The Devourers (25 page)

T
he story's over. Cyrah's life, or what part of it I was allowed to relive, is over.

I wait for the stranger to take my seemingly pointless typed version of that life from me.

Winter returns to Kolkata, slow and hesitant, the shadows of my apartment growing cool enough to banish the whir of the ceiling fan. Outside, during the day, the city looks the same, if a little less sweaty, the more thin-skinned among its populace wrapped in monkey caps, shawls, and scarves. Bereft of the damp of summer and monsoon, the air begins to smell rich and smoky. At night, the streetlights wear thin wedding veils of mist.

I lay down this work.

When the sun is folded up, and when the stars scatter, and when the mountains are set in motion, and when the ten-month pregnant she-camels are left untended, and when the beasts are gathered together, and when the oceans are set ablaze, and when the souls are reunited (with their bodies), and when the infant girl buried alive, is asked for what crime she was slain, and when the records are unfolded, and when the veil of heaven is removed, and when Hell is set blazing, and when Paradise is brought near, then each person shall know what he has brought with him.

S
URAT
A
T-
T
AKWIR 81:1–14
T
HE
Q
URAN

I
buy a daab off a little boy, who hacks the top off the unripe green coconut with a rusty machete and sticks a plastic straw in the top. He charges me twenty rupees for this, which I decide is too much, but then I stop to wonder how much twenty rupees really is to a boy living on the fringes of the largest metropolitan area in West Bengal and selling coconut water to tourists sailing off into the Gangetic delta. Probably enough to keep him from going hungry for an entire day. I hand him a crumpled note, feeling manipulated. He flashes me a grin and leaps off the boat, quick and nimble, just as its diesel engine coughs to life and sends it drifting downstream. I've been dreading being seasick (the last time I was on a boat was when I was a toddler), but the motor makes sure the boat cuts smoothly through the gray water without any swaying or tilting. Thirsty after the three-hour drive from Kolkata to this little rural dock, I suck the coconut shell empty in very little time.

The stranger stands at the bow, wrapped in a shawl and staring out at the mist-clad river, looking for all the world like an ancient masthead to our semi-modern motor launch. His thick, tangled beard makes his face look even thinner than before, matching his long, untied hair. He looks like a wild river deity carved out of wood.

I feel predictably like Conrad's Marlow about to journey down the Congo River. And the stranger, whose name I still don't know after a year—he could be my Kurtz, I suppose. But he's already on the boat. Best not think too deep on that. Still, over-obvious allusions aside, I have no idea what he intends to show me on this trip into the Sundarbans. I can scarcely believe it's actually happening, after all this time, after that night at Prinsep Ghat. But this has been the rhythm of our correspondence since I met him.

When he called a week ago to say that this trip was booked, his tone was quick, impatient. I barely had time to think before agreeing to come along. Thankfully, I have some time off from teaching for winter. The rented car, the rented boat, lodging, the full itinerary—I try to imagine the stranger making travel plans, and I can't.

This morning was the first time we've seen each other since that night. He's acted like nothing happened. Warm, but distant.

In my satchel, as requested, is my transcription of Cyrah's journal, finally complete. He hasn't yet asked about it.

Looking over the edge of the bright-blue launch, I see a world turned gray—the sky is blotted out by the mist hugging the land, and the water we travel over is just a darker shade of that haze. At the edges of the broad channel, children skitter and wave their tiny penises and buttocks at us, spots of color on the steeped gray mudbanks. The launch gains speed, skimming through the occasional shadows of concrete bridges that span the width of the tributary.

I don't feel like I'm in a delta forest. I ask one of the crew about that (this being a private launch, the stranger and I are the only “tourists” on board), and he says we aren't in the forest yet, and won't be for a while. So I sit on one of the plastic chairs set out under the wooden canopy in the center of the launch, which crowns the cabin and its cozy beds. I let the purring of the motor lull me into a waking sleep.

I watch the stranger's rigid back. He doesn't move. Standing there, tall and slim, an arrowhead pointing south to the mouth of the Ganges, he becomes our boat's engine, pulling us across the tidal waters with his growling will alone.

—

When I wake, everything has changed. The gray world gleams with sunlight, and the dull earth around has sprung to green life. On either side of the rippling silver sheet of the river is the mangrove forest. The ends of their roots stick up out of the muddy banks like groves of little stakes, waiting patiently for high tide to cover them with water so they can breathe again. Pale, pink-faced rhesus monkeys frolic among these stretches of vegetative fingertips as if they were fields of tall grass. The forest shimmers surreal and bright, the short mangroves hugging the edges of the banks and allowing no glimpses into the swampy forest beyond. Immediately I start looking for tigers amid the trees.

