Life Of Pi. Yann Martel

to evoke that basic lesson of geometry.

      There was silence. The teacher was staring at the board. I was holding my breath. Then he said, “Very well, Pi. Sit down. Next time you will ask permission before leaving your desk.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      He ticked my name off. And looked at the next boy.

      “Mansoor Ahamad,” said Mansoor Ahamad.

      I was saved.

      “Gautham Selvaraj,” said Gautham Selvaraj.

      I could breathe.

      “Arun Annaji,” said Arun Annaji.

      A new beginning.

      I repeated the stunt with every teacher. Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans. Between one commonly named boy and the next, I rushed forward and emblazoned, sometimes with a terrible screech, the details of my rebirth. It got to be that after a few times the boys sang along with me, a crescendo that climaxed, after a quick intake of air while I underlined the proper note, with such a rousing rendition of my new name that it would have been the delight of any choirmaster. A few boys followed up with a whispered, urgent “Three! Point! One! Four!” as I wrote as fast as I could, and I ended the concert by slicing the circle with such vigour that bits of chalk went flying.

      When I put my hand up that day, which I did every chance I had, teachers granted me the right to speak with a single syllable that was music to my ears. Students followed suit. Even the St. Joseph’s devils. In fact, the name caught on. Truly we are a nation of aspiring engineers: shortly after, there was a boy named Omprakash who was calling himself Omega, and another who was passing himself off as Upsilon, and for a while there was a Gamma, a Lambda and a Delta. But I was the first and the most enduring of the Greeks at Petit Séminaire. Even my brother, the captain of the cricket team, that local god, approved. He took me aside the next week.

      “What’s this I hear about a nickname you have?” he said.

      I kept silent. Because whatever mocking was to come, it was to come. There was no avoiding it.

      “I didn’t realize you liked the colour yellow so much.”

      The colour yellow? I looked around. No one must hear what he was about to say, especially not one of his lackeys. “Ravi, what do you mean?” I whispered.

      “It’s all right with me, brother. Anything’s better than ‘Pissing’. Even ‘Lemon Pie’.”

      As he sauntered away he smiled and said, “You look a bit red in the face.”

      But he held his peace.

      And so, in that Greek letter that looks like a shack with a corrugated tin roof, in that elusive, irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge.

       CHAPTER 6

      He’s an excellent cook. His overheated house is always smelling of something delicious. His spice rack looks like an apothecary’s shop. When he opens his refrigerator or his cupboards, there are many brand names I don’t recognize; in fact, I can’t even tell what language they’re in. We are in India. But he handles Western dishes equally well. He makes me the most zesty yet subtle macaroni and cheese I’ve ever had. And his vegetarian tacos would be the envy of all Mexico.

      I notice something else: his cupboards are jam-packed. Behind every door, on every shelf, stand mountains of neatly stacked cans and packages. A reserve of food to last the siege of Leningrad.

       CHAPTER 7

      It was my luck to have a few good teachers in my youth, men and women who came into my dark head and lit a match. One of these was Mr. Satish Kumar, my biology teacher at Petit Séminaire and an active Communist who was always hoping Tamil Nadu would stop electing movie stars and go the way of Kerala. He had a most peculiar appearance. The top of his head was bald and pointy, yet he had the most impressive jowls I have ever seen, and his narrow shoulders gave way to a massive stomach that looked like the base of a mountain, except that the mountain stood in thin air, for it stopped abruptly and disappeared horizontally into his pants. It’s a mystery to me how his stick-like legs supported the weight above them, but they did, though they moved in surprising ways at times, as if his knees could bend in any direction. His construction was geometric: he looked like two triangles, a small one and a larger one, balanced on two parallel lines. But organic, quite warty actually, and with sprigs of black hair sticking out of his ears. And friendly. His smile seemed to take up the whole base of his triangular head.

      Mr. Kumar was the first avowed atheist I ever met. I discovered this not in the classroom but at the zoo. He was a regular visitor who read the labels and descriptive notices in their entirety and approved of every animal he saw. Each to him was a triumph of logic and mechanics, and nature as a whole was an exceptionally fine illustration of science. To his ears, when an animal felt the urge to mate, it said “Gregor Mendel”, recalling the father of genetics, and when it was time to show its mettle, “Charles Darwin”, the father of natural selection, and what we took to be bleating, grunting, hissing, snorting, roaring, growling, howling, chirping and screeching were but the thick accents of foreigners. When Mr. Kumar visited the zoo, it was to take the pulse of the universe, and his stethoscopic mind always confirmed to him that everything was in order, that everything was order. He left the zoo feeling scientifically refreshed.

      The first time I saw his triangular form teetering and tottering about the zoo, I was shy to approach him. As much as I liked him as a teacher, he was a figure of authority, and I, a subject. I was a little afraid of him. I observed him at a distance. He had just come to the rhinoceros pit. The two Indian rhinos were great attractions at the zoo because of the goats. Rhinos are social animals, and when we got Peak, a young wild male, he was showing signs of suffering from isolation and he was eating less and less. As a stopgap measure, while he searched for a female, Father thought of seeing if Peak couldn’t be accustomed to living with goats. If it worked, it would save a valuable animal. If it didn’t, it would only cost a few goats. It worked marvellously. Peak and the herd of goats became inseparable, even when Summit arrived. Now, when the rhinos bathed, the goats stood around the muddy pool, and when the goats ate in their corner, Peak and Summit stood next to them like guards. The living arrangement was very popular with the public.

      Mr. Kumar looked up and saw me. He smiled and, one hand holding onto the railing, the other waving, signalled me to come over.

      “Hello, Pi,” he said.

      “Hello, sir. It’s good of you to come to the zoo.”

      “I come here all the time. One might say it’s my temple. This is interesting …” He was indicating the pit. “If we had politicians like these goats and rhinos we’d have fewer problems in our country. Unfortunately we have a prime minister who has the armour plating of a rhinoceros without any of its good sense.”

      I didn’t know much about politics. Father and Mother complained regularly about Mrs. Gandhi, but it meant little to me. She lived far away in the north, not at the zoo and not in Pondicherry. But I felt I had to say something.

      “Religion will save us,” I said. Since when I could remember, religion had been very close to my heart.

      “Religion?” Mr. Kumar grinned broadly. “I don’t believe in religion. Religion is darkness.”

      Darkness? I was puzzled. I thought, Darkness is the last thing that religion is. Religion is light. Was he testing me? Was he saying, “Religion is darkness,” the way he sometimes said in class things like “Mammals lay eggs,” to see if someone would correct him? (“Only platypuses, sir.”)

      “There are no grounds for going beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no sound reason for believing