The Devourers Page 4

  His voice doesn’t rise. But I feel my heart beat faster, my headache thumping with it. I look at my unsteady hands, relish the whining note of my headache.

  “Tell me something. Are you going to ask me for money after the evening’s done?” I ask.

  “No. I’m not a hawker.”

  I put the glass of whiskey and melting ice against my forehead.

  “Magicians don’t work for free.”

  “Metaphors only go so far. I’m not a magician, either. Just tell me, Alok. Do you want to hear more? You wanted to, last night. Do you still want to?”

  I close my eyes, feel moisture trickling off the glass and down my head. I nod.

  “You’re more open-minded than most historians, then?” he asks. I open my eyes.

  “Again with the generalizations. I’m not even sure where you got that one from.”

  “Very well. For one thing, I’m not going to finish the story I told you yesterday.”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Because it’s not important right now. It did what it was supposed to, and it’ll come back when and if it needs to.”

  His face goes vacant as he looks at one of the resident rats of this dank Olympia. It scampers between the tables, darting over the crimson carpet and looking for crumbs to scavenge, unafraid of the many human feet around it. I remember the dead rat by the stranger’s feet last night. The stranger looks young again, unlike yesterday night after he finished the stories. The unruly hair, the smirk. The familiar combo of jeans and kurta. For a second I think that maybe he actually is one of my students, playing an elaborate joke to humiliate me once it gets out on campus. That I’ve somehow failed to notice him in my classes, or failed him, and this is some kind of revenge.

  “What did you do to me yesterday?” I ask, if just to stifle this thought.

  “What you saw or felt has its provenance in your own head.”

  “It’s absurd that you would even say that, after introducing yourself in the way you did. And it’s not like I’ve never been told a story before. I felt something else. Like—” I stumble on the word, but force it out. “Like magic. Like you said.”

  He waits, as if for me to make a point.

  “I’ve honestly never felt anything like it in my life. It felt like you shared a bit of lost time with me, shared the memories of something that can’t—shouldn’t—exist, like you had it hidden under that kurta of yours and just, I don’t know, gave it to me.”

  A flash of teeth. “How eloquent.”

  “You’re being facetious, but it’s true. The more I think about it, the more I feel that you did something impossible yesterday night. If it’s a trick, it’s one I’ve never seen or heard of before.”

  He is silent for a moment.

  “Well, Professor, I’m glad you liked my ‘trick.’ I have something to give you,” he tells me.

  He takes a gulp of his drink and pulls a large, mustard-yellow manila envelope out of his backpack. He places it on the table. I notice that his glass is almost empty already.

  “You want to know more. Here is something more,” he tells me, one hand on the envelope.

  “What is this?”

  “This is history. History most people—humans—aren’t aware of, in particular. As a professor of history, I thought you might appreciate that.”

  “Can I open it?”

  “Of course. I brought it here for you.” He removes his hand from the envelope. I take it and open the flap to look inside. It’s a plain black hardbound notebook, filled with slanted handwriting. Black ink and the smudged gray of pencils. From the first to the last, the pages (which have no lines on which to write, though the penmanship is straight and true) are crammed full. I catch fragments, written in English. In the middle, I find the skeleton of a leaf, which wisps out to float to my lap. I pick it up and put it back in the notebook.

  “You want me to read this?” I ask.

  “Yes. Take it with you,” he says.

  “What is it?”

  “I suppose you could call it a journal, from another time. A voice from the past.”

  “Whose voice?” I ask.

  “You’ll find out when you read it.”

  “This is because you say you’ve—because you’ve lived a long time. That’s why you have access to this?”

  “Yes,” he agrees.

  “This doesn’t look very old.”

  He smiles. “Very observant. I translated them from the original source. I doubt you can read the languages the source contains. Either way, I can’t just go around giving historical artifacts to strangers, can I?”

  I’ve tended to think of him as the stranger. I am a stranger to him. But I can’t shake the feeling that he somehow already knows more about me from two conversations than many of my alleged friends do. Even family, why not. More than I could ever hope to know about him.

  “You’re a translator? Is that your job?” I ask him.

  “I translated what’s in that notebook you’re holding. That doesn’t make me a full-time translator.”

  “So I take your word that this notebook contains a journal from another time. Because, for some reason, you took up translating as a hobby.”

  “Lord above. You don’t have to take my word for anything. Just pretend if it’s easier. Read what I’ve given you and see what you think. Decide for yourself. No humans—well, that’s not true. Very few humans have read what you’re going to in those pages. This is just a part of what I can give you. There’s more.”

  “So why are you giving me this?”

  “I want to hire you. To transcribe these documents, type them out.”

  “But I’m not a transcriber. I just teach history. I write essays. Nothing like this. You should get a professional.”

  “Do I look like I want a professional? You’re a student and teacher of history, Alok. That is enough. I’m giving you an opportunity that very few historians could even dream of. It’s a simple request. Type out what you read. That’s all. I’ll pay you.”