The stranger still stands at the tip of the boat, apparently unmoved from when I last saw him. As if sensing that I'm awake, he turns around and smiles. We are in the Sundarbans.

W
e spend the whole day traveling the waterways of the delta forest before we reach the island-village of Sajpur, where our guesthouse is. The channels are as varied as the forest is uniform and impenetrable. Some of them are narrow streams, others broad rivers, others vast confluences of water that stretch out to the horizon like great lakes bordered by dim land in the distance. Sometimes gaudy red-and-white tour boats pass us by, packed with people bending eagerly over the rails to catch a sight of all the wildlife the boats drive away with the sound of their engines, making me thankful for our own private launch. I spend the day out on deck or inside the cramped cabins, sprawled on the hard beds looking over my transcriptions of the stranger's manuscripts. The sea-smell of the salty delta water drifts in through the windows of the cabin, a natural incense to relax my mind.

The stranger spends all his time looking out to the forests as they pass us by. Sometimes he points out the odd bit of fauna to me. A great estuarine crocodile basking in the sun-warmed mud, skin studded with emerald scales glittering in the afternoon, slithering into the water with lethal ease as our boat drifts by it (motor off, so that we can observe). A gray monitor lizard tasting the air with pink tongue at the edge of the forest. A brown-and-white hawk with ruffled feathers, its beak a yellow hook, perched on the watchtower of a bare branch sticking up out of the forest canopy. Sometimes I hear a rustling along the tree line when the boat travels close to the shore and the motor is off, and I imagine it to be the sound of great paws treading on the undergrowth, bright patterned sinews brushing against the mangroves and low palm leaves.

In the evening, the sun snared behind the mangroves, our boat stops to refuel at an estuary whose shores act as a docking area, filled with boats in transit. All of us wandering the arteries of the delta, drawn here to form a glittering human scab on the water. The stranger and I sit in the captain's cabin and play cards to pass the time, a plastic plate of flaking samosas and ketchup between us.

Beyond the windows of the cramped wooden cabin (a felt hanging of a tiger above the hard bed), this ephemeral city of boats bobs in the twilight, air heavy with the smell of diesel and the growling of generators. The stranger has little interest in half-shod blackjack as he observes the brief settlement outside, an apparition of civilization in this wilderness, marked by Venus glowing in the soft sky above it.

His memories drift off him on the curling fumes of his sweat, igniting my imagination. The flaccid sails of Portuguese pirate ships soaked in the last rays of sunset, stippled with shadows of mangroves and palms, torches wavering over the water. Human blood spraying like dark wine across wooden decks, ships groaning and swaying under the heavy feet and hands of monsters disgorged from the jungle. The stinking fear of these seafaring bandits and merchants: fear of this strange yet lucrative land so far from their home, of crocodiles and tigers beyond the water. All overwhelmed by their terror at the beasts that have boarded them, nimble as humans, quick and silent like nothing on this planet—beasts that can walk upright, garlanded with bones, dwarfing even the mightiest of Bengal's cats, monsters of unimaginable beauty and ferocity. Screams ringing across the delta waters as animals watch from the forest, tigers panting jealous of the massacre taking place, confused and afraid of the beings that cause it.

I breathe it all in, now leaning over the damp edge of the boat, watching cigarette smoke leave the stranger's mouth in a white tendril. I'm shaking, and I try to hide it. The stranger hands me his cigarette, and I take it with gratitude. It's damp against my lips, from his mouth. I inhale deep, imagine cinders in my lungs, hope the nicotine will help with my sudden headache. My visions of the past linger in that ache, and I touch my mouth, as if to feel the traces of his saliva on it, from the cigarette. His smell, his sweat, his spit. I wonder if I'm beginning to hallucinate, queasy with excitement. He hasn't made me see his stories since the night at the baul mela. Maybe after all this time, something is changing.

“Alok,” the stranger says. I'm afraid to speak, because my teeth might chatter.

“Y-yes,” I say. His cigarette burns like a firebrand, scorching the air and painting the stranger's face, and I'm back in the baul mela for a fleeting second, the first moment I looked at him. The glow of a match against the shadows of his cheekbones.

Cigarette between his teeth, he takes off his own shawl and puts it on my shoulders. His hands firm on my shoulders, fingertips briefly pushing against my muscles through fabric, through the wool of my sweater.

“Thank you,” I say, swallowing my tremors. His hands slide off me, smoke tracing their path.

