“You’ll … consume her, when she’s gone?”
“If she goes first, then yes, that is the arrangement.”
“And if you go first, she’ll consume you?”
“I did offer, but the idea didn’t seem to interest her much.”
My head was fuzzy, and my throat felt like a bathtub drain clogged with hair. But it helped to hear Shiba and the men speak with the same levity and wisdom as they had before; it made me feel like perhaps nothing had really changed, that I was only suffering from the shock of learning something that needed time to sink in. So I sat quietly as the conversation flowed around me.
David’s eldest, he shared, was starting university soon. He was frustrated that the boy still had no idea what he wanted to do, and Arjun was advising patience, saying that he would find his way. Shiba, who had been fairly quiet, also chimed in, sharing a story about her indecisive friend who had, almost magically, neatly braided together strands of a life that had once seemed totally tangled.
“Let him do what he likes,” she said. “Give up all control. Eventually, that’s what’ll happen anyway.”
“But he doesn’t know what he likes,” David said.
Slowly, I, too, was drawn into the conversation, and the table, warm and friendly, welcomed me in. Eventually, my tummy started to grumble.
“Have one bite, na,” Shiba said, offering me a nawala of omelet paratha.
I took it. It was tasty.
After breakfast, Shiba and I spent the whole day indoors. I felt like I had PMS or a bad hangover, my head throbbing and my body not wanting to move. Shiba, gentle and accommodating, played sweet Coke Studio tunes and brought me tea and snacks while we lounged in her room, not talking very much. Eventually, we transferred ourselves to the TV room, where we sank comfortably into the large leather recliners.
“Veer-Zaara?” Shiba suggested, clicking through the options on the screen.
“Yeah, okay,” I said.
Shiba clicked play. She called out to Roshan, who was dusting outside, and asked her to tell Kumar to send up some popcorn.
“Kumar Bhai!” Roshan hollered down the stairs. “Shiba Baji popcorn maang raheen hain.”
Kumar, from below, sent confirmation.
Shiba turned to me and said, “Wasn’t it funny when Papa said that thing about sexual cannibalism?’
I groaned.
“Oh. Sorry. Too soon.”
“No, no. It was kind of funny,” I relented. And then, despite myself, I smiled. “‘The female consumes the male, either during or after copulation,’” I repeated, mimicking Arjun’s voice.
Shiba laughed. “I’ve looked it up. Apparently, sometimes male spiders make sure that their partners are full before they approach them for sex. To make sure they won’t get eaten afterward.”
I laughed. “No they don’t.”
“They do. I swear.”
“Well, good strategy, I guess?” After a pause, I asked, “Do Anna’s daughters know what happened to her?”
Shiba shook her head. “Storytellers aren’t allowed to say anything to their families. She just told them that she’d chosen to have us take care of everything in the event of her death. I think they found that strange, but they accepted it nonetheless.”
“And you said not every Storyteller knows that they’ll be eaten?”
“That’s right. But they all know that their bodies will be used in some capacity.”
“Did Peter know?’
“He didn’t know what would happen precisely, but he was excited to donate his body to the cause. He was fascinated by our work and had completed the course himself a couple of times.”
“He never mentioned. How come none of them talk about the Centre on their recordings?”
“Some of them do, but we delete the references for now.”
I asked Shiba whether she spoke openly about the Centre’s secrets when she recorded her own story.
“Well, no, personally, I don’t. But for all I know, Papa and the others do. Maybe by the time they pass away, people will be more open-minded about the whole thing, and we’ll be able to leave those bits in.”
“I think that would be nice. For people to know exactly what they’ve signed up for.”
“You think people would still do it, if they knew?”
I thought about this for a moment before responding. “I think they would. You’d be making it clear to them that it was all consensual, right? Maybe the process would go even deeper if they knew.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
I wondered then what my story would be like if I were to tell it. I hoped I wouldn’t be all bone and grit and chewy leather, but not too creamy or saccharine either. My story needed to simply be true, I decided. I’d speak with as much honesty and clarity as possible, and, surely, that would translate into something nourishing.
“You know, I actually feel closer to Anna and Peter since I found out,” I admitted.
“Yeah?”
“I think so.”
The opening credits of the film rolled on the screen in front of us.
“Do you want something to drink?” Shiba asked me once the popcorn arrived.
“Pepsi?” I suggested.
“Roshan, Pepsi bhi!” Shiba yelled.
“Kumar Bhai! Pepsi bhi,” Roshan passed along.
From that evening onward, when we sat around the dinner table, I felt included to a wholly different degree. The uncles began to share, with remarkable nonchalance, the intricacies of the Centre’s operations. They spoke so lightheartedly of donations and transformations, of plans for expansion and the great potential of it all. And the truth is, there was something intoxicating about being in the midst of their conversation. It started to feel as if I’d entered the place where the real things happened, as if I had pushed through a tear in the fabric of the world and could now see the invisible mechanisms setting everything in motion. Well, okay, maybe not everything. But I saw that there were levels of control, layers of power, between man and God. These men had been on a different layer from me, but now I was up there too, and once you’ve been up there, the mechanisms would never be invisible again. It sometimes seemed monstrous there and other times holy, but it didn’t really matter which; the important thing was just being there. I tried to commit every moment to memory, every word, every sight. I wasn’t sure why, but it felt imperative, somehow, to remember it all. And soon, I found that I’d stopped seeing anything wrong with the process at all. Somewhere along the way, I had decided that it was no greater a sin to ingest a human being than it was to ingest, say, a cow. Or, arguably, a melon, which is also a living thing. Who was it that decided my flesh was more sacred than, say, Billee’s, or Billee’s more sacred than a chicken’s, or a chicken’s more than a pea’s? No, that was pure speciesism. It was us humans, as always, adamant on our own superiority.
And so I asked Shiba, a few days later, “Do you think I could record my story too?”
She looked at me, surprised.
“Do you want to?”
“I do.”
ELEVEN
At first, I didn’t know where to begin.
“Just begin from the beginning,” Shiba said, handing me a yellow USB drive that she’d fished out of the filing cabinet in the cottage.