated in dried earth and made to represent good and evil, and he tells me they are iconic human representations of witnessed shape-shifter battles from millennia ago. That the devi and her monstrous asura foe were from different tribes of the race he belongs to.

In the pandal at Maddox Square, he points to the lion, the vahana by Durga's side, her animal vehicle, and tells me it is either a representation of one of Durga's non-human selves or a fellow shape-shifter in its non-human self. Like a teacher the stranger then points to the fanged human shape of demon god Mahishasura emerging from the lion-mauled carcass of the bull—mahish—that he turned into to trick Durga, and knowingly comments that it is a stylized way of showing the inexplicable—a shape-shifter transforming from a non-human self to a human one.

“Why does human-shaped Durga have so many arms then? Did she try and turn into a giant spider and fail?” I ask him. He ignores my admittedly weak joke. Though I also meant it as a real question. Who am I to judge the normality of shape-shifters in a remote prehistoric past?

“Maybe that was one of her shapes,” he says. “Durga and Mahishasura might not have been restricted to that duality, the first and second self. Apollonian and the Dionysian, as someone once said,” he breathes out, stirring the hair that hangs over his forehead.

“Shape-shifters were once more powerful than that,” he says loudly, almost shouting in the midst of all the people, but the collective babble inside the pandal is so loud no one even looks up. With a flourish of his hands he makes even the act of wringing sweat from his beard graceful. Wiping his hand on his kurta, he lowers his voice again, leaning in close to me. His breath warm against my ear. “We held in ourselves the multitudes of this planet, the birds and the beasts, the trees, the wind, and the sea. We could be anything, make ourselves in the world's image. We touched the infinite. We
were
the infinite.” He puts one arm around my shoulder, fingers grasping, caught in this sermon given under a goddess and a demon that he claims share his origins. We sway with the waves of the crowd ebbing and flowing against us, shoulders and arms damp.

“All your oldest tales show it. Now we have fallen far from the myriads we once held in ourselves, the legions and illusions we could emanate. The beings that humans of this subcontinent memorialized as the goddess Durga and the demon god Mahishasura were more divine, in a classical sense, than I or my kin. Closer to the infinite than anything in this world, this time, could ever dream. Me, I have only myself, and the other. We are powerful, my second self and I, but we cannot be anything, only ourselves. We can change, of course. I can become some
one
else.” His fingers slip away from my shoulder, tracing a brief tingle across my back. “But so can any human, with some effort,” he says, and it feels like his eyes have fallen on me. I look, and he's staring at Durga and Mahishasura with the ardor of the devout.

I'm fascinated by all this, but ask no more, because it feels like he's sunk once again into one of his unpredictable bouts of melancholy.

“Or maybe the many arms of Durga are just an embellishment,” he says, fingers raking through his beard again. “Creative license. Maybe the notion that shape-shifters ever held more than two selves within them is a fabrication based on your stories. Our own myth. Sometimes I think we're just making all this up as we go along, like you.” He shrugs.

“Like me? What do you mean?”

“Don't be deliberately obtuse, Alok. I mean humans, obviously,” he says and walks out of the pandal. I follow, wondering whether to laugh. I do, a little, but it's just to get rid of the uneasiness in me. Even in my most relaxed moments with him, I cannot, in all honesty, ever get used to him referring to humans as something he isn't.

I feel protective of him as I watch him walk into the throng in the square, as if he might dissolve into it.

—

I take him to a packed Café Coffee Day nearby, though he hates Kolkata's franchise coffee shops, with their deafening music and blinding lights, their young baristas eternally stunned by their own mandated politeness and their customers' lack thereof. Surely you don't need to be half werewolf to have that original opinion, I tell him, and when he is unmoved I ask him for the first time in our admittedly short relationship if something is wrong.

He seems alarmed that I'd ask him that, and he quickly drinks his coffee to cover up that alarm, that slight blush that touched his face. “No,” he says with finality, grimacing at his drip coffee, taken black.

For all the fantasies he's fed me, this seems the most certain and blatant lie I've heard from him.

But I nod along. To ease his mood, I talk about myself, the way he likes. I tell him how much I miss my parents during the puja season, because it reminds me of when they took me pandal-hopping as a child, telling me to pray quietly in front of the idols for a minute before letting me run around dodging the legs of the other visitors, pretending I was Durga chasing the demon bull through a forest and hacking it to bits so the asura revealed its human form. Then we'd go and eat out somewhere like Mocambo or Peter Cat (there weren't a ton of choices back in the day), followed by a visit to New Market and Nahoum's, where the floors would be muddy from all the puja shoppers walking in out of the rain, and I'd leave my little fingerprints all over the glass panes of display cases asking for this and that, and my parents, basking in my joy, would splurge on multiple boxes of brownies and fruitcake and whatever else I desired.

“Have you tried going back and establishing contact with them again? Just saying hello?” the stranger asks.

“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.”

“I certainly do, Alok,” he says, looking down at his cup. “So you haven't spoken to your parents since you stopped visiting. Even though you live in the same city.”

“On the phone sometimes. Not really.”

“You're hoping that if you wait long enough, they will call you and ask you to come over, and the ice will have melted a little.”

“I suppose. Yes.”

“And the puja season would be a likely time for them to call, considering that they share the same memories of their boy running around pandals and asking for brownies at Nahoum's.”

I nod, and give him a weak smile. Without even trying, I seem to have matched the stranger's melancholic mood.

