Eat or be eaten

Starting off unevenly in a haze of hash and Baul music at a late night concert in Kolkata’s Shaktigarh Math, this tale of Mughal-era werewolves soon levels into the dense realm of unabashed fantasy, that rare province of Indian fiction. Professor Alok Mukherjee, in the present day, is mesmerised by a charismatic man who offers him a light and says he is half werewolf, sniffing out the once affianced teacher’s loneliness. “Intimacy lies in the body and the soul, in scent, in touch and taste and sound. A man whose name you don’t know can tell you a tale to move you to tears,” the man tells him, worshipping the “twinned deities to the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses of the khrissal”. So begins his story, its own lexicon expertly woven in. Khrissal is the shapeshifter name for humans, their bodies and emotions gulped down and absorbed by the werewolves; hamrammr is Norse for shape changer; vukodlak is Serbian for a kind of folkloric ghoul or werewolf; there are French loup- garoux and Norse kveldulfs, Afghan djinns and ifreets, ghuls with their hyena totems.

The narrative is partly personal history, partly a broad history of shapeshifting on the Subcontinent, prefaced by double whiskies at Olypub on Park Street where Mukherjee is asked to transcribe the scrolls the anonymous stranger (he refuses to surrender a name till much later) hands over to him— strange texts made up of skin whose awful provenance he will learn of only much later. These are records of bloody escapades and careless raids, even wagers on the head of Shah Jahan, which fill the migration of these restless, hermaphroditic creatures, fleeing persecution in France and questing for their version of Ragnarök. But the pack of 25 which set out from Nürnberg, followed by 20 others,is reduced by infighting and tribal battles to three, and soon just two as the shapeshifters—a kveldulf of the Viking-eaters, a son of Lycaon and a loup garou—in 17th century Mumtazabad bury one of their kind next to the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal herself. Several rules have been broken: Fenrir, big shaggy beast, wants to love a human, to plant his seed in a woman, and Gévaudan, who loves him, kills Makedon for trying to punish him for this transgression. The old ways are crumbling, and Cyrah of Kandahar, a solitary Muslim woman forced to sell herself, bears the living testament to this: a child, Izrail, who will have to choose to live with the rakshasas but will also haunt humankind, woefully. Most powerfully, Cyrah will be the first human to witness that forbidden and sacred ritual of shifting:

‘It smelled like birth, the birth of god or demon, raw and animal and steaming in the morning air. Sweet and musk, like frankincense and myrrh; heavy and pungent, like the juice of living things, blood and piss, sweat and spit; rancid and fecund, like waste, shit and earth… I could hear it, feel it breathing, the rumbling of a mountain slumbering through centuries slivered to seconds.’

There is an impressive commitment to the truths of his universe in Das’ evocation of werewolf mythology, his unsparing and often gory evocation of the ripping apart of prey. “What’s in a name?” asks cocky Makedon—and what follows is anything but sweet or related to roses; “By any name we are greater than human.” There is no restraint as flesh and bones are ripped asunder, in what follows. (Warning: don’t read this book at mealtimes.) Some of the action is less than believable, within this construct; Mukherjee may have been ‘glamoured’ into turning secretary but it doesn’t sit well. So, the device for the story is not as credible as the tale itself, strangely. But the meat of it more than makes up for the slippage. The language is beautiful, almost overly so, at every instant alive with lines like: ‘Our eyes meet, guttering with sunrise.’ The moment the two men come together is wonderfully rendered, the sex compulsive and real as the two ‘devour’ each other but break away.

There are moments when we teeter on the edge of the hokey; Mukherjee hands over the transcriptions at the Indian Museum, by the Egyptian mummy, ‘amusing, in a Hammer- horror kind of way’. The metaphor of devouring can seem obvious at times, worthy of those Romedy movies where couples live on as the other (indeed, the book actually ends with ‘I love you’). Yet even the legacy of oft-used werewolf lore in jargon straight out of True Blood—imakhrs (makers), moulting, ek’dhu (a deep sleep in which one lies with the dead prey to turn into them)—does not dispel the originality of this compelling debut. The sad but chillingly apt parallel it draws with homosexuality and its repression within the family is just another level of truth. Similarly, the awful understanding of rape: ‘Women create. Men inflict violence on you, envious and fearful, desperate to share in that ability.’

About The Author

Rajni George

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