Encounters with Wolves, in Three Acts

a Bombay fairy tale

Act One/Seed

There was a spit of land by the salty sea, and by some clerical error—by the drawing of a dot on a map in an office in a different continent—they built a city on it. They made it so that twenty-five, fifty, one hundred, two hundred years later, people were enchanted by it and came to live in it.

People were drawn like so many fireflies, drawn until it sagged with the weight of them, nourished them, and in nourishing them was nourished by them. But every home has its limits, its boundary walls, and the larger its arms grew, the thinner its generosity stretched. 

It was not a kind world, not to people (though some were very comfortable), and not to houses (though some were obscenely large), and not to cities (though some would grow more spacious at the cost of distant and unseen others). 

In the summer there was no water, and in the monsoon there was entirely too much; the sewage systems overran and smelled every day of the week; the space to live shrank and shrank so they had to cut every last tree in streets where people’s houses shared walls. 

In the middle of this vast, noisy, rocky, stuttering city was one little forest. The city had begun cutting into it, so it grew smaller, and creatures that ran and slept and made their homes in its very centre began to spill out.

Among them was the wolf cub, my friend.

We didn’t start out as friends. My mother pulled me away from the sight of him with his own mother, lounging by the side of the street on our way home from buying vegetables. 

She was skinny, thinner than she should have been. If she had been closer, perhaps I would have seen her ribs. But lying there with her only cub she was regal, serene—a honey-eyed lupine queen. 

With high ears and a long snout she surveyed her kingdom of rocks, shops, fast-moving auto-rickshaws, and people. People, rushing by, talking fast, minding their business; people who had to get to work, to college, to school, while the wolf looked on. Her cub was lost in her, their pelts the same brindled brown. 

But then he tottered back from the comfort of her stomach, and looked at me with his yellow eyes, his sandy fur still fuzzy around his ears. He looked like a puppy that might be found in any of the streets in the city. Only his distinctive eyes told that he came from the depleted forest cowering in the middle of this mammoth metropolis of blinking lights and honking cars and smoke.

I watched him the next day as I went on my way to school in my white uniform, my hair done in two plaits, white ribbons on them. He was snoozing on his mother’s belly, breath rising and falling. Here, they were at the edge of the forest, where concrete met grass met broken glass met garbage met wildflowers. In a while, after rush hour, perhaps she would scavenge for food. Perhaps a kind shopkeeper would toss her an oily kebab. 

I thought about him all day at school, my mind so off my lessons that I received a hair pull and a cane to my wrist by the man who taught us mathematics. He beat us with a viciousness that seemed personal. Many years later, I would remember and recognise it for what it was: an ugly, weak excitement that punctured his otherwise dull, heavy days. But my mind was on the wolf.

Act Two/Bud

She shows me her teeth but it does not mean she smiles. Loving a wolf is like that.

Do not think her capricious. She is bonded to me in love, in body and spirit. On the appointed evenings, I meet her at the edge of the woods, which are ripe from the stink of the city. She leads me away from the clamour. We find a quiet nook by a small lake in which families bob along on tiny, ridiculous boats.

I smell her pelt, intoxicating saliva and petrichor and loam. Her paws, firm and warm and gentle, in my hair. We are content.

No one knows we’re in love. I think my mother suspects it. I know she goes through my things to see if she can find a small token, a keepsake that should not be there—a chocolate I am not sanctioned to eat, a note scribbled with the ramblings of some hormone-pulled boy. She has not imagined a daughter who loves girls. She has not imagined a daughter who loves wolves.

My mother and my father have been accumulating money for the twenty years I have been living. They mean to give it all, and me, away.

My lover knows. I know what she will do to any man who comes to take me away, and I shudder with fear and pleasure. She knows.

When the boy and his family arrive, my heart breaks thrice. Once, to see my parents ingratiating themselves to the people paupering them. Twice, to see how empty the rooms and the streets of home will be once I leave. Thrice, though I had known this would happen, to see my lover chased off, to see her pain as she lopes away, wounded by a rock.

