The Devourers Read online

  But today I am grateful for the dead man, who lies at my feet, and lingers in my changed veins. I look at my arms, at the rest of my small, pale shape, with its thickets of undergrown hair, and I bend low to the frozen crimson mirror of my prey’s blood. In its dark surface, I can see my sunlit face, and it is now the face of the Úlfhéðinn, this man who now lives in me. There is a new scar on his face, knotted and thick, running down his cheek from just below the right eye, which is now milky and gray. I bid farewell to my previous self.

  I touch the slick of red ice, touch his crusted entrails, and kiss my fingers; touch my forehead, my chest, my genitals. Here I fell by my pride, and here I was remade by my prey.

  I open my eyes.

  —

  I look at my small brown hands, smooth and lacking in scar tissue, and I wonder who I am. Then I see the stranger next to me smoking a cigarette, and know I am not him. His lips are rouged with new color. I look at him, gaunt and tall, skin brown like mine, hair black, and I’m amazed that I know this man now. I wonder where he’s from—whether born of some arcane violence in the depths of ancient Scandinavia, or slid squalling into the hands of doctors in a hospital in India mere decades ago, like me. I wonder at the fact that I’m even considering the former.

  He laughs, whether reading my mind I can’t tell. “Welcome back,” he says, a lick of smoke escaping his teeth. His fingers are stained with the new red on his lips as well. I see a dead rat by his feet, neatly slit open, though it could be lipstick on the stranger’s mouth.

  We’re still near Jadavpur. This is real. But we’ve walked quite a bit. No longer in the honeycomb of alleys around Shaktigarh Math, we stand instead at the wider avenue of Prince Anwarshah Road. The street is lined with shuttered shops and silent vehicles.

  “If I didn’t trust you, I’d swear you’ve drugged me somehow,” I tell him.

  “It’s probably unwise to trust me, so you can swear all you like.”

  “You’re admitting you’re untrustworthy?” I ask.

  “You just met me. Surely telling you a story or two isn’t enough to gain someone’s trust. You have to earn that, yes?”

  “Telling a story or two. You’ve a way with understatement.” I cough out a bit of laughter, bending down to grasp my knees. I feel incredibly tired. “God, I feel so hungry. Like I’m starving.”

  “Yes,” he agrees, and lets out a piercing whistle.

  A taxi stops beside us. The stranger tosses the remaining shred of his cigarette.

  The driver tells us in Hindi that it’ll be twenty rupees extra this late.

  “Come on. Let’s get you something to eat. My treat,” the stranger tells me, holding open the cab door.

  “That’s really not necessary,” I tell him as my stomach growls. But I get into the taxi all the same, slumping into the backseat like a drunken teenager. The stranger follows. The car’s humid with the rubbery reek of sweat and upholstery. A string of browned lemons and chilies hanging from the rearview mirror twists in the air, charming the car with luck. The taxi pulls out past the row of off-duty cabs lining the front of South City Mall and its transparent façade, now dark, the hidden metal slashes of stilled escalator steps inside throwing weak reflections from the ambient streetlight. Dimmed billboards smile down on us with the giant faces of smiling models and Bollywood stars.

  I slip in and out of a doze as the taxi moves through Kolkata by night. An empty city, populated only with the bulbous yellow beetle-shapes of Ambassador taxis and the roaring, painted monsters of supply lorries, their spattered mudflaps and rear bumpers decorated with crude faces of tusked demons and red English lettering in careful brushstrokes, warning of DANGER and imploring their fellow denizens of the road to BLOW HORN PLEASE as their shaking exhaust pipes belch clouds of dark smoke. Light filters through the car windows and slides across the stranger’s face, which flashes with waking red when a car or truck stops next to us while indicating.

