Sunday, December 09, 2012

Rashmi bookmarks “Life of Pi”


Starting in India, the country of my birth, ending in Canada, the country of my life, and with a final wrap-up by Japan, the country of my dreams, this adventure novel by Yann Martel is one of the better examples of rich and creative writings that I have come across!

Life of Pi is the story of Piscine Molitor (Pi) Patel, a South Indian boy and his 227-day saga of survival while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. In exactly 100 chapters, the story - divided into three parts, “Toronto and Pondicherry”, “The Pacific Ocean” and “Benito Juárez Infirmary, Tomatlán, Mexico” - deals with the three themes of Pi’s discovery of religion, his experiences with zoo life, and of course the story of his survival.

Owing to the fact that I am not at all religious, my least favourite part was the unfolding of Pi’s experiences with different religions. That said, the writing was so captivating, I kept reading anyway, and actually discovered some interesting ideas, such as, “It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsamane… But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

Again, in the section describing his childhood years at the family zoo, I got a whole new approach to the concept of animal life in a zoo. Like most people I guess, I sometimes pity zoo animals, and their captive lives in tiny jails; yet as Pi points out, “Animals in the wild lead lives of hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food is low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured. What is the meaning of freedom in such a context? Animals in the wild are, in practice, free neither in space nor in time, now in their personal relations… In the wild, animals stick to the same paths for the same pressing reasons, season after season”.

The main reason I found this book so absorbing and memorable was its powerful storytelling; a tale - fantastic enough to begin with - is narrated in such a rich manner, it was sheer joy reading this book. The descriptions were so vivid, the imagery so powerful! That wonderful reading experience started at the zoo - a notable incident being when Pi’s father teaches his sons a lesson about how dangerous the animals could be… after going through the cages of the more ferocious animals, when they finally reached the guinea pigs, I realized I had been holding my breath!

That fantastic imagery is of course best showcased during the narrative of Pi’s days and months on the lifeboat. From the first time he finds himself stranded on a lifeboat with three animals, to the horrific sequence of events between the hyena and the zebra, to the first time he discovers he is with a tiger, to their experiences at a carnivorous island… the imagery is so very powerful. Pi describes the sea as a city, complete with “highways, boulevards, streets and roundabouts bustling with submarine traffic. In water that was dense, glassy and flecked by millions of lit-up specks of plankton, fish like trucks and buses and cars and bicycles and pedestrians were madly racing about, no doubt honking and hollering at each other.” So picturesque!

The other feature I found absolutely fascinating was how human as well as animal nature evolved - or devolved - when it was thrown into a seemingly helpless situation. In the grotesque events that pitted the hyena against the zebra, the tiger against the mako shark, we saw the desperate levels to which an animal will go to, when survival is all that matters. What was more horrific was when we saw man’s descent to those same levels. A very religious, strictly vegetarian South Indian boy was not above eating everything from the liquid in a turtle’s vein to a tiger’s faeces to even another human, just to stay alive, that most basic of all human instincts.

On the other hand, this same fight for survival also led to the amazing relationship between the boy and the tiger - and how it shifted from one of fear and power, to that between a master and his servant, to one of mutual understanding where they finally began to understand each other’s presence, and the sounds and movements they made.

In an interesting take on events, the third part of the novel features the conversation between Pi and two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport who are trying to ascertain why the ship sank. Pi’s alternate survival story ends with a question (thrown just as much to the reader, I think) as to which of the two stories they preferred… To all of you who ask, ‘is Life of Pi a true story?’ I will quote Pi’s answer to Tomohiro Okamoto: “The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn’t that make life a story?”

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