Of the interim, I would rather not speak. 

My parents don’t talk to me when I return to the block of flats surrounding the forest. I do not call it home because it does not welcome me, arms thrown open, when I need to be swallowed by a hug, a cup of tea, a shower in which hot tears mix with water to wash me clean, to let me begin again. Instead they turn me away, saying they have already sent me to my actual home, saying I am shaming them, saying what will people think, saying  did I not even imagine what an ordeal I am bringing upon them? 

So I turn and walk where my feet lead me, because even now, you see, my body is wiser than I. 

I find her at water’s edge with her pack, with the wolf boy whose silent friendship sustained me through canings at school, with the aging lupine queen, full of grace. Their ears prick in anticipation but they hold back, and only she runs towards me, runs and runs and runs, and then I fall into her arms, and finally howl.

Act Three/Bloom

Submit to the vagaries of the morning. Buy groceries for the week. Sit in traffic. Sit at a desk. Come back to cook.

Tidal waves. Sea air. It ruffles fur the same way it ruffles hair. It pulls a wolf heart as it pulls yours. Lovers meet on the city’s edge, kissing at the final point after which everything is ocean, endless as the constellated sky.

I crouch in the fast train to work and then the slow train back, inside those long, efficient snakes in the spine of the city. Sometimes I smile and mean it. Sometimes I smile and do not. 

Stare at the moon. Feel it tugging your insides. Chase, attack, run, be attacked, stand up, shake it off. Stalk in the shadows. Cherish your mate.

Have you noticed people who seem beautiful no matter what they wear? They make you want to try on clothes you would otherwise detest. The angles and planes of their faces are never crumpled in agony. Perhaps the nonchalance comes with the clothes. So you buy and buy and buy, feeling the surge of warm blood rising when you swipe your card, when you are handed glossy bags to take home. 

Perhaps this one will do it. But of course it never does.

I work to sell those images. I work hard to pay my bills, lengthening limbs, defining cheekbones, plumping up lips, smoothing out creases. 

Behind these images are the other images, my own, my endless sketches of preternaturally beautiful, honey-ringed eyes that blink, blink, blink, so slow, so even, so steady. 

In three new moons, I understand what my lover sees when she looks at me. The places where hair thickens into fur or grows abundantly on smooth skin, the places where cuticle becomes claw, the image behind the image. 

In six full moons, I understand why I have always seen wolves, and they have always seen me. In the moon after the equinox, the bones of my life are laid bare. 

It is on balsamic nights that I run freely with my pack, the wind whipping my ears. Conspiring with the yet hidden moon when she hangs knowingly in the heavens, surrendering to the terrible joy of being with my lover with nothing to fetter or bind us. 

If people see us, they do not see snout, or tail, or paw—they see the fractal city. Winter-dark leaves, midnight blue patch of sky, red bus with the word BEST painted on it. Old turrets lengthen behind us as we spread over the streets; statues disappear; faded stars emit flickers of old light in ceilings painted a century ago. 

We hold our ceremonies of ritual and loss. We teach the young. We heal the sick. Mourn. Commiserate. Play. Make love. Make friends. Together we decide what to hunt, how to meet next, where to gather and when to scatter.

I smell them before I see them, the others. Wearing olive and grey and navy, carrying backpacks and briefcases, going to work like me, waiting for the moon to wane like me. Sometimes we sit in the same train compartment. Sometimes we smile and mean it. 

I have a bad day at work. I am asked to present a report I don’t remember being asked to prepare. I scroll through my emails from the last six months and find not a shred of evidence to support my employer’s claim. I try and fail to present a coherent report by day’s end. I am shouted at. I go to drink alone at a bar near the office because my colleagues have to return to their families, and all of my friends are either too busy or too far away.

I go home, change out of my dress, and look at myself in the mirror. My golden eyes.

These are no simple rules for living. There is nothing simple about this life. That is why they have no legends about us in this land.

(First published by Sword and Kettle Press, for their Cup and Dagger mini-chapbook series, in 2021.)