  When we stop, it is on Ballygunge Circular Road, by Sharma’s, one of the few all-night roadside dhabas that service the nocturnals of Kolkata. I have no idea whether the stranger pays the taxi driver his extra twenty rupees. Like a temple, Sharma’s has drawn a flock to its open storefront, which breathes out air thick with the smell of scorched meat and live bodies. 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. Women remain under-represented, some nervous and others uncaring amid the crush of eating men. The footpath and road in front of Sharma’s is cluttered with double-parked cars, patrons eating inside them to avoid the crowd in the dhaba, their windshields occasionally spotted with bird shit from the trees above.

  We sit at one of the tables inside, hard bench under our buttocks. We don’t wait long for a tin tray of butter masala chicken, its gravy neon orange with a floating layer of oil. Ravenous, I dip my naan in the slop and eat the whole tray, feeding a hunger so strong it makes my belly hurt. The stranger doesn’t eat, watching the patrons around us, face calm under the sleepless fluorescents, their light replicated by tiled walls marked with azure Pepsi ads. We don’t talk much, but the silence feels earned after the past few hours that we’ve spent together. I feel a comfort from his presence as he taps his long fingers against his glass of hot chai, opaque with milk. A comfort, even though he looks at me like I’m a pet, scarfing up the food he’s just poured into my dish.

  “Mr. Half Werewolf. Mr. H. Werewolf. If you had to, out of all these people, which one would you pick to eat?” I ask, my lips and brain sloppy with sudden late-night nutrition. He just smiles, though he does look through the crowd as if considering the question. His gaze lands back on me. I can’t tell whether that’s deliberate.

  And then I’m done eating, and this long night is over. So abrupt I can barely believe it, standing once again in the chill of the open air, stomach taut with food. It’s dawn, but still dark. My companion lights another joint. I realize the kitten is gone, and am disappointed. I don’t ask what happened to it.

  “Thank you for the meal,” I say.

  “You’re welcome. Now go home, Professor. It’s late, and you’ve listened enough,” he says.

  “I don’t know about that. Will I see you again?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. Would you like to see me again?”

  “Yes. I want to hear the end of the first story.”

  He closes his eyes and takes a deep drag. His lips are still ruddy from whatever it was that he put on them while I was in his storytelling trance, despite being washed in milky tea. “You and your endings, Professor. They’ll be the end of you, someday.”

  “You started it,” I say.

  “And I’m still living it,” he says, and wipes his mouth. “Tomorrow. Oly Pub. Five thirty.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  We walk over to a parked taxi nearby. The driver looks at us suspiciously and demands an extra fifty rupees this time.

  “The price is going up, I see,” I tell the stranger. “Can’t you hypnotize him into not charging me extra?”

  The stranger says nothing, and I’m embarrassed. “Do you want to share the cab? I’m heading toward Jodhpur Park. Where do you live?”

  The stranger hitches with a silent laugh. “That’s all right. Get home safely, Professor.”

  “Thank you. For the stories,” I say, opening the taxi door and getting in.

  The stranger smiles his red smile and walks away, sleeping kitten cradled in one arm, joint in the other hand. I almost don’t notice this. I could have sworn the kitten was gone. I feel very far from the present. As the taxi rolls down Ballygunge Circular Road and its overhanging canopy of trees, past the yellow walls of the army base, I look back and lose sight of the stranger. Heart thundering, I wait to get home. Ever-present, the dogs watch from the sides of the road, their eyes throwing back the headlights.

  A new day. I take the metro, emerge at Park Street stat
ion, and walk down the street to Oly. Park Street is the Times Square of Kolkata. Any devout Kolkatan will tell you this. That doesn’t mean it’s anything like Times Square, of course. But for a quiet man like me, it’s enough. It’s not as if I have a lot of friends to go bar-hopping and dancing with, or anything like that. So if you haven’t been there already, imagine a wide street (well, compared with the usually narrow streets of this city), adorned with restaurants and stores and coffee shops and stalls and bars that have barnacled the smog-stained remnants of colonial British architecture. Add more recent buildings that stand shoulder-to-shoulder with these reformed mansions, and fill the whole place with people. That’s one thing Park Street does have equal to Times Square—people. On the street walking side by side with passing cars, on the pavement rubbing shoulders like the buildings around them. They’re everywhere, as you would expect in one of the most densely populated areas of the planet.

