Life of Pi (9 page)

Ravi had a field day of it when he found out.

“So, Swami Jesus, will you go on the hajj this year?” he said, bringing the palms of his hands together in front of his face in a reverent namaskar. “Does Mecca beckon?” He crossed himself. “Or will it be to Rome for your coronation as the next Pope Pius?” He drew in the air a Greek letter, making clear the spelling of his mockery. “Have you found time yet to get the end of your pecker cut off and become a Jew? At the rate you’re going, if you go to temple on Thursday, mosque on Friday, synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday, you only need to convert to three more religions to be on holiday for the rest of your life.”

And other lampoonery of such kind.

And that wasn’t the end of it. There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, “Business as usual.” But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God’s, that the self-righteous should rush.

Once an oaf chased me away from the Great Mosque. When I went to church the priest glared at me so that I could not feel the peace of Christ. A Brahmin sometimes shooed me away from darshan. My religious doings were reported to my parents in the hushed, urgent tones of treason revealed.

As if this small-mindedness did God any good.

To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity.

I stopped attending Mass at Our Lady of Immaculate Conception and went instead to Our Lady of Angels. I no longer lingered after Friday prayer among my brethren. I went to temple at crowded times when the Brahmins were too distracted to come between God and me.

A few days after the meeting on the esplanade, I took my courage into my hands and went to see Father at his office.

“Father?”

“Yes, Piscine.”

“I would like to be baptized and I would like a prayer rug.”

My words intruded slowly. He looked up from his papers after some seconds.

“A what? What?”

“I would like to pray outside without getting my pants dirty. And I’m attending a Christian school without having received the proper baptism of Christ.”

“Why do you want to pray outside? In fact, why do you want to pray at all?”

“Because I love God.”

“Aha.” He seemed taken aback by my answer, nearly embarrassed by it. There was a pause. I thought he was going to offer me ice cream again. “Well, Petit Séminaire is Christian only in name. There are many Hindu boys there who aren’t Christians. You’ll get just as good an education without being baptized. Praying to Allah won’t make any difference, either.”

“But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.”

“You can’t be both. You must be either one or the other.”

“Why can’t I be both?”

“They’re separate religions! They have nothing in common.”

“That’s not what they say! They both claim Abraham as theirs. Muslims say the God of the Hebrews and Christians is the same as the God of the Muslims. They recognize David, Moses and Jesus as prophets.”

“What does this have to do with us, Piscine? We’re
Indians!
”

“There have been Christians and Muslims in India for centuries! Some people say Jesus is buried in Kashmir.”

He said nothing, only looked at me, his brow furrowed. Suddenly business called.

“Talk to Mother about it.”

She was reading.

“Mother?”

“Yes, darling.”

“I would like to be baptized and I would like a prayer rug.”

“Talk to Father about it.”

“I did. He told me to talk to you about it.”

“Did he?” She laid her book down. She looked out in the direction of the zoo. At that moment I’m sure Father felt a blow of chill air against the back of his neck. She turned to the bookshelf. “I have a book here that you’ll like.” She already had her arm out, reaching for a volume. It was Robert Louis Stevenson. This was her usual tactic.

“I’ve already read that, Mother. Three times.”

“Oh.” Her arm hovered to the left.

“The same with Conan Doyle,” I said.

Her arm swung to the right. “R. K. Narayan? You can’t possibly have read all of Narayan?”

“These matters are important to me, Mother.”

“
Robinson Crusoe!
”

“Mother!”

“But Piscine!” she said. She settled back into her chair, a path-of-least-resistance look on her face, which meant I had to put up a stiff fight in precisely the right spots. She adjusted a cushion. “Father and I find your religious zeal a bit of a mystery.”

“It is a Mystery.”

“Hmmm. I don’t mean it that way. Listen, my darling, if you’re going to be religious, you must be either a Hindu, a Christian or a Muslim. You heard what they said on the esplanade.”

“I don’t see why I can’t be all three. Mamaji has two passports. He’s Indian and French. Why can’t I be a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim?”

“That’s different. France and India are nations on earth.”

“How many nations are there in the sky?”

She thought for a second. “One. That’s the point. One nation, one passport.”

