Pi and the Bible

While on holiday, I have been reading Yann Martel’s book, Life of Pi, which won the Man Booker Prize. This novel is a fanciful but captivating story of the son of an Indian zoo-keeper. The family is en route to a new life in Canada, aboard a ship which is also carrying the animals from the zoo.

Suddenly an explosion sinks the ship, plunging the young hero into a life-boat, which, as it turns out, he will have to share with a gigantic stowaway: a royal Bengal tiger named, incongruously, Richard Parker.

Pi survived for 227 days aboard the life-boat with the dangerous feline, and in his daily schedule prayer had an important place. For Pi was a deeply, if unconventionally, religious lad. Coming from a Hindu family, he embraced both Christianity and Islam, without giving up Hinduism. In time of crisis he calls out, in one breath, to Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, and Vishnu.

There is a passage in the middle of the book which particularly caught my attention. Pi declares:

My greatest wish--other than salvation—was to have a book. The first time I came upon a Bible in the bedside table of a hotel room in Canada, I burst into tears. I sent a contribution to the Gideons the very next day, with a note urging them to spread the range of their activity to all places where worn and weary travellers might lay their heads, and that they should leave not only Bibles, but other sacred writings as well. I cannot think of a better way to spread the faith. No thundering from a pulpit, no condemnation from bad churches, no peer pressure, just a book of scripture quietly waiting to say hello, as gentle and powerful as a little girl’s kiss on your cheek.

On my way home from the bus station, the taxi driver had his radio tuned to a religious station which seemed to specialize in "thundering from a pulpit." Without wishing to question in any way the religious sincerity of the driver, I have to say that I prefer the experience of scripture as a little girl’s kiss on the cheek to its use as a bludgeon to chastise the ungodly. I wonder whether Pi’s view of scripture is shared by his creator, the novelist Yann Martel.

July 27, 2003