The Devourers Read Free Page B

nothing. He gets up, surprising me. “Wait.” I raise my voice. “Where are you going?” I ask.
    “I’m going to walk away with this kitten, of course. The dogs won’t come near me. I like dogs, myself, but they can be a tad cruel sometimes. So can cats. So can we all. Anyway, that ragtag pack outside won’t come near me. I’ll feed this little thing till it has the strength to survive, and I’ll let it come and go as it pleases after that.”
    “Ever the compassionate werewolf, are you?”
    He shrugs, looking weary. “Come now. A moment of compassion every two centuries hardly makes one compassionate, does it? You don’t want to hear about the things I’ve done in your and other lifetimes. But there it is. Just today, I saw two dogs—they were licking each other, lapping at each other’s muzzles as if they loved each other with every cell in their bodies. Did they? Or was it just two animals sniffing out compatible genes? When two humans kiss, isn’t it the same thing, deep down? I don’t know. It was a moment I found worthy of keeping in my memory, and telling someone. I have done so. I thank you for lending a willing ear. I’m going now, Professor.”
    I don’t know what to say. He gets up to leave. “Walk with me, if you like,” he adds.
    As if this has been his plan all along, or mine, I get up and follow him. So we leave, together. The dogs trail us at the edges of my vision, eager for the fragile prey curled up in the stranger’s arms.

I n the warren of narrow roads beyond Shaktigarh Math, we lose the sounds and music of the mela. They’re replaced by the tick of claws on asphalt and concrete eroded by rain. I’ve always been afraid of street dogs at night, but they keep away, don’t even bark. As if they smell something strange in the air. They watch us, ears pricked, silent Anubis-faced sentinels on the deserted street corners of Jadavpur. The rows of blanketed bodies on the footpaths give the streets the feeling of an open tomb. The dogs uncaring guardians to these sleeping humans who share their nocturnal territory, this electric-lit kingdom lined with the twinkle of broken glass, shadows etched across stucco and worn paint, walls glyphed with graffiti in Bengali, Hindi, English.
The stranger holds the kitten to his chest. Madonna and child. His hair catching light to halo his head. We pass a rickshaw parked by a piss-streaked wall, field rats huddling around its wheels, its puller wrapped in a shawl under the canopy. Beyond the corridor of the road, the flare of passing headlights pales the stranger’s face for a moment.
    “Do you want to hear more?” the stranger asks. I can’t tell if he’s hesitant or just being soft-spoken. His face stippled with the shadows of leaves, sandals slapping the road.
    “Yes. Finish the story.”
    “Maybe someday. Tonight you deserve another one, for being such a good listener.”
    “If you like,” I say.
    “You know now. What to do,” he tells me. I do. I close my eyes.
    “Keep your eyes half open. As if meditating,” he says. I let some light under my lids. I can smell the stranger now, as if his storytelling has worked him into a sweat. A smell that on anyone else would make me hold my breath. On him it feels alluring, like the smell of my own sweat on summer nights, sublimating on skin flushed with arousal, pooling in my armpits.
    “Tell me if I’m about to trip over something,” I tell him.
    “What do you see when you think of a werewolf?” he asks me.
    “I…”
    “Don’t answer, just think.”
    Something takes hold of me—the cold night air and the smell of the stranger making me feel faint. That stupor, like in the tent at the mela. I realize I want it. I think of what he’s asked me to think. Of man and wolf, man and animal, man and woman and animal, twisted together, fur and bones and flesh and claws and teeth, glowing eyes and arched spines, human skin peeling and tearing to spill out flea-bitten fur, a mass of memories