Acclaim for Yann Martel's Life of Pi(29)

With a turn of a page we jump over the Pacific—and there is next to nothing. He tells me that the camera did click regularly—on all the usual important occasions—but everything was lost. What little there is consists of what was assembled by Mamaji and mailed over after the events.

There is a photo taken at the zoo during the visit of a V.I.P. In black and white another world is revealed to me. The photo is crowded with people. A Union cabinet minister is the focus of attention. There's a giraffe in the background. Near the edge of the group, I recognize a younger Mr. Adirubasamy.

"Mamaji?" I ask, pointing.



"Yes," he says.

There's a man next to the minister, with horn-rimmed glasses and hair very cleanly combed. He looks like a plausible Mr. Patel, face rounder than his son's.

"Is this your father?" I ask.

He shakes his head. "I don't know who that is."

There's a pause of a few seconds. He says, "It's my father who took the picture."

On the same page there's another group shot, mostly of schoolchildren. He taps the photo.

"That's Richard Parker," he says.

I'm amazed. I look closely, trying to extract personality from appearance. Unfortunately, it's black and white again and a little out of focus. A photo taken in better days, casually.

Richard Parker is looking away. He doesn't even realize that his picture is being taken.

The opposing page is entirely taken up by a colour photo of the swimming pool of the Aurobindo Ashram. It's a nice big outdoor pool with clear, sparkling water, a clean blue bottom and an attached diving pool.

The next page features a photo of the front gate of Petit Seminaire school An arch has the school's motto painted on it: Nil magnum nisi bonum. No greatness without goodness.

And that's it. An entire childhood memorialized in four nearly irrelevant photographs.

He grows sombre.

"The worst of it," he says, "is that I can hardly remember what my mother looks like any more. I can see her in my mind, but it's fleeting. As soon as I try to have a good look at her, she fades. It's the same with her voice. If I saw her again in the street, it would all come back. But that's not likely to happen. It's very sad not to remember what your mother looks like."

He closes the book.





CHAPTER 34


Father said, "We'll sail like Columbus!"

"He was hoping to find India," I pointed out sullenly.

We sold the zoo, lock, stock and barrel. To a new country, a new life. Besides assuring our collection of a happy future, the transaction would pay for our immigration and leave us with a good sum to make a fresh start in Canada (though now, when I think of it, the sum is laughable—how blinded we are by money). We could have sold our animals to zoos in India, but American zoos were willing to pay higher prices. CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, had just come into effect, and the Window on the trading of captured wild animals had slammed shut. The future of zoos would now lie with other zoos. The Pondicherry Zoo closed shop at just the right time. There was a scramble to buy our animals. The final buyers were a number of zoos, mainly the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and the soon-to-open Minnesota Zoo, but odd animals were going to Los Angeles, Louisville, Oklahoma City and Cincinnati.

And two animals were being shipped to the Canada Zoo. That's how Ravi and I felt. We did not want to go. We did not want to live in a country of gale-force winds and minus-two-hundred-degree winters. Canada was not on the cricket map. Departure was made easier—as far as getting us used to the idea—by the time it took for all the pre-departure preparations. It took well over a year. I don't mean for us. I mean for the animals.

Considering that animals dispense with clothes, footwear, linen, furniture, kitchenware, toiletries; that nationality means nothing to them; that they care not a jot for passports, money, employment prospects, schools, cost of housing, healthcare facilities—

considering, in short, their lightness of being, it's amazing how hard it is to move them.

Moving a zoo is like moving a city.

The paperwork was colossal. Litres of water used up in the wetting of stamps. Dear Mr.

So-and-so written hundreds of times. Offers made. Sighs heard. Doubts expressed.

Haggling gone through. Decisions sent higher up for approval. Prices agreed upon. Deals clinched. Dotted lines signed. Congratulations given. Certificates of origin sought.

Certificates of health sought. Export permits sought. Import permits sought. Quarantine regulations clarified. Transportation organized. A fortune spent on telephone calls. It's a joke in the zoo business, a weary joke, that the paperwork involved in trading a shrew weighs more than an elephant, that the paperwork involved in trading an elephant weighs more than a whale, and that you must never try to trade a whale, never. There seemed to be a single file of nit-picking bureaucrats from Pondicherry to Minneapolis via Delhi and Washington, each with his form, his problem, his hesitation. Shipping the animals to the moon couldn't possibly have been more complicated. Father pulled nearly every hair off his head and came close to giving up on a number of occasions.

There were surprises. Most of our birds and reptiles, and our lemurs, rhinos, orangutans, mandrills, lion-tailed macaques, giraffes, anteaters, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas, zebras, Himalayan and sloth bears, Indian elephants and Nilgiri tahrs, among others, were in demand, but others, Elfie for example, were met with silence. "A cataract operation!"