The Devourers (9 page)

I
t takes me several weeks to finish the transcription.

Months after I've finished, the stranger calls on my landline, asking to meet so that I can give him the typed version. He takes long enough that I figured I'd never see him again. I ask him how he found my number, and he answers simply: It's in the phone book. Of course it is.

The handover happens at the Indian Museum, over the stale wrappings of its resident Egyptian mummy. Perhaps he finds that amusing, in a Hammer-horror kind of way. A half werewolf, a mummy, and a human meet at a museum, et cetera. I watch flies peck at the glass of the display case, trying to get to the long-desiccated corpse within, while the stranger flips through the stapled sheets of the typed transcript. He has grown an ungroomed beard, so I don't even recognize him. His tapering jaws hidden by hair, he takes on the look of a sun-roasted prophet. Thankfully, he remembers what I look like. He seems delighted at my work. We leave the museum and walk up Chowringhee, drinking milky sweet street chai from little clay cups despite the steaming heat of the summer afternoon.

He points at the baking green expanse of the Maidan, across the sun-reflecting river of traffic oozing down Jawaharlal Nehru Road.

“I remember when that park was nothing but swamp and jungle, and a few hovels huddling around the dirt road to Halishar. Our pack, we'd pick prey off that road so often—travelers without a clue. Oh, don't look at me like that. If we didn't, bandits would have, or tigers, sometimes even the odd mazed elephant. We usually left the villagers alone, though.”

“When did you finally give in and move into the city?”

“The city? The city didn't happen for a long time. And who said I live in the city now?”

“Don't you?”

He ignores my question, of course. “The British messed it all up. Built their City of Palaces here, built Fort William. Everything changed after Plassey. It was something, though.”

“What was?”

“The first day they turned on the lights over Chowringhee. Gas lamps. It was a summer evening; July, I think. July of 1857? I forget the year. I only read about it later. Didn't much keep track back then. I watched from the wilderness. They didn't even have bloody pavements yet, but they switched on the lights. A string of fireballs in the dark, unceasing. Quite something. When I saw them flicker to life, I had this gut-wrenching feeling. I knew things were changing faster than we'd ever expected.”

I look past the dirty metal pillars of the flyover that bisects Jawaharlal Nehru Road, and at the fenced-off Maidan. A kite drifts above the trees that jostle the pointed spears of the wrought-iron fence. We keep walking.

He is no longer putting up the pretense that the first story he told me at the baul mela wasn't about him. He is admitting to having a somewhat abnormal life span, and to the admittedly unusual activity of hunting humans. It makes me smile, though I don't know myself if it's a smile of patronizing skepticism or just relief at gaining a bit more of his confidence. After all, if the stranger's stories are real, I'm faced with carrying a truth too enormous and terrifying to contemplate.

“So tell me truthfully. Did you write the story in the notebook you gave me?” I ask.

“It's more than a story. It's a confession, a journal, an apology.”

“Right. To the poor woman in it. Cyrah. The one woman in it, I might add.”

“Yes, to her. And no, I didn't write it, obviously. I just translated it. Like I said, do I look blond and blue-eyed?”

“Then who did?” I ask.

“The narrator wrote it.”

“Don't get meta on me. You know what I mean,” I say. “Well, anyway, it's probably a good thing you're claiming not to have written it, because your ‘narrator' is an awful man—”

“Not a man…” The stranger smiles.

“Yes, yes, shape-shifter, not a man. Poor, benighted soul, raped a woman, and I'm supposed to cry for him because he wanted to ‘create'? Both this story and the one you told me, they're supposed to be somewhat sad, right?” I almost stop because I remember exactly how melancholic the stranger's narration had been, when he told the story that hypnotized me at the mela. I become a bit nervous that he might get offended, but I see that he's waiting placidly for me to continue. I go on. “But even ignoring the whole human-hunting thing, they're from the point of view of a kidnapper, and then a rapist, and both times there's a woman who only exists in their story to suffer for their strange needs. And whether or not they're not human, they look and act, for all intents and purposes, like human men. I mean, am I supposed to be sad for the narrator here?”

I become even more nervous when he doesn't say anything.

“I'm not, am I? That's ridiculous. I hope he's not supposed to be sympathetic. Is he?”

“You'd have to ask him that, now, wouldn't you? Will you just relax for one moment, Professor? Just relax, take a breath, enjoy this bright summer day. You ask so many questions, I hardly know which ones to answer. Do you want some jhaal moori?”

“No, I'm okay.”

He drinks the last of his chai and tosses the clay cup into one of the piles of garbage that punctuate the hawkers' stalls lining the pavements of Chowringhee. Walking to one of the vendors with their metal carts, he buys himself a paper bag of jhaal moori. Pouring out even handfuls of the spicy puffed rice in his palm and tossing them into his mouth, he speaks between munches.

