Carnivore for Company

It was again in a Yard sale in Arlington sometime early this year that I bought Canadian writer Yann Martel's booker price winning novel Life of Pi. For some reason, I did not read it immediately. This September, I was was required to go to New York for 10 days on official duty. I looked for a book for reading during my stay in New York. I wanted something light. Thomas, my son, suggested Life of Pi. I carried it with some reluctance and started reading it in the three-hour rail journey to New York.

The book impressed as fiction of a different kind. The novel has only two characters of consequence in it, one human and the other animal, that too a carnivore, a royal Bengal tiger to be exact. Pi is the shortened name of sixteen-year old Piscine Molitor Patel, the main character and narrator. He is the son of a private zoo-owner in India's Pondicherry. Circumstances compelled Pi's father to wind the zoo up and migrate to Canada with his family. In the process, many of the animals of the zoo were sold to zoo's in the Western hemisphere. The Pi family decided to make their journey to the new world in the same cargo ship in which were loaded the caged animals proceeding to join their new owners. Mid-way, the ship developed trouble and wrecked. Of his family, only Pi managed to escape the wreck in a lifeboat. But, some of the animals that escaped their cages in the confusion of the wreck too managed to get on to the life boat.

Thus, Pi found himself in the company of a hyena, a zebra, a female orang-utan and a royal Bengal tiger. The zebra and the orang-utan were killed and feasted on by the hyena which in turn was finished by the tiger. At last, Pi was left in the company of the tiger. The rest the novel (which is most of it) is the story of Pi's survival in this unusual company. His story is heroic and pathetic. How did he survive? He did it by musing, philosophizing, improvising and of course, fishing. The fishing was mostly for his companion to keep it fed so as to avoid himself becoming its prey. The story is long. The life boat with its mixed cargo traverses the pacific in 227 days (remember the value of the mathematical constant Pi is often expressed as 22/7) before touching land in Mexico.