Stranger than fiction

Food, flesh, stories, sexual partners — this is a list of just some things that are commonly devoured. Expectedly, Indra Das’ The Devourers comes packed with many instances of such exhaustive consumption. At the outset, the premise seems beguilingly simple. A half-werewolf sniffs out the loneliness that shrouds a history professor and then decides to tell him his story. While lycanthropy and relative immortality place Izrail well beyond the confines of genteel society, the young professor Alok is also as much an outsider. Shunned by his parents after a failed engagement, his exile, however, is comparatively (and somewhat absurdly) more earthly.

The frequent mentions of hunting and human prey infect Izrail and Alok’s first exchanges with a tension that is immediately reminiscent of works by past Gothic masters such as Bram Stoker and HP Lovecraft. Surprisingly, there aren’t many contemporary or Indian titles that can serve as a yardstick for Das’ speculative fiction. His first book seems to inhabit a genre all by its novel self. It couldn’t have been easy to do, but the author has adeptly transported the werewolf from London and Paris of the 20th century to present-day Kolkata. The effect is curiously unsettling.

There seems to be a careful logic that determines Das’ choice of setting. Accessible to most Calcuttans, the Park Street watering hole Oly, the 24x7 Sharma dhaba and even the ubiquitous Cafe Coffee Day are all rendered eerie by the preternatural presence of a self-confessed shape-shifter. In one of Devourers’ most memorable scenes, Izrail and Alok visit a few pandals during Durga Puja. Izrail points to the idols of the 10-armed deity and that of her demon foe. He insists that these were human representations of shape-shifters like him. “We could be anything, make ourselves in the world’s image. We touched the infinite. We were the infinite,” he says. Izrail, who through most of the book sticks to the ascribed role of a storyteller, doesn’t once bare his fangs. His menace is largely communicated by way of suggestion. When he and Alok part at New Market, he disappears amidst carcasses in a meat warehouse. Alok goes to buy brownies.

These little touches apart, what makes Devourers a compelling read is its air of uncertainty. As Alok is seduced by the fantasies being described by a mysterious stranger, we can’t help but recall the professor’s initial doubts. What if this was a practical joke being played by one of his peeved students? What if this was merely an elaborate setup? Izrail himself doesn’t promise much certitude. He tells Alok, “Romance, fantasy, horror, realism, moralistic fable, history, lies, truth. It’s all there for you. Pick and choose, my friend.” Amusingly, a frustrated Alok once demands of Izrail, “Don’t get meta on me.” For most part, Izrail and Das both seem deaf to this plea. A half-werewolf gives a history professor two scrolls to transcribe, confessing that he is only the translator of these texts. The version we read has purportedly passed through many filters, some of which aren’t entirely human. Werewolf fiction couldn’t get any more meta.

Alok’s transcriptions force us to leap back in time. Suddenly, and a little jarringly, we find ourselves in 17th-century Mughal India. Three European shape-shifters — Fenrir, Gévaudan and Makedon — arrive in Shah Jahan’s kingdom when the Taj Mahal is all but half-built. Guided by what he construes to be love, Fenrir breaks the golden rule of the shape-shifter handbook. He rapes and impregnates a human woman called Cyrah. The transgression violently ruptures the sense of fraternity that binds him to his fellow brutes. Wanting answers and a better fate, Cyrah sets out on a search for her assailant with Gévaudan. While Fenrir’s confessions are marked by an annoying verbosity, Cyrah’s scroll proves more engrossing, even if overtly cinematic at times. In these rather long sections of the book, Das uses the epistolary device to tediously explain the mythology that surrounds his characters. Unlike Alok, who is given a rightful part to play in this alternative history of the world, the reader is spoon-fed detail that only encumbers his or her engagement with the novel. At more times than one, Devourers seems to suffer from a curse of the historic. The Mughal era becomes an excuse for Das to give his book the proportions of an epic legend. It is this grandeur of intent that turns overwhelming.

Cyrah’s troubled journeys notwithstanding, the most prominent critique of rape in Devourers comes from the rapist himself. Fenrir tells Cyrah, “I see khrissal (human) men take their women all the time, with no regard for whether they want it or not ... Women create. Men inflict violence upon you, envious and fearful.” Das doesn’t offer absolution this easily. There is savage violence, patricide and, if that weren’t comeuppance enough, there’s matricide too. In Devourers , sexuality is constantly unsettled. Hermaphroditic shape-shifters wrestle each other to the ground and mate. Apart from being riveting, the novel’s climax in the Sunderbans is also sexual. Few Indian novels have succeeded in portraying gay sex with this unhurried ease. Rather than negate boundaries, Devourers admirably creates a third space where man/woman, human/non-human, Apollonian/Dionysian co-exist. It’s not about this ‘or’ that; it is all about this ‘and’ that instead.

It doesn’t take long to guess that we’re able to read this account because Alok had kindly been spared by his half-werewolf friend. The Joker, a resilient survivor from another mythology, had explained Alok’s eventual condition brilliantly — “What doesn’t kill you makes you stranger.”

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