“Thank you. For typing that out. I told you I'd pay you for your services, and I will,” he says, stopping to savor the moori. His thick beard moves up and down over his slender neck. I see the green bulge of a prominent vein snake up that long trunk of sinew and skin, and avert my eyes from it.

“Okay, what's my payment? I'm intrigued,” I ask, clearing my throat.

“Have you ever been to the Sundarbans?” he asks, sniffing the myriad scents in the air. To me, everything is overwhelmed by the stink of pollution from heavy traffic just a few feet away from us.

“The Sundarbans? No, why?” I ask.

“It's a pity that most people in this city barely even realize that one of the largest delta forests in the world lies just hours south of here.”

“Well, I'm aware of it. I just haven't gone.”

“I'm paying you in travel, Professor. You can thank me later. I've booked a trip to the Sundarbans,” he says, lapsing back into familiar presumption. He smiles, small flecks of puffed rice crumbs sticking to his lips and black beard. “I'll pay you in money, too, in case you're worried. Think of this as a bonus.”

“You want me to visit the Sundarbans. With you.”

“Unless you don't want your bonus. It's nothing to me.” He shrugs, rolling oily peanuts around his palm with his thumb.

“Why the Sundarbans?” I ask.

“It's close. And I want to show you where I grew up,” he says. The peanuts and stray rice disappear, crunching loudly between his teeth.

“You grew up in the Sundarbans?”

“I just said so. You really must stop with these incessant questions, Professor. Come with me and I'll tell you about it. This is neither the time nor the place.”

“I'm just a little surprised. It's not every day people ask me on trips into jungles. Or anywhere, for that matter. I barely even know you.”

He munches his moori, squinting, placid. A sheen of sweat shines on his high forehead, catching the burning sunlight.

“Can I think about it?” I ask.

“Of course. Should you decide to accept payment, I also want to continue our arrangement. Professional or not, you're just fine at the job, Alok. You should give yourself more credit once in a while,” he says.

“There is more to the story, then?”

“Quite a bit more.” He nods and unzips his worn backpack. He hands me a mustard-yellow manila envelope, just like the first time. This time, it has loose sheets instead of a notebook, but filled with the same handwriting as before. “Another manuscript,” he says. “If you can call it that. Another journal of sorts, translated. You might be interested in it. You seem most concerned, after all, about the woman in the previous journal. Compile this one and type it out, like before. If you're willing. Again, payment will be arranged. Simple money, if you like.”

I think about this. I know he might well be barking mad, but then again—if he is, so am I. He made me see things, see stories even as he spoke their words. I still don't know what's happened between the two of us, whether he drugged me into accepting some hallucinatory reality of his own the first night I met him. But if I'm dancing with a trickster, I'm nothing if not awed by each step, each move. He's leading, with skill.

And if everything he says is real, I don't even know. I don't know what that means. It means I'm to be a historian like no other, my lack of ambition be damned.

So I take his second manuscript and agree to be his unqualified contracted transcriber once more, if only to give us a reason to keep meeting, to wear away my remaining rational impulses to stop all of this and never contact him again.

I won't say I'm not scared. I am. But being afraid rouses me, in a way. It makes me interested in what's to come in the world. In my world. I haven't felt that for so long. Not during meetings with Gitanjali at the coffeehouse, eating greasy chicken cutlets and trying to figure out whether we really want each other (or whether I want her, to avoid presumption on my part). Not during endless classes and lectures, or writing and editing textbook drafts. Not during nights alone drinking whiskey and wondering what my parents, my family, are doing, my inflamed love for them in absentia only matched by my hatred at them for disowning me.

At the end of our walk, I also agree to go on the trip to the Sundarbans with him. I don't know if I actually will, but it seems the best thing to say for now. He doesn't react in any significant way, but he seems happy at my decision. He also hands me a thick envelope of thousand-rupee bills, as additional payment for the first transcription. He says we'll meet again, but once more doesn't say when or where. It has been six months since our first conversation at the baul mela, yet here we are, shaking hands and saying goodbye with the confidence of common acquaintances, at least. And he does shake my hand, I'm not making that up. As if we were business partners, and I'd just sold him something more substantial than my ability to type out handwritten documents. It is a strange and uncharacteristic gesture, but he is the one who initiates it. His grip is warm, very firm. My own limp academic's hand slides out of his, tingling with the shock of touch. We part at the red-brick façade of New Market: he vanishing into the pungent-aired warehouse at its center, filled with animals and carcasses, glistening, clucking, braying under bare bulbs; I wandering off to buy brownies at Nahoum's.