“One nation in the sky?”

“Yes. Or none. There’s that option too, you know. These are terribly old-fashioned things you’ve taken to.”

“If there’s only one nation in the sky, shouldn’t all passports be valid for it?”

A cloud of uncertainty came over her face.

“Bapu Gandhi said—”

“Yes, I know what Bapu Gandhi said.” She brought a hand to her forehead. She had a weary look, Mother did. “Good grief,” she said.

Later that evening I overheard my parents speaking.

“You said yes?” said Father.

“I believe he asked you too. You referred him to me,” replied Mother.

“Did I?”

“You did.”

“I had a very busy day …”

“You’re not busy now. You’re quite comfortably unemployed by the looks of it. If you want to march into his room and pull the prayer rug from under his feet and discuss the question of Christian baptism with him, please go ahead. I won’t object.”

“No, no.” I could tell from his voice that Father was settling deeper into his chair. There was a pause.

“He seems to be attracting religions the way a dog attracts fleas,” he pursued. “I don’t understand it. We’re a modern Indian family; we live in a modern way; India is on the cusp of becoming a truly modern and advanced nation—and here we’ve produced a son who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Sri Ramakrishna.”

“If Mrs. Gandhi is what being modern and advanced is about, I’m not sure I like it,” Mother said.

“Mrs. Gandhi will pass! Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat
to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread—these are two laws of nature. If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood! I am utterly convinced of this. Mrs. Gandhi and her foolishness will pass. The New India will come.”

(Indeed she would pass. And the New India, or one family of it, would decide to move to Canada.)

Father went on: “Did you hear when he said, ‘Bapu Gandhi said, “All religions are true”’?”

“Yes.”

“
Bapu
Gandhi? The boy is getting to be on affectionate terms with Gandhi? After Daddy Gandhi, what next? Uncle Jesus? And what’s this nonsense—has he really become a
Muslim
?”

“It seems so.”

“A Muslim! A devout Hindu, all right, I can understand. A Christian in addition, it’s getting to be a bit strange, but I can stretch my mind. The Christians have been here for a long time—Saint Thomas, Saint Francis Xavier, the missionaries and so on. We owe them good schools.”

“Yes.”

“So all that I can sort of accept. But
Muslim
? It’s totally foreign to our tradition. They’re outsiders.”

“They’ve been here a very long time too. They’re a hundred times more numerous than the Christians.”

“That makes no difference. They’re outsiders.”

“Perhaps Piscine is marching to a different drumbeat of progress.”

“You’re defending the boy? You don’t mind it that he’s fancying himself a Muslim?”

“What can we do, Santosh? He’s taken it to heart, and it’s not doing anyone any harm. Maybe it’s just a phase. It too may pass—like Mrs. Gandhi.”

“Why can’t he have the normal interests of a boy his age? Look at Ravi. All he can think about is cricket, movies and music.”

“You think that’s better?”

“No, no. Oh, I don’t know what to think. It’s been a long day.” He sighed. “I wonder how far he’ll go with these interests.”

Mother chuckled. “Last week he finished a book called
The Imitation
of Christ
.”

“
The
Imitation
of Christ!
I say again, I wonder how far he’ll go with these interests!” cried Father.

They laughed.

I loved my prayer rug. Ordinary in quality though it was, it glowed with beauty in my eyes. I’m sorry I lost it. Wherever I laid it I felt special affection for the patch of ground beneath it and the immediate surroundings, which to me is a clear indication that it was a good prayer rug because it helped me remember that the earth is the creation of God and sacred the same all over. The pattern, in gold lines upon a background of red, was plain: a narrow rectangle with a triangular peak at one extremity to indicate the qibla, the direction of prayer, and little curlicues floating around it, like wisps of smoke or accents from a strange language. The pile was soft. When I prayed, the short, unknotted tassels were inches from the tip of my forehead at one end of the carpet and inches from the tip of my toes at the other, a cozy size to make you feel at home anywhere upon this vast earth.

