In search of the Life of Pi

On the verandah of a bungalow on a tea estate near Dibrugarh, I was browsing my sister’s bookcase. My sister, Mrs Loya Agarwala, is an editor for a local journal, she has written stories and features in national magazines for over 10 years and is a regular columnist for a regional daily. Her bookcase, as is her house, is a little corner of England, her birthplace. Its shelves are filled with Bronte, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Byron. Her kitchen shelves have jars of Colman’s mustard, and Branston pickle side by side with jars of gaaj tenga and aamlokhi. She handed me a book with a picture of tiger on the cover called Life of Pi, by Yann Martell. Last year’s Booker Prize winner was a compelling read about a boy called Pi Patel, a Hindu-Muslim-Christian, who is shipwrecked and gets stranded on a lifeboat with a seasick tiger – a magical tale of the resilience of the human spirit. Unbeknown to me at the time, the book would determine the course of the rest of my holiday.

Man proposes God disposes says the English adage, even holiday plans which tend to be transient and fragile, are slave to the vicissitudes of travel. My Plan “A” was to fly from Guwahati to Bangkok and then to Phnom Penh in Cambodia from where I would journey to Angkor Wat on motorbike, and then to Vietnam travelling south from