I set the two doggie beds near the front door, under my antique mirror. I look at myself when I leave for work, adjust my collar, adjust my skirt. Adjust the stroller and adjust the baby tucked in the stroller. I look at my dogs. I look at my family, all together. I adjust my face, make sure it looks normal, for I, too, have sprung from unexpected things.
Twenty-First-Century Vetala
AMRITA CHAKRABORTY
My last body was a gentle woman, in life. From the small bedsit I lived in then, I used to watch her from across our balconies, humming a Hemanta Mukhopadhyay song as she put the laundry out to dry. Her hands were scarred and always slightly damp, water dripping from them as she cooked or wiped or washed another wanting thing. Because I was, or at least appeared to be, a man she knew as a mere fellow tenant, there was never any true communication between us. Only my curious glances above the books I held out in front of me, looks she was too busy to ever acknowledge, aside from a curt nod if she happened to meet my eyes.
Nor did I pursue that interest any further, at least not until afterward. I’m not like my brother, after all, who found the most striking man in Kolkata and waited it out until he died from a heart attack at forty-two. (Dada’s never been clear on whether that was a natural occurrence.) The last time I saw him, he had brought a girl to the graveyard we shared as an occasional local haunt, and she clutched his arm the entire time he spoke with me, giggling uneasily. I doubt he truly enjoys anything about it but their admiration, the thickening sensation of being the center of another’s want.
No, I’m not like him. There’s little about behaving like a human myself that interests me—I would never wish to be one of them. But I do consider myself somewhat of an expert on the things that drive them to behave the way they do. To feel what they feel. I have worn so many human skins, seen the world through near-infinite pairs of eyes. Sometimes I tire of them and wish I could stuff this stray consciousness, this mass of ephemera, into some species of animal with fewer concerns weighing on it. Or a plant, even a rock. But my kind were made to stay in humanity’s shade. To live eternally on the crest of their death.
In the days before Moyna died, I had been just barely clinging to the body of the aging law clerk who rented the flat opposite hers. Despite the delayed decay due to my presence, his skin had started to attain an unnatural green tint, and I could tell that the body was dangerously close to the stage at which the internal organs would burst and begin to leak out, when it would obviously become useless to me. I never stayed past the point when people would notice anything more than a peculiar illness taking hold of their neighborhood loner or the newcomer to town; there are few these days who know the old stories to oust or destroy us but I take no risks when it comes to the survival of our kind. Despite the degradation of my assumed form, though, I found it more difficult than usual to move on. You might guess why.
Moyna was generous with her time and labor, as most women I observe are; giving and giving and scraping the bottom of the well when nothing else is left. Whether this was in her nature or simply her choice to fulfill the needs of those around her—what did that matter? After I first oriented myself in the tenor of her breaths, memorized the particularities of her muscles and neural grooves, I was taken aback by how much was expected of her. That first morning, I couldn’t get anything right—not rising by dawn to prepare her husband’s humble breakfast of a paratha and mint achar, not getting the children dressed for school, and certainly not the intricacies of preparing food for eight people while doing the washing and caring for an elderly mother-in-law. These difficulties of daily life were precisely why I rarely took hold of bodies like this, indispensable tethers to their families.
Oh, but when it came to Moyna, I could not resist, however inconvenient. How can I explain this to you without resorting to shoddy metaphor? Here: one morning she stood in the doorway to the balcony, her head resting on the chipped wall. She closed her eyes and lifted one hand out of the shadows, as if to cup a measure of sunlight for use in some celestial recipe. Shontu, her three-year-old son, came toddling out to meet his mother, hugging the tail end of her saree. I glanced down at my book then, the moment suddenly too effulgent for my borrowed vision. When I looked up again, she had hoisted the child up onto one hip, and drawn his hand out to meet the sun. Her nose pressed into Shontu’s cheek and he laughed, and suddenly, her eyes. Anyone would have wanted to live through them.
I swear I left her behind as kindly as I could. On the pallet that served as her bed, nearing the evening so her husband would find her once he came home from his work at the nearby processing plant. I put her children down for their afternoon nap before I laid her down. The stove stood at attention, a fresh, if awkwardly cooked pot of daal their final gift from her.
Yesterday, my
