Acclaim for Yann Martel's Life of Pi(25)

"Robinson Crusoe!"

"Mother!"

"But Piscine!" she said. She settled back into her chair, a path-of-least-resistance look on her face, which meant I had to put up a stiff fight in precisely the right spots. She adjusted a cushion. "Father and I find your religious zeal a bit of a mystery."

"It is a Mystery."

"Hmmm. I don't mean it that way. Listen, my darling, if you're going to be religious, you must be either a Hindu, a Christian or a Muslim. You heard what they said on the esplanade."

"I don't see why I can't be all three. Mamaji has two passports. He's Indian and French.

Why can't I be a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim?"

"That's different. France and India are nations on earth."

"How many nations are there in the sky?"

She thought for a second. "One. That's the point. One nation, one passport."

"One nation in the sky?"

"Yes. Or none. There's that option too, you know. These are terribly old-fashioned things you've taken to."

"If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?"

A cloud of uncertainty came over her face.

"Bapu Gandhi said—"

"Yes, I know what Bapu Gandhi said." She brought a hand to her forehead. She had a weary look, Mother did. "Good grief," she said.





CHAPTER 27


Later that evening I overheard my parents speaking.

"You said yes?" said Father.

"I believe he asked you too. You referred him to me," replied Mother.

"Did I?"

"You did."

"I had a very busy day..."

"You're not busy now. You're quite comfortably unemployed by the looks of it. If you want to march into his room and pull the prayer rug from under his feet and discuss the question of Christian baptism with him, please go ahead. I won't object."

"No, no." I could tell from his voice that Father was settling deeper into his chair. There was a pause.

"He seems to be attracting religions the way a dog attracts fleas, he pursued. "I don't understand it. We're a modern Indian family; we live in a modern way, India is on the

cusp of becoming a truly modern and advanced nation—and here we've produced a son who thinks he's the reincarnation of Sri Ramakrishna."

"If Mrs. Gandhi is what being modern and advanced is about, I'm not sure I like it,"

Mother said.

"Mrs. Gandhi will pass! Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread—these are two laws of nature. If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood! I am utterly convinced of this. Mrs. Gandhi and her foolishness will pass.

The New India will come."

(Indeed she would pass. And the New India, or one family of it, would decide to move to Canada.)

Father went on: "Did you hear when he said, 'Bapu Gandhi said, "All religions are true'"?"

"Yes."

"Bapu Gandhi? The boy is getting to be on affectionate terms with Gandhi? After Daddy Gandhi, what next? Uncle Jesus? And what's this nonsense—has he really become a Muslim?"

"It seems so."

"A Muslim! A devout Hindu, all right, I can understand. A Christian in addition, it's getting to be a bit strange, but I can stretch my mind. The Christians have been here for a long time—Saint Thomas, Saint Francis Xavier, the missionaries and so on. We owe them good schools."

"Yes."

"So all that I can sort of accept. But Muslim? It's totally foreign to our tradition. They're outsiders."

"They've been here a very long time too. They're a hundred times more numerous than the Christians."

"That makes no difference. They're outsiders."

"Perhaps Piscine is marching to a different drumbeat of progress."

"You're defending the boy? You don't mind it that he's fancying himself a Muslim?"

"What can we do, Santosh? He's taken it to heart, and it's not doing anyone any harm.

Maybe it's just a phase. It too may pass—like Mrs. Gandhi."

"Why can't he have the normal interests of a boy his age? Look at Ravi. All he can think about is cricket, movies and music."

"You think that's better?"

"No, no. Oh, I don't know what to think. It's been a long day." He sighed. "I wonder how far he'll go with these interests."

Mother chuckled. "Last week he finished a book called The Imitation of Christ."

"The Imitation of Christ! I say again, I wonder how far he'll go with these interests!"

cried Father.

They laughed.





CHAPTER 28


I loved my prayer rug. Ordinary in quality though it was, it glowed with beauty in my eyes. I'm sorry I lost it. Wherever I laid it I felt special affection for the patch of ground beneath it and the immediate surroundings, which to me is a clear indication that it was a good prayer rug because it helped me remember that the earth is the creation of God and sacred the same all over. The pattern, in gold lines upon a background of red, was plain: a narrow rectangle with a triangular peak at one extremity to indicate the qibla, the direction of prayer, and little curlicues floating around it, like wisps of smoke or accents from a strange language. The pile was soft. When I prayed, the short, unknotted tassels were inches from the tip of my forehead at one end of the carpet and inches from the tip of my toes at the other, a cozy size to make you feel at home anywhere upon this vast earth.