The Devourers by Indra Das

Author:Indra Das
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

INTERVAL

Before I know it summer’s gone like the blink of a firefly’s abdomen, and it’s puja season. The stranger and I walk around the city in the midst of festive crowds, taking in the illuminated drawings that decorate the streets—tableaux made out of strings of Christmas lights, twisted with pagan irony into designs and animals against bamboo banners and arches to celebrate Durga Puja.

We visit a few pandals. Inside, the stranger smiles at the idols of Durga, wrapped in human-woven sarees and garlands and bedecked in human-made jewelry, holding cheaply fashioned but shiny human-made weapons, towering over slain asura Mahishasura, also given modesty in the moment of his death by a human-woven loincloth. Of course, their flesh was also shaped and given the color of life by human hands. The blood pouring from Mahishasura’s wounds paint mixed and applied by brush. The stranger looks at these deities incarnated in dried earth and made to represent good and evil, and he tells me they are iconic human representations of witnessed shape-shifter battles from millennia ago. That the devi and her monstrous asura foe were from different tribes of the race he belongs to.

In the pandal at Maddox Square, he points to the lion, the vahana by Durga’s side, her animal vehicle, and tells me it is either a representation of one of Durga’s non-human selves or a fellow shape-shifter in its non-human self. Like a teacher the stranger then points to the fanged human shape of demon god Mahishasura emerging from the lion-mauled carcass of the bull—mahish—that he turned into to trick Durga, and knowingly comments that it is a stylized way of showing the inexplicable—a shape-shifter transforming from a non-human self to a human one.

“Why does human-shaped Durga have so many arms then? Did she try and turn into a giant spider and fail?” I ask him. He ignores my admittedly weak joke. Though I also meant it as a real question. Who am I to judge the normality of shape-shifters in a remote prehistoric past?

“Maybe that was one of her shapes,” he says. “Durga and Mahishasura might not have been restricted to that duality, the first and second self. Apollonian and the Dionysian, as someone once said,” he breathes out, stirring the hair that hangs over his forehead.

“Shape-shifters were once more powerful than that,” he says loudly, almost shouting in the midst of all the people, but the collective babble inside the pandal is so loud no one even looks up. With a flourish of his hands he makes even the act of wringing sweat from his beard graceful. Wiping his hand on his kurta, he lowers his voice again, leaning in close to me. His breath warm against my ear. “We held in ourselves the multitudes of this planet, the birds and the beasts, the trees, the wind, and the sea. We could be anything, make ourselves in the world’s image. We touched the infinite. We were the infinite.” He puts one arm around my shoulder, fingers grasping, caught in this sermon given under a goddess and a demon that he claims share his origins.

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