I prayed outside because I liked it. Most often I unrolled my prayer rug in a corner of the yard behind the house. It was a secluded spot in the shade of a coral tree, next to a wall that was covered with bougain
villea. Along the length of the wall was a row of potted poinsettias. The bougainvillea had also crept through the tree. The contrast between its purple bracts and the red flowers of the tree was very pretty. And when that tree was in bloom, it was a regular aviary of crows, mynahs, babblers, rosy pastors, sunbirds and parakeets. The wall was to my right, at a wide angle. Ahead of me and to my left, beyond the milky, mottled shade of the tree, lay the sun-drenched open space of the yard. The appearance of things changed, of course, depending on the weather, the time of day, the time of year. But it’s all very clear in my memory, as if it never changed. I faced Mecca with the help of a line I scratched into the pale yellow ground and carefully kept up.

Sometimes, upon finishing my prayers, I would turn and catch sight of Father or Mother or Ravi observing me, until they got used to the sight.

My baptism was a slightly awkward affair. Mother played along nicely, Father looked on stonily, and Ravi was mercifully absent because of a cricket match, which did not prevent him from commenting at great length on the event. The water trickled down my face and down my neck; though just a beaker’s worth, it had the refreshing effect of a monsoon rain.

Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they’ve known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? Why climb this Mount Everest of formalities that makes you feel like a beggar? Why enter this jungle of foreignness where everything is new, strange and difficult?

The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life.

The mid-1970s were troubled times in India. I gathered that from the deep furrows that appeared on Father’s forehead when he read the papers. Or from snippets of conversation that I caught between him and Mother and Mamaji and others. It’s not that I didn’t understand the drift of what they said—it’s that I wasn’t interested. The orangutans were as eager for chapattis as ever; the monkeys never asked after the news from Delhi; the rhinos and goats continued to live in peace; the birds twittered; the clouds carried rain; the sun was hot; the earth breathed; God was—there was no Emergency in my world.

Mrs. Gandhi finally got the best of Father. In February 1976, the Tamil Nadu government was brought down by Delhi. It had been one of Mrs. Gandhi’s most vocal critics. The takeover was smoothly enforced—Chief Minister Karunanidhi’s ministry vanished quietly into “resignation” or house arrest—and what does the fall of one local government matter when the whole country’s Constitution has been suspended these last eight months? But it was to Father the crowning touch in Mrs. Gandhi’s dictatorial takeover of the nation. The camel at the zoo was unfazed, but that straw broke Father’s back.

He shouted, “Soon she’ll come down to our zoo and tell us that her jails are full, she needs more space. Could we put Desai with the lions?”

Morarji Desai was an opposition politician. No friend of Mrs. Gandhi’s. It makes me sad, my father’s ceaseless worrying. Mrs. Gandhi could have personally bombed the zoo, it would have been fine with me if Father had been gay about it. I wish he hadn’t fretted so much. It’s hard on a son to see his father sick with worry.

But worry he did. Any business is risky business, and none more so than small
b
business, the one that risks the shirt on its back. A zoo is a cultural institution. Like a public library, like a museum, it is at the service of popular education and science. And by this token, not much of a money-making venture, for the Greater Good and the Greater Profit are not compatible aims, much to Father’s chagrin.
The truth was, we were not a rich family, certainly not by Canadian standards. We were a poor family that happened to own a lot of animals, though not the roof above their heads (or above ours, for that matter). The life of a zoo, like the life of its inhabitants in the wild, is precarious. It is neither big enough a business to be above the law nor small enough to survive on its margins. To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, rule of law and everything else enshrined in India’s Constitution. Impossible to enjoy the animals otherwise. Long-term, bad politics is bad for business.

People move because of the wear and tear of anxiety. Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others. Because of the impression that the future is blocked up, that
they
might do all right but not their children. Because of the feeling that nothing will change, that happiness and prosperity are possible only somewhere else.

The New India split to pieces and collapsed in Father’s mind. Mother assented. We would bolt.

It was announced to us one evening during dinner. Ravi and I were thunderstruck.
Canada!
If Andhra Pradesh, just north of us, was alien, if Sri Lanka, a monkey’s hop across a strait, was the dark side of the moon, imagine what Canada was. Canada meant absolutely nothing to us. It was like Timbuktu, by definition a place permanently far away.