Life of Pi

by Yann Martel

That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?

Then the elderly man said, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” I stopped waving my hand. But I was suspicious. Was this a Jehovah’s Witness knocking at my door?

Hope fed on hope.

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

How true it is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.

I tell you, to be drunk on alcohol is disgraceful, but to be drunk on water is noble and ecstatic.

Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.”

For if there’s one thing more dangerous than a healthy animal, it’s an injured animal.

Soon the sun was alone in the sky, and the ocean was a smooth skin reflecting the light with a million mirrors.

I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.

you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me.

To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away.

It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.

Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.

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.

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.

To be a castaway is to be a point perpetually at the centre of a circle.

You can get used to anything—haven’t I already said that? Isn’t that what all survivors say?

It came as an unmistakable indication to me of how low I had sunk the day I noticed, with a pinching of the heart, that I ate like an animal, that this noisy, frantic, unchewing wolfing-down of mine was exactly the way Richard Parker ate.

Oh, you should have seen that landscape! What I had seen up till now were mere hillocks of water. These swells were truly mountains. The valleys we found ourselves in were so deep they were gloomy.

There was an explosion of hot air and hot water. For two, perhaps three seconds, a gigantic, blinding white shard of glass from a broken cosmic window danced in the sky, insubstantial yet overwhelmingly powerful. Ten thousand trumpets and twenty thousand drums could not have made as much noise as that bolt of lightning; it was positively deafening.

At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.

Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation? The answer—believe me—is No.

There’s no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day.

After so many weeks of natural sounds, these mechanical noises were strange and awesome and stunned me into silence.

“I love you!” The words burst out pure and unfettered, infinite. The feeling flooded my chest. “Truly I do. I love you, Richard Parker. If I didn’t have you now, I don’t know what I would do. I don’t think I would make it. No, I wouldn’t. I would die of hopelessness. Don’t give up, Richard Parker, don’t give up. I’ll get you to land, I promise, I promise!”

I put a message in the bottle: “Japanese-owned cargo ship Tsimtsum, flying Panamanian flag, sank July 2nd, 1977, in Pacific, four days out of Manila. Am in lifeboat. Pi Patel my name. Have some food, some water, but Bengal tiger a serious problem. Please advise family in Winnipeg, Canada. Any help very much appreciated. Thank you.” I corked the bottle and covered the cork with a piece of plastic. I tied the plastic to the neck of the bottle with nylon string, knotting it tightly. I launched the bottle into the water.

What was smooth became rough. What was rough became smooth. What was sharp became blunt. What was whole became tattered.

The salt went on eating everything with its million hungry mouths.

sometimes the water was so warm it felt like syrup.

It wasn’t proper sleep, but a state of semi-consciousness in which daydreams and reality were nearly indistinguishable.

Crawled over to see R. P. Not reacting. Body curled, tail flat. Coat clumpy with wetness. Smaller when wet. Bony. Touched him for first time ever. To see if dead. Not.

It’s no use. Today I die. I will die today. I die.

A sound without shape or colour sounds strange. To be blind is to hear otherwise.

“Look for green,” said the survival manual. Well, this was green. In fact, it was chlorophyll heaven. A green to outshine food colouring and flashing neon lights. A green to get drunk on.

To judge—and be disappointed—or not to judge, that was the question.

My tongue began to tremble as if it were a finger flipping through a dictionary, trying to find a long-forgotten word. It found it, and my eyes closed with pleasure at hearing it: sweet.

I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo. I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approach of a known killer.

The effect of bathing in pure, clean, salt-free water was more than I can put into words. After such a long time at sea, my skin was like a hide and my hair was long, matted and as silky as a fly-catching strip. I felt even my soul had been corroded by salt.

In animals, the urge to kill is separate from the urge to eat. To go for so long without prey and suddenly to have so many—his pent-up hunting instinct was lashing out with a vengeance.

I estimate that it was about six or seven miles in diameter, which means a circumference of about twenty miles.

With the single, notable exception of the meerkats, there was not the least foreign matter on the island, organic or inorganic. It was nothing but shining green algae and shining green trees.

I doubt that an independent organism, however intimate the symbiosis it has entered upon, would give up on so essential a part of life as reproduction. The leaves’ appetite for the sun, as testified by their abundance, their breadth and their super-chlorophyll greenness, made me suspect that the trees had primarily an energy-gathering function.

The major difficulty in training animals is that they operate either by instinct or by rote. The shortcut of intelligence to make new associations that are not instinctive is minimally available. Therefore, imprinting in an animal’s mind the artificial connection that if it does a certain action, say, roll over, it will get a treat can be achieved only by mind-numbing repetition. It is a slow process that depends as much on luck as on hard work, all the more so when the animal is an adult.

Eventually I quit the boat. It seemed absurd to spend my nights in such cramped quarters with an animal who was becoming roomy in his needs, when I could have an entire island. I decided the safe thing to do would be to sleep in a tree.

laden

I can tell you exactly what day I came upon the tree: it was the day before I left the island.

Ah, how I wish that moment had never been! But for it I might have lived for years—why, for the rest of my life—on that island. Nothing, I thought, could ever push me to return to the lifeboat and to the suffering and deprivation I had endured on it—nothing! What reason could I have to leave the island? Were my physical needs not met here? Was there not more fresh water than I could drink in all my lifetime? More algae than I could eat? And when I yearned for variety, more meerkats and fish than I could ever desire? If the island floated and moved, might it not move in the right direction? Might it not turn out to be a vegetable ship that brought me to land? In the meantime, did I not have these delightful meerkats to keep me company? And wasn’t Richard Parker still in need of improving his fourth jump? The thought of leaving the island had not crossed my mind once since I had arrived. It had been many weeks now—I couldn’t say how many exactly—and they would stretch on. I was certain about that. How wrong I was.

A human tooth. A molar, to be exact. The surface stained green and finely pierced with holes.