  I am there, on Sunday, in the twilight that forms between the buildings of cities when the sun is too low to shine directly on the asphalt. The streetlights have come alive, but day still clings on. I’ve lived here so long, but meeting someone who claims to be more than human makes me see everything differently, like at the dhaba last night. My eyes linger on every street dog, curled by the passing feet of pedestrians or exploring the footpaths, so different from their predatory nocturnal incarnations. But more than the dogs, it’s the people, the city that suddenly seems strange, yet not strange enough. Everything feels like a comedown from a trip, an intense high—so much so that it’s physical, a headache growing behind my skull and promising to break at the notes of the stranger’s voice.

  I keep to the footpath, avoid the streaks of odorous water and garbage clotting the gutters. Steamy food-shacks offer passing clouds of warmth from winter’s chill, the heat of open-air cooking trapped under blue plastic tarpaulins stretched over the sidewalks to shelter their customers. I pass hawkers selling snacks, sachets of supari, cigarettes, perfumes and colognes, pirated movies, discounted books and magazines, condoms both imported and not—all operating right beside less ephemeral retail outlets and eateries with glass walls that look into different worlds.

  Everywhere, the behavior of our different packs and clans and tribes on display. Beggars hover close to the transparency of storefront windows in the hope of absorbing some of the opulence within. I pass the well-lit glitz that hovers around the entrance to Park Hotel and its fashionable discos and restaurants, edging by young men and women emerging from chauffeured cars, bodies musked with cologne. I’m careful not to touch any of the girls by accident (I hesitate to call them women), as I don’t want to attract the ire of their well-groomed male companions. A pimp, probably on the lookout for hotel patrons, asks me in flamboyant English if I’d like to spend the night with a college girl, and I shake my head and keep walking. Not too far from there, I reach the popular refuge of the firmly middle classes, Oly Pub. It looks plain and weathered next to the higher-profile stretch of pavement real estate by the hotel, though the building does hint at a faded grandeur. I make a quick supper of a chicken and egg roll at Kusum’s Rolls and Kebabs right next door, and head into the pub.

  I nod to the doorman who probably recognizes me, and duck into the fluorescent-lit gloom. I go upstairs to the windowless sanctum of the air-conditioned section, hoping that the stranger will also go there. A cigarette haze hangs over the Formica tables, as if the winter mist has followed me inside.

  I search the faces in the room till a waiter gives me a grumpy glance, pointing out the fact that I’m standing in the middle of the carpeted thoroughfare without saying a word. The stranger isn’t here. My aching head feels heavier at his absence. Though it’s still light out, Oly is already crowded. I find a table in the corner and order a whiskey double with water, hoping it will calm the headache. The same waiter brings me the drink and takes a while doing it. I bide my time, sipping my watered whiskey and nibbling at the pile of dirty-yellow daalmoot in the little plastic plate by my glass, feeling more and more guilty for taking up an entire table all by myself while the pub fills up.

  —

  But he does show up.

  He appears by my table without warning, half an hour later. It looks like he’s wearing the same flimsy kurta and worn jeans he wore yesterday, and his hair tumbles down to his shoulders again, the ponytail he left with last night abandoned. He’s carrying a dusty blue-and-black JanSport backpack that makes him look younger. Like one of my students, except for those quivers of gray in his hair.

  “Professor. I trust you weren’t waiting long?” He takes off the backpack and slides it under the table with one foot. He’s still wearing those sandals.

  “Oh no. I was just, you know,” I say.

  “Waiting?”

  “Yes. No, I mean, it hasn’t been that long. Please, sit. Thanks for coming.”

  He pulls up the chair opposite and sits down. I blush, and am thankful for the smoke and dim lighting. I get the feeling that he knows I’ve been waiting a long time and likes it. Nervous sipping has almost emptied my glass of whiskey, so I feel tipsy and inclined to forgive him. I’m just glad that he actually showed up, and more grateful than I feel comfortable being. The sound of his voice is an uncanny placebo for the throb behind my eyes.