S
everal months pass us by with no mention of the trip to the Sundarbans that the stranger promised, so I assume he was lying about having booked it when he first told me about it. I don't mind. I might even be relieved, since I'm still not sure I'm going to go with him. We start meeting often. I hand over portions of the typed manuscript every time, over coffee or cool bottles of Kingfisher beer. When monsoon rolls around, it's whiskey doubles over fibrous beefsteak at Oly Pub. On the days it isn't raining, we pick apart cheap chili chicken under the violet night sky on the Lindsay Hotel's rooftop bar, surrounded by white tourists smoking cigarettes and gazing out at the lights of Kolkata (by now, the new law has kicked in, and this is one of the few bars where you can smoke at a table, because it's outdoors). He is utterly delighted, always, by the various ways humans prepare food and drink, and the various venues in which they partake of it.

We talk. I'd try to put down every conversation we have here, but they wouldn't all be interesting to a reader, which may be surprising, considering the unusual nature of our relationship. But many of these talks we have in the interim are actually genuinely uninteresting in a way that shocks me, and also gives me a lot of pleasure. At times, it feels like talking to an old friend—that's how normal it all is. He spends a lot of time asking me about my life, and I indulge him, to a sensible degree at first, and then with a complete lack of restraint. He's a far better listener than I would have expected of such a consummate storyteller. An excellent one, in fact, never interrupting, and always completely rapt in even my most boring recollections.

I tell him about my engagement to Shayani, a fellow history student I met while doing my master's at Presidency College. About our long and blissful courtship in classrooms and hole-in-the-wall eateries, spooning soggy momos into each other's mouths in dim Tibetan restaurants. Sheer relief after long hours lulled by professorial droning. The quick kisses in the hallways between classes, the bliss of ending those eternal summer days by fucking beside the open windows of my little apartment in Jodhpur Park. I tell him about my quiet proposal in bed, taking the ring from the bedside drawer while the sun rose outside. Shayani's calm, clear-eyed delight, the ring a cold new hardness on her finger when her hand wandered down between my legs, spit on palm, and she kissed me till I came. I tell him about my parents' approval of Shayani being a pretty Bengali girl, and the various elaborate lunches and dinners and receptions over which our two families bonded and became one, using our romance as an excuse. About the collapse of all our plans and the cancellation of our impending betrothal—a tortuous, mutual decision to respect the beauty of our courtship and not have it be rotted away by the boredom we felt after our relationship became a performance for our families. About the rift between my family and me that followed—my rejection of their hysterical reaction to this breakup. The inverse of Romeo and Juliet: two families so eager to be one that the star-crossed lovers can't stand it anymore. He especially enjoys that last comparison, laughing as I tell him about my farcical tragedy.

I don't, however, tell him other, more complicated reasons that provoked the end of my engagement to Shayani, and exacerbated my parents' unhappiness with me.

I don't tell him about the men I slept with on occasion before Shayani, usually fellow students during my undergraduate days, sometimes strangers. I suppose this is because he is, at least going by appearances, a man, and I don't want to draw attention to the fact that we're meeting alone. Despite this concealment, I'm more candid with him than with anyone else in my life. It feels reckless and wonderful, as if pouring out the details of my past intimacies to him might make them new again. I wonder sometimes if he is as hypnotized by these stories of my unspectacular human life as I was by his tale telling at the baul mela. If this is what he craves—the memories of an unremarkable man.

Anyway, the point being we talk, like human beings. Like two normal human beings, whether or not he is one.

He almost never talks about himself. When he does mention himself, it is always an offhand remark taking us back in time. He might wave at the grumbling blue flickers of lightning on the horizon as we sit on the roof of Lindsay Hotel, telling me how they remind him of the flashes of musket fire from skirmishes between French and British colonials, back when they were still vying for domination of the area. How the chaos and confusion of battle made for exciting hunting. He might ruminate in the now cleaner-aired Oly Pub on the smoking ban in bars and restaurants, mentioning his forays into the dank opium dens of North Calcutta once the nineteenth century rolled around and the city was a thing that could no longer be avoided. I take these morsels, and the pages he gives me, grateful for them in the absence of whatever magic he worked on our first night together. He doesn't seem willing to demonstrate that again, and I don't push him.

It becomes clear over the passing months that he has a taste for nostalgia. I listen, always, captivated, letting him speak more and more. He never mentions the baul girl he might have rescued (kidnapped), or his exile from the alleged tribes. He never goes into too much detail about his present or past life, lives, or those of his fellow hunters of the swampland that became Kolkata, only giving fragments. I wait, not pushing, not commenting, letting him talk. I ask nothing of him. I doubt nothing to his face.

He seems to enjoy my company.