The Devourers
SynopsisPlot
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. Tantalized by the man’s unfinished tale, Alok will do anything to hear its completion. So Alok agrees, at the stranger’s behest, to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins.
Story
About this book
In Kolkata, under a full moon and the sounds of traveling musicians, a college professor named Alok meets a stranger who carries an unusual confession. The stranger asks Alok to transcribe a set of old notebooks, worn parchments, and skins that once belonged to living creatures. Alok agrees, drawn by curiosity and the promise of hearing the rest of an unfinished story. What emerges from these documents is a chronicle spanning centuries, describing beings who exist somewhere between human and animal, governed by ancient instincts.
Part of the chronicle follows a wanderer moving through seventeenth-century Mughal India who becomes entangled with a defiant woman. Their connection pulls him between two opposing worlds, and the story shifts between this historical thread and Alok's present-day encounters with the stranger in modern Kolkata. As Alok transcribes more, his relationship with the stranger deepens and takes on a more unsettling quality.
Indra Das sets the novel across two distinct periods of Indian history, using the frame of transcription to move between them. The book combines elements of dark fantasy with questions about the boundaries of the human body, desire, and predatory nature. Its Kolkata setting grounds the supernatural material in a recognizable city with its own layered past.