“Your parents haven't obliged this narrative,” he says. I shake my head.

“You're their only child. Give it some more time.” I shrug.

He is silent.

Then he says, “Did you know that I actually visited Nahoum and Sons bakery when it first opened its doors in New Market, perhaps a decade or so after the twentieth century began. I met the proprietor, a Jewish gentleman from Baghdad, and shook his hand. I was still getting used to mingling into the populace of a human city, so he didn't take to my demeanor, but he served me like everyone else who'd lined up. New Market was actually still new back then, its bricks red as a robin's breast instead of the brown of dried blood.”

I laugh. “Now you're just making things up. I'm
sure
you just happened to be at the bakery my parents took me to regularly. When it first opened. In the 1900s.”

The stranger smiles. “No way to tell.”

“No way to tell,” I agree, and sip my mocha.

“Well, we're not in Nahoum's,” he says. “But at the very least, let me buy you a brownie this puja season.”

“If you insist.” I shrug and laugh, though to be honest I feel like crying. How could he say something like that in this moment, something so lacking in his mystique, something so sappy and simple? I'm almost sickened by the sentiment. No commiseration, no telling me about whatever utterly strange family life he might or might not have, and yet his appreciation for my matching of his mood, giving him company, is palpable enough to break me.

I'm very glad when he gets up to buy us both brownies in hot chocolate sauce, and I can hastily use a paper napkin to wipe my eyes and pretend to clean my glasses.

—

As Durga Puja turns into Diwali the stranger falls silent on our walks, while fire blossoms in the sky and crackers mist the streets with smoke. In his eyes the sparklers of strangers, held out over balconies, showering footpaths with glowing rain. He looks exposed in the light of all this chemical fire. We hide from it all in the windowless shelter of packed bars along Park Street, or walking the narrow alleys of Tangra's depopulating Chinatown. As we eat Hakka cuisine by the pale glow of decorative aquariums, I'm inspired by the surroundings, and try to raise the subject of syncretism within the tribes he and his manuscript have mentioned—with certain overarching belief systems, rituals, and customs (the kindling of the “ghost fires” of prey, the unique shared words, the concepts of multiple selves, the taboo of sex with humans, the notion of the second self as sacred and never to be seen by humans unless they're about to be dead or changed, et cetera) coexisting alongside other disparate tribal systems.

He agrees that it would be one way to describe things, but doesn't engage, ordering gin and tonics instead, flipping through the freshly transcribed pages I've given him. I want to ask him if he learned the habit of gin and tonics from British colonials who invented the drink, with its cocktail of quinine and alcohol to ward off malaria. But I don't want the question to be misconstrued as mockery. I can't imagine that he sipped mixed drinks from glasses much in those days.

But I feel a difference between us on these late-October nights, as if he's distancing himself a little.

—

When we meet on Park Street on the final night of Diwali, he hails a cab and asks the driver to take us to Prinsep Ghat. There, we cross the Greco-Roman pillars of the monument to the dead Englishman who gave the place its name, cross the hard white fluorescents, silent tracks, and empty platforms of the local railway station, cross an unlit dirt road, and reach the clustered groves that huddle on the waters of the Hooghly.

All so familiar, though I haven't been in a while. It's one of the places where Shayani and I would escape on summer nights. Here on the broken ghat steps leading to the river, we'd sit and talk while sharing melted Cadbury's milk chocolate bars, licking the sweetness from each other's fingers and mouths until mosquitoes, other amorous visitors, or the puritanical patrols of the Kolkata Police drove us away.

I wonder if I'm wrong to be touched that the stranger remembered this spot from our conversations. I wonder what it means that he brought us here, of all places, for solace from the noise and crowds of the pujas. Whether it means anything at all. We watch ripples shimmer quiet under the lights of Vidyasagar Setu, the horizon on the other side of the bridge glowing with occasional fireworks. The moored rowboats used to take tourists on rides during the day bob on reflections, empty now. I sit by the stranger's side as he smokes up, the smell of hash now like a familiar cologne on him. I listen as he remembers the days when imperial boats rocked over that river. As he remembers, in the same conversation, watching
An American Werewolf in London
from the rat-haunted balcony rows of New Empire cinema in the mid-1980s, claiming it was the first werewolf movie he ever watched, and a particularly surreal experience. What his notion of surreality might be, I can only imagine. 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.

As we sit, three men walk by behind us on the path above the ghat steps. I know they are three men because of their voices, and because I look behind us to see their dark shapes mottle the unlit tree-lined path. The sky's dull red glow, soaked from the city's light, gives the landscape color enough to see by. As the men pass, they trail a jarring laughter that stinks of drunken, pack-fueled confidence. Then they go silent, their dusty footsteps stopping. Some murmured words.

The stranger and I stop talking.

I hear my own heartbeat quicken my blood. I look behind us again at the shapes of the men, one of their shadowed faces graced with the cyclopean dot of a lit cigarette. They're watching us. I hear a long, soft exhalation from the stranger's lips, blowing out smoke. He doesn't look behind us.

The footsteps begin again. But they don't move away down the path. They come closer, down the ghat steps toward us. “Ah, fuck,” I whisper. The stranger says nothing. The footsteps grow louder until they surround us. The scuffing sound of their relaxed gait stops right behind us, replaced by the familiar singsong whistle of a man leering at something he wants power over. His two friends are standing about two feet on either side of us. I don't look up at any of them.