The Beri is a very ancient thing that lives in the Lakshadweep Sea.

Most of the time it looks like a large log of driftwood. It can spend years, decades, even centuries at a time in this shape, dormant, floating in the open ocean.

Barnacles, mussels, and other marine animals make their homes on it. They live out their lives bobbing in and out of the waves and the scorching sun, and eventually they die. Their empty shells fall away, and the space where they grew is occupied in turn by the creatures’ descendants.

Generations live and die.

The Beri sleeps.

Eventually, the log is washed onto the shore of one of the atolls of Lakshadweep or the Maldives. There it lies on the beach, unmoving.

If the island is an uninhabited one, the Beri will be swept back out to sea at the next high tide. However, if the island has a village, and if a young woman from that village should go out walking on the beach should happen to sit on the log or stand astride it, the Beri will slowly begin to wake up.

A few days pass before it shakes off its long slumber. Then, late at night, the Beri begins to transform itself. Slowly it takes the shape of a handsome, slumbering young man, stretched out on the sand.

An hour or so before dawn, the man gets up, stretches, and brushes himself off. Then he walks towards the island’s village, where he introduces himself as a visitor from a different island, claiming that he was dropped off by a passing boat.

The disguised Beri proceeds to seek out the same young woman who woke him up on the beach. Since he can make himself appear irresistibly attractive, he usually succeeds in marrying her. Then he settles down on the island and pretends to live a normal life.

Secretly, though, in the dead of night, the Beri keeps sneaking off to the island’s cemetery to dig up corpses, bring them home, and eat them.