  “And the sources? Do I get to see them? The actual historical documents. Surely you realize that if you actually have such things, I’d be very interested in seeing them, rather than this. I am a historian, after all. What period is this from? My specialization is late modern, colonial India mainly, but obviously, I’d be interested in any kind of text from the past.”

  “You might well see the original texts. If you prove yourself interested enough. Worthy of it. Just read the translation first. It might tell you a little more about what you want to know about what I am.”

  “A werewolf,” I say, to pin him down a bit.

  He licks the rim of his glass. I clench my jaw and look away, catching a glimpse of his tongue sliding wet from between his lips.

  “Half,” he says. He drains the last of his drink. I have much of my glass still left, despite drinking fast to keep up with him. He hasn’t denied what he claimed yesterday, but he hasn’t been embracing it, either. And now he’s hired me to do a job. It feels odd, even mundane. But I can hardly forget what he’s proven himself capable of. The thought of historical journals describing werewolves in the past does excite me, coming from this particular man.

  “I’ll do it,” I say, and take too large a gulp of whiskey.

  He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Good,” he says, and tosses some hundred-rupee notes on the table. Enough for both our drinks and tip. The opposite of demanding payment from me.

  “You’re leaving?” I ask.

  “We will meet again,” he says, snatching the backpack from under the table and slinging it onto his shoulders.

  “Right. But. Where will we meet again?” I ask before he can hurry off.

  He gets up and stops, looking distracted by my question.

  “Do you have a phone number or an email address? Some way we can get in touch?” I suggest, to help things along.

  “No. But I will see you again. Goodbye, Professor Alok Mukherjee. Thank you for accepting
this task.”

  He walks away so quickly that I’d assume that he has an emergency to get to, if not for his calm. I don’t have the time to ask how he’s going to get in touch with me. I suppose I can call out before he disappears through the new patrons standing and waiting by the stairwell door for tables. But I don’t.

  I feel both excited and disappointed. I had expected more. To be hypnotized again like last night, away and out of my current body in this present. The headache remains.

  Perhaps what he’s given me will do as a substitute, for now. I double-check the pages of his notebook, to make sure that they actually have words on them, that they’re not just a bunch of scribbles on paper. There is a line of poetry written on the inside of the front cover in pencil, small but visible. It’s Blake, though I’ve forgotten what it’s from. Seeing it reassures me. I feel drunk. Confident despite it all that I will see him again, just like he said. I shake my head and look around, to see if anyone has noticed what’s transpired. But nothing has transpired, nothing that can be seen by anyone other than me. No one is looking at me. I have a whiskey to finish, alone. I start reading.

  FIRST FRAGMENT*1

  This new parchment I write on is fresh skin:

  Taken from the back of a boy we found wandering alone near the dusty walls of Lahore, weeks after we crossed the borders of the Mughal Empire and days after we swam across the silt-clouded waters of the Indus. I took the child by his warm brown arm and spoke into his ear in Punjabi, asking him, “Where are your parents?” and he answered in a wet voice, “They have sickened and died,” and I slipped my thumbs under the curve of his jaw to feel him live before I bent his neck and broke it so he cried no longer (some have said I take to pity too easily). I hold him now in my hands, his skin toughened under the sun of his empire that forgot him and over the smoke of our campfires burning earth-fed wood.

  Not a league from the child’s killing we found his mother lying on the ground, clothed in flies. There was a newborn babe clutched in her arms snaked in purple umbilicus. The woman’s thighs were scabbed in the sun-dried crust of the infant’s birth, her stomach still flaccid from its expelled weight. The babe sucked at her cold nipple. It hurt me to see the bravery of this female, striving to feed her offspring moments before her death. I did not tell my companions my thoughts. I lingered a moment longer, to bless the female and her babe with remembrance. How many times have I witnessed such sights across the centuries, and willfully ignored them?

  Makedon dashed that cherub’s head with a rock. A small mercy that he did not play with it. Gévaudan stared at the pitiful sight with a grimace of disdain. We did not eat of mother or infant, for our fardels*2 were full at the time, and we were in no mood to scavenge like wild dogs, having trekked long to reach Lahore. We went on, to let them rot or become food for lesser creatures than us. I sought some comfort on her behalf, for the fact that her older son lived on in some way inside us, in the weird metabolisms of our shifting selves, in our dreams of his young life.

  I test the scroll I made from him here, this dried skin to clothe the flesh of a story, or many. It holds under the bone of the nib.