“Listen. The last time we saw each other,” he says. There we are. It had to come up. “At Prinsep Ghat.”

“Alok, don't even. It's fine. It's ancient history,” I say.

“My name isn't Alok. It's yours,” he says, smiling in the dying light.

“Shit. Sorry, slipped out. It's difficult, talking to someone without a name. I just wanted to put a name where one's missing, and that one was the closest.”

“Indeed,” he whispers, and looks at me. I shudder again, shaking my head to throw the headache.

“That night, I didn't intend to offend you. To truly offend you,” he says.

“Don't say things like that. It makes you sound like someone else, someone I don't know at all.”

“I am a stranger, no?”

“In name,” I say.

He nods, taking another drag. “Ancient history, then.”

“That's right.”

He nods and clears his throat. “Do you have the complete transcription?”

“I do,” I say, reaching into my satchel and handing him the manila envelope full of my printed version of Cyrah's tale. I look around and feel silly. It's not like I'm handing him a bag full of drugs. His long fingers close around the package, cigarette propped in between the knuckles. “Thank you, Alok. This is a fine work you've done for me,” he says. The envelope crackles as he tucks it under his armpit. His eyes glow as he draws on the cigarette, looking intently at me, his transcriber. No longer. What am I to him now?

“Feels like you just took pity on a bored and lonely college professor and gave him some money and something to do, but you're welcome.”

His eyes don't move from me.

“What?” I ask him.

“Nothing. Are you still cold?”

“I'm fine. Thank you.”

Just like that, my job for this man, this so-called stranger, is over. The shivering vanishes abruptly, as if something has drained out of me.

The boat coughs to life again, the crew shouting warnings to the other vessels that surround us. They guide it out of the little city of boats with rapid ease, and the cluster of life floats away from us like an illusion. Soon we are in the rivers again, traveling in the settled gloaming between the trees. Despite my headache, I feel a calm words can't describe, a light breeze brushing past the stranger to jostle my hair. When he's done with his cigarette, he doesn't throw the butt in the water, instead licking it damp and making it disappear into his kurta. We're moving fast now, the water rippling after us like oil in the sunset.

It's dark by the time we moor at the little docking area of the village, the stars gleaming fierce in a rich blue sky. I can see no lights anywhere except for the lanterns on our boat. We cross over to land on an unsteady plank that rests in the mud of the shore. The guesthouse itself is very close to the riverbank, reachable by a brick path laid down in mud, crossing through a narrow fringe of forest separating village from river, and running alongside broad, fallow fields that adjoin the plot of land the tourist lodge occupies. At the edge of the fields, the moonlit mist pales the black, thick line of the forest. The sound of thousands of insects screaming always with us. A pack of friendly dogs, which look like the same mongrels that wander the streets of Kolkata, follow us eagerly, though never coming close. They never do, when the stranger is around. There are no lights to help us see during the walk. The stars and moon are bright enough, casting shadows. The village is asleep.

As we enter the lodge, a whitewashed two-storied building surrounded by smaller cabins, I can make out a courtyard-garden through which the brick path winds. It's all illuminated in the glow of moonlight reflecting off earth and forest, glistening off damp leaves and grass, with not a single visible flare of electric light to aid it.

The electricity has been shut off for the night to save power, except for the dim blue fluorescents in the dining room downstairs, where we eat a home-cooked dinner of large-grained rice, dal, and chicken curry, having kept my bags in our room on the second floor. The cook nods at us, toothy grin in her round face, her midriff swelling bare from under her saree and sweater-blouse, solid as a baobab trunk. We thank her, and she retreats into the kitchen. The rice is so fresh I can feel the grit of chaff between the grains, the chicken soft and wet under a fat sheath of goose-bumped skin. Our host is the overseer of the travel lodge: Shankar-babu, an amiable and overeager man wrapped in shawl, sweater, and woolen cap, squinting at us through bottle-thick glasses that enlarge his watery eyes. He tells us the bird we are eating was killed hours ago, brought in from the village. He regales us with tales of life in the Sundarbans (talking in Bengali, and allowing me to hear the stranger speak in it for the first time, in an erudite accent that far outshines my own grasp of my mother-tongue). Shankar-babu shows us a newspaper cutting in a plastic folder he brings to us, which tells of tiger attacks just a few weeks ago in this very village. He tells of the recent injury of a fisherman whose leg was snapped up by a crocodile. I look at the darkness outside the windows, nervous. A large brown spider darts its way across the whitewashed wall next to the barred window. The stranger tells me it is called a huntsman.