But I don’t insist. I don’t mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
The Pondicherry Zoo doesn’t exist any more. Its pits are filled in, the cages torn down. I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.
My name isn’t the end of the story about my name. When your name is Bob no one asks you, “How do you spell that?” Not so with Piscine Molitor Patel.
Some thought it was P. Singh and that I was a Sikh, and they wondered why I wasn’t wearing a turban.
In my university days I visited Montreal once with some friends. It fell to me to order pizzas one night. I couldn’t bear to have yet another French speaker guffawing at my name, so when the man on the phone asked, “Can I ’ave your name?” I said, “I am who I am.” Half an hour later two pizzas arrived for “Ian Hoolihan”.
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names. Witness Simon who is called Peter, Matthew also known as Levi, Nathaniel who is also Bartholomew, Judas, not Iscariot, who took the name Thaddeus, Simeon who went by Niger, Saul who became Paul.
My Roman soldier stood in the schoolyard one morning when I was twelve. I had just arrived. He saw me and a flash of evil genius lit up his dull mind. He raised his arm, pointed at me and shouted, “It’s
Pissing
Patel!”
In a second everyone was laughing. It fell away as we filed into the class. I walked in last, wearing my crown of thorns.
The cruelty of children comes as news to no one. The words would waft across the yard to my ears, unprovoked, uncalled for: “Where’s Pissing? I’ve got to go.” Or: “You’re facing the wall. Are you Pissing?” Or something of the sort. I would freeze or, the contrary, pursue my activity, pretending not to have heard. The sound would disappear, but the hurt would linger, like the smell of piss long after it has evaporated.
Teachers started doing it too. It was the heat. As the day wore on,
the geography lesson, which in the morning had been as compact as an oasis, started to stretch out like the Thar Desert; the history lesson, so alive when the day was young, became parched and dusty; the mathematics lesson, so precise at first, became muddled. In their afternoon fatigue, as they wiped their foreheads and the backs of their necks with their handkerchiefs, without meaning to offend or get a laugh, even teachers forgot the fresh aquatic promise of my name and distorted it in a shameful way. By nearly imperceptible modulations I could hear the change. It was as if their tongues were charioteers driving wild horses. They could manage well enough the first syllable, the
Pea
, but eventually the heat was too much and they lost control of their frothy-mouthed steeds and could no longer rein them in for the climb to the second syllable, the
seen
. Instead they plunged hell-bent into
sing
, and next time round, all was lost. My hand would be up to give an answer, and I would be acknowledged with a “Yes, Pissing.” Often the teacher wouldn’t realize what he had just called me. He would look at me wearily after a moment, wondering why I wasn’t coming out with the answer. And sometimes the class, as beaten down by the heat as he was, wouldn’t react either. Not a snicker or a smile. But I always heard the slur.
I spent my last year at St. Joseph’s School feeling like the persecuted prophet Muhammad in Mecca, peace be upon him. But just as he planned his flight to Medina, the Hejira that would mark the beginning of Muslim time, I planned my escape and the beginning of a new time for me.
After St. Joseph’s, I went to Petit Séminaire, the best private English-medium secondary school in Pondicherry. Ravi was already there, and like all younger brothers, I would suffer from following in the footsteps of a popular older sibling. He was the athlete of his generation at Petit Séminaire, a fearsome bowler and a powerful batter, the captain of the town’s best cricket team, our very own Kapil Dev.
That I was a swimmer made no waves; it seems to be a law of human nature that those who live by the sea are suspicious of swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountain climbers. But following in someone’s shadow wasn’t my escape, though I would have taken any name over “Pissing”, even “Ravi’s brother”. I had a better plan than that.
I put it to execution on the very first day of school, in the very first class. Around me were other alumni of St. Joseph’s. The class started the way all new classes start, with the stating of names. We called them out from our desks in the order in which we happened to be sitting.
“Ganapathy Kumar,” said Ganapathy Kumar.
“Vipin Nath,” said Vipin Nath.
“Shamshool Hudha,” said Shamshool Hudha.
“Peter Dharmaraj,” said Peter Dharmaraj.
Each name elicited a tick on a list and a brief mnemonic stare from the teacher. I was terribly nervous.
“Ajith Giadson,” said Ajith Giadson, four desks away …
“Sampath Saroja,” said Sampath Saroja, three away …
“Stanley Kumar,” said Stanley Kumar, two away …
“Sylvester Naveen,” said Sylvester Naveen, right in front of me.
It was my turn. Time to put down Satan. Medina, here I come.
I got up from my desk and hurried to the blackboard. Before the teacher could say a word, I picked up a piece of chalk and said as I wrote:
My name is
Piscine Molitor Patel
,
known to all as
—I double underlined the first two letters of my given name—
Pi Patel
For good measure I added
π= 3.14
and I drew a large circle, which I then sliced in two with a diameter, 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.
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
.
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 anything but our sense experience. A clear intellect, close attention to detail and a little scientific knowledge will expose religion as superstitious bosh. God does not exist.”
Did he say that? Or am I remembering the lines of later atheists? At any rate, it was something of the sort. I had never heard such words.
“Why tolerate darkness? Everything is here and clear, if only we look carefully.”
He was pointing at Peak. Now though I had great admiration for Peak, I had never thought of a rhinoceros as a light bulb.
He spoke again. “Some people say God died during the Partition in 1947. He may have died in 1971 during the war. Or he may have
died yesterday here in Pondicherry in an orphanage. That’s what some people say, Pi. When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day, ‘Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?’ God never came. It wasn’t God who saved me—it was medicine. Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It’s the end. If the watch doesn’t work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us. One day we will take hold of the means of production and there will be justice on earth.”
This was all a bit much for me. The tone was right—loving and brave—but the details seemed bleak. I said nothing. It wasn’t for fear of angering Mr. Kumar. I was more afraid that in a few words thrown out he might destroy something that I loved. What if his words had the effect of polio on me? What a terrible disease that must be if it could kill God in a man.
He walked off, pitching and rolling in the wild sea that was the steady ground. “Don’t forget the test on Tuesday. Study hard, 3.14!”
“Yes, Mr. Kumar.”
He became my favourite teacher at Petit Séminaire and the reason I studied zoology at the University of Toronto. I felt a kinship with him. It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them—and then they leap.
I’ll be honest about it. 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 Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.