Life of Pi

Turtle shells were very handy. I couldn’t have done without them. They served not only as shields, but as cutting boards for fish and as bowls for mixing food. And when the elements had destroyed the blankets beyond repair, I used the shells to protect myself from the sun by propping them against each other and lying beneath them.

It was frightening, the extent to which a full belly made for a good mood. The one would follow the other measure for measure: so much food and water,

so much good mood. It was such a terribly fickle existence. I was at the mercy of turtle meat for smiles.

By the time the last of the biscuits had disappeared, anything was good to eat, no matter the taste. I could put anything in my mouth, chew it and swallow it—delicious, foul or plain—so long as it wasn’t salty. My body developed a revulsion for salt that I still experience to this day.

I tried once to eat Richard Parker’s feces. It happened early on, when my system hadn’t learned yet to live with hunger and my imagination was still wildly searching for solutions. I had delivered fresh solar-still water to his bucket not long before. After draining it in one go, he had disappeared below the tarpaulin and I had returned to attending to some small matter in the locker. As I always did in those early days, I glanced below the tarpaulin every so often to make sure he wasn’t up to something. Well, this one time, lo, he was. He was crouched, his back was rounded and his rear legs were spread. His tail was raised, pushing up against the tarpaulin. The position was tell-tale. Right away I had food in mind, not animal hygiene. I decided there was little danger. He was turned the other way and his head was out of sight. If I respected his peace and quiet, he might not even notice me. I grabbed a bailing cup and stretched my arm forward. My cup arrived in the nick of time. At the second it was in position at the base of his tail, Richard Parker’s anus distended, and out of it, like a bubble-gum balloon, came a black sphere of excrement. It fell into my cup with a clink, and no doubt I will be considered to have abandoned the last vestiges of humanness by those who do not understand the degree of my suffering when I say that it sounded to my ears like the music of a five-rupee coin dropped into a beggar’s cup. A smile cracked my lips and made them bleed. I felt deep gratitude towards Richard Parker. I pulled back the cup. I took the turd in my fingers. It was very warm, but the smell was not strong. In size it was like a big ball of gulab jamun, but with none of the softness. In fact, it was as hard as a rock. Load a musket with it and you could have shot a rhino.

I returned the ball to the cup and added a little water. I covered it and set it aside. My mouth watered as I waited. When I couldn’t stand the wait any longer, I popped the ball into my mouth. I couldn’t eat it. The taste was acrid, but it wasn’t that. It was rather my mouth’s conclusion, immediate and obvious: there’s nothing to be had here. It was truly waste matter, with no nutrients in it. I spat it out and was bitter at the loss of precious water. I took the gaff and went about collecting the rest of Richard Parker’s feces. They went straight to the fish.

After just a few weeks my body began to deteriorate. My feet and ankles started to swell and I was finding it very tiring to stand.

C H A P T E R 7 8

There were many skies. The sky was invaded by great white clouds, flat on the bottom but round and billowy on top. The sky was completely cloudless, of a blue quite shattering to the senses. The sky was a heavy, suffocating blanket of grey cloud, but without promise of rain. The sky was thinly overcast. The sky was dappled with small, white, fleecy clouds. The sky was streaked with high, thin clouds that looked like a cotton ball stretched apart. The sky was a featureless milky haze. The sky was a density of dark and blustery rain clouds that passed by without delivering rain. The sky was painted with a small number of flat clouds that looked like sandbars. The sky was a mere block to allow a visual effect on the horizon: sunlight flooding the ocean, the vertical edges between light and shadow perfectly distinct. The sky was a distant black curtain of falling rain. The sky was many clouds at many levels, some thick and opaque, others looking like smoke. The sky was black and spitting rain on my smiling face. The sky was nothing but falling water, a ceaseless deluge that wrinkled and bloated my skin and froze me stiff.

There were many seas. The sea roared like a tiger. The sea whispered in your ear like a friend telling you secrets. The sea clinked like small change in a pocket. The sea thundered like avalanches. The sea hissed like sandpaper working on wood. The sea sounded like someone vomiting. The sea was dead silent.

And in between the two, in between the sky and the sea, were all the winds.

And there were all the nights and all the moons.