  “Would you like a drink?” I ask.

  He nods and waves his arm. To my amazement, the waiter shows up immediately. He isn’t any less grumpy, but I’ve never been able to make a waiter at Oly Pub show up in fewer than five minutes. The stranger orders two whiskey doubles. I feel flattered, both by his taking the liberty to order me another and by his appropriation of my choice for his own drink. I have to stop myself from thanking him again.

  “The haunt of heroes,” he says, leaning back and looking around. I assume he’s referring to the pub’s original—now truncated—name, Olympia.

  I wonder how to respond. The stranger folds his hands on the table and looks straight at me, making eye contact. I have no idea what to say to him, what we’re going to talk about, how to start a conversation with him, why in hell I even wanted to meet him again.

  “Did you keep the kitten?” I ask him.

  “I ate it.”

  I stare at him.

  “A poor joke. Forgive me and pull down your eyebrows. The kitten’s safe, with a saucer of milk all her own. She’s taken quite a liking to me. Or perhaps just to not being terrorized by stray dogs.”

  “I’m glad you kept her.”

  “So here we are, and you still haven’t told me your name.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I’m Alok. Alok Mukherjee.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, Alok,” he says and licks his teeth. There’s something fidgety about him today, not like the calm of that old half werewolf I met yesterday.

  “What’s your name?” I ask, after waiting awkwardly.

  “Professor—you don’t mind if I still call you Professor, I hope—my name hardly matters.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You haven’t been listening.” The refusal to play his part in this human ritual disturbs me. The waiter appears with his bottle of Royal Stag, a glass, and his bronze peg measure, and pours us both doubles. I wait.

  “What should I call you, then?” I ask the stranger once the waiter’s gone. The rims of our glasses meet sharply.

  “You can call me anything you want. Anything at all.”

  I find this an unwieldy suggestion. “Are you still saying you’re part werewolf?”

  “Isn’t that why you wanted to meet me again? To find out more? Alok,” he lilts. “What do you want to know?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “I’m aware of that. I’m asking what you do want to know.”

  “I know what you’re asking,” I tell him, irritated. For all his effort to project immortal wisdom, there’s something childish about his way of engaging with me. I look into my glass. “You’re interesting. That’s why I—” I clear my throat. “That’s why I agree
d to meet you again.”

  “How kind,” he says.

  “I want you to finish the story you started yesterday.”

  “Ah. Professor.” He leans forward, placing his elbows on the table.

  “You’re clearly an intelligent man. I want you to know that. I’m not trying to best your intellect with an elaborate prank here.”

  “That’s good, I guess. You don’t have to keep calling me Professor.”

  He smiles. “I find you interesting, too, though you might not believe it. We’re not the same at all. We’re not even close to the same age. But if we’re to talk like adults, you’re going to have to take a leap of faith that quite frankly isn’t possible for a human being in this day and age, not one in your social and environmental circumstances.”

  “You’re telling me I’m going to have to believe whatever you say,” I say.

  “You don’t have to believe me. But you’re going to have to act like you do. For the sake of this play we’ve both walked into. You agreed to be in it, yesterday night. If you abide by that agreement, we can talk.”

  “And why do you think I’ll do that?” I ask.

  “Because you followed me out of the mela. Because you came here today,” he says.

  I nod slowly, unable to refute that. “Okay. Why are you here, then?”

  The stranger takes a drink. “Yesterday I told you stories. You called it hypnotism. Say it is that. Say I’m hypnotizing you. That it’s an illusion. A magician still needs an audience, doesn’t he.”

  “If you’re that good a magician, why find one person in a crowd. Why not charge people, fill an auditorium.”

  “Because that would be tawdry. Sometimes intimacy is the only way real magic works.”

  “Intimacy,” I say, and rub my forehead. “I don’t know your name.”

  “Get out of here, then,” he says. I look up. “You’re not my prisoner, Professor Mukherjee, and don’t pretend that you are. 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.”