  In Mumtazabad:*3

  I saw you. You of human men and women, you of one self and one soul. I cannot tell you that you shone out to me first. There were many men and women and children who kindled my appetites in Mumtazabad, where the workmen dwell and the travelers in Shah Jahan’s empire may rest in caravanserais and barter in bazaars. I saw them everywhere, these virgins and sodomites, scented with dusty sweat and the stains of their exploits. Men with gray eyes and drought-cracked lips who prostrate themselves to their Allah, unaware of wolfish eyes that fall upon their upraised buttocks. Peasants male and female, naked but for plain loincloths grown damp, dark skin glazed with sweat from their toil, even in winter’s chill. Noblemen lounging in shaded palanquins, mouths red with chewed betel, their salwars and breeches threaded with winter sun. Noblewomen in peshwaz robes, muslin waves that ripple like curtains at their windows, their veils brushing lips only glimpsed through fabric, powdered talc clinging like frosts on the downy slopes of their cheeks. So many succulent lives, churning with diverse energies, waiting to be tasted.

  Yet I chose you. The sun was at its zenith when we entered the caravanserai, walking behind the odorous camels of a traveling merchant, and as the bleating animals parted and we came into the open courtyard, I saw you leaning against a pillar playing with your oiled curls, mouth sliced by the shadow of your nose. You looked at me, stared at me and my companions clad in strange furs and tunics so foreign, and your eyes seemed to me like no eyes I had ever seen north of the Indus. 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.

  —

  I walked up to you and you stared still, chipped nails grasping those curls and twining them ’round your fingers. Your eyes, planets of shallow sea shaded by your unpowdered brow, eluding all colors, so gray and blue that they ceased to be either and seemed to me green, as the eyes of our second selves often are.

  “What do you want, foreigner?” you asked me.

  “As a foreigner, I want to talk to one who isn’t foreign to this land,” I said, and relished the surprise on your face as I spoke back to you in Pashto. But even as surprise sweetened your expression, you did not avert your gaze.

  “Then keep moving. I wasn’t born here but in Persia, and some here might think me a foreigner, though my mother brought me here in her arms when I was little.”

  “Would you believe it if I told you that I can’t remember where I was born?” I asked you.

  “I would not.”

  “Fairly answered. Still, it’s true. That would make me a foreigner the world over, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would.”

  “Then it matters little where I am and where you are, because wherever I might meet you, I’ll still be a foreigner and you less so.”

  “A feeble argument based on an impossibility,” you said, fiddling with your hair again. You looked around, peering behind me.

  “Where are your foreign friends, then? We don’t often see men so heathen in appearance, no one can tell which part of the world they’re from or what gods they hold true. And such devilish-looking folk even less so.”

  “Each of us is from a different place, and many places. I apologize, my lady, for our raiment, which is made from wild beasts and might lend us a disposition similar to them.”

  “I’m not so easily offended. There are more frightening men than you and your companions here in this sinkhole of a bazaar, not to mention this empire, despite your looks.”

  “You might be surprised,” I said, and you seemed off-put by what seemed like a boast, but was merely the truth.

  “So where have your friends gone?” you asked.

  “To wash themselves in the baths.”

  “And you alone among them thinks keeping the stink of travel on you is attractive?”

  “Your tongue is sharp. You might be thankful that I don’t follow the customs of man in treating his woman.”

  “I’m not so easily thankful, either, traveler. If I offend you, take your leave.”

  “Like you, I’m not so easily offended, my lady.”

  “And you shouldn’t be, looking like you do. It’s sensible that you should look like a beast, if you don’t follow the customs of man as you claim. Where are you from?”

  “I don’t remember. And I have ranged far and wide since that unremembered birth. But I came here with my companions from the gates of a city called Nürnberg. From another empire, like this one, but for the people of Europe, known sometimes as the Holy Roman Empire.”

  The mask of your wariness seemed to slip a little. “You’ve traveled far for one with no camels or horses. You must be very tired.”

  “I’ve had enough rest. Tell me, why is a young woman sitting here alone in the middle of a caravanserai? Why is your husband or suitor right n
ow not at my neck with a blade for talking with you?”

  “I let whatever suitors come my way pay for my travels, after which they slip from my sight and are never seen again,” you said.

  “And if you are not wed, why are you not in the company of other women, and covered? Surely you are Muslim, if you are from Persia,” I said.

  “Muslim I may be, yes, but I’ve no husband, nor family, nor home to stay in. My modesty matters little to anyone—I’ve as little need for covering myself as any Hindu commoner you see on the streets.”

  “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?”

  “I’m merely curious, my lady. Even with the vast knowledge I’ve gathered of your kind and its various peoples, I sometimes get confused.”

  “My kind.”

  “Khr—that is, humans,” I told you, strangely unafraid of revealing myself.

  “It’s told white men are arrogant, but this is new,” you said, puzzled.

  “And where are you traveling?” I asked.

  “Your fellow white men land on our shores to the west, and now to the east as well. Perhaps they’ll have work, or ships to carry me to other lands,” you said.

  “See the worlds.”

  “The world. Yes,” you said.

  “A strange inclination, for one of your position and sex.”

  “Is it?”

  “So I supposed. My friends will return soon, and we’ll be leaving here, once I’ve washed myself also at the bathhouse.”

  “Then what is it you want, if you’re not staying? Get to it.”