The narratives of past & present are interwoven throughout. These scrolls tell the tale of Fenrir, an immortal shape-shifter whose greatest wish seems to be procreating with a human, which is frowned upon and Cyrah, a young Muslim prostitute who is raped by Fenrir & ends up pregnant with his child. Wanting to hear the rest of the story, Alok accepts the stranger’s job proposal to type out scrolls that contain an old story, tracing them back to 17th-century Mughal India. He is a rakshasa, a man-eater, a half-werewolf. The stranger, as he is known through much of the book, begins to tell him a story. I cannot express just how deeply I felt this story, how it burrowed itself within my bones.Īlok is a history professor in modern-day Kolkata, who meets a mysterious, alluring stranger one night at a music festival. I devoured this the night before an important, incredibly emotional day. It’s an intoxicating speculative fiction tale of identity & gender in India, described by the author as a “somewhat alternate world to our own.” The Devourers is the debut published novel from Indra Das. We share a long silence for the first time.” After all, whose heart hasn’t been broken by someone? He seems suddenly too old to look so young, with his smooth face and lush, long hair (touched though it is by the occasional strand of gray). I give him a moment of silence, surprised by this realization, as mundane as it is.
“I see the look in his eyes and know that his heart has been broken by someone with black hair that melted into night, someone whose crippling revulsion toward him, whose grease-stained kiss, still linger in his mind. With every passing chapter of beauty and brutality, Alok’s interest in the stranger grows and evolves into something darker and more urgent. The tale features a rough wanderer in seventeenth-century Mughal India who finds himself irrevocably drawn to a defiant woman-and destined to be torn asunder by two clashing worlds.
So Alok agrees, at the stranger’s behest, to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins.įrom these documents spills the chronicle of a race of people at once more than human yet kin to beasts, ruled by instincts and desires blood-deep and ages-old. Tantalized by the man’s unfinished tale, Alok will do anything to hear its completion. Synopsis: On a cool evening in Kolkata, India, beneath a full moon, as the whirling rhythms of traveling musicians fill the night, college professor Alok encounters a mysterious stranger with a bizarre confession and an extraordinary story.
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