Life of Pi

I kept a diary. It’s hard to read. I wrote as small as I could. I was afraid I would run out of paper. There’s not much to it. Words scratched on a page trying to capture a reality that overwhelmed me. I started it a week or so after the sinking of the Tsimtsum. Before that I was too busy and scattered. The entries are not dated or numbered. What strikes me now is how time is captured. Several days, several weeks, all on one page. I talked about what you might expect: about things that happened and how I felt, about what I caught and what I didn’t, about seas and weather, about problems and solutions, about Richard Parker. All very practical stuff.

C H A P T E R 7 4

I practised religious rituals that I adapted to the circumstances—solitary Masses without priests or consecrated Communion hosts, darshans without murtis, and pujas with turtle meat for prasad, acts of devotion to Allah not knowing where Mecca was and getting my Arabic wrong. They brought me comfort, that is certain. But it was hard, oh, it was hard. Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love—but sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up.

At such moments I tried to elevate myself. I would touch the turban I had made with the remnants of my shirt and I would say aloud, “THIS IS GOD’S HAT!”

I would pat my pants and say aloud, “THIS IS GOD’S ATTIRE!”

I would point to Richard Parker and say aloud, “THIS IS GOD’S CAT!”

I would point to the lifeboat and say aloud, “THIS IS GOD’S ARK!”

I would spread my hands wide and say aloud, “THESE ARE GOD’S WIDE ACRES!”

I would point at the sky and say aloud, “THIS IS GOD’S EAR!”

And in this way I would remind myself of creation and of my place in it.

But God’s hat was always unravelling. God’s pants were falling apart. God’s cat was a constant danger. God’s ark was a jail. God’s wide acres were slowly killing me. God’s ear didn’t seem to be listening.

Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed. A school of fish appeared around the net or a knot cried out to be reknotted. Or I thought of my family, of how they were spared this terrible agony. The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.

C H A P T E R 7 5

On the day when I estimated it was Mother’s birthday, I sang “Happy Birthday” to her out loud.

C H A P T E R 7 6

I got into the habit of cleaning up after Richard Parker. As soon as I became aware that he had had a bowel movement, I went about getting to it, a risky operation involving nudging his feces my way with the gaff and reaching for them from the tarpaulin. Feces can be infected with parasites. This does not matter with animals in the wild since they rarely spend any time next to their feces and mostly have a neutral relationship to them; tree dwellers hardly see them at all and land animals normally excrete and move on. In the compact territory of a zoo, however, the case is quite different, and to leave feces in an animal’s enclosure is to invite reinfection by encouraging the animal to eat them, animals being gluttons for anything that remotely resembles food. That is why enclosures are cleaned, out of concern for the intestinal health of animals, not to spare the eyes and noses of visitors. But upholding the Patel family’s reputation for high standards in zookeeping was not my concern in the case at hand. In a matter of weeks Richard Parker became constipated and his bowel movements came no more than once a month, so my dangerous janitoring was hardly worth it from a sanitary point of view. It was for another reason that I did it: it was because the first time Richard Parker relieved himself in the lifeboat, I noticed that he tried to hide the result. The significance of this was not lost on me. To display his feces openly, to flaunt the smell of them, would have been a sign of social dominance. Conversely, to hide them, or try to, was a sign of deference—of deference to me.