The Devourers by Indra Das Read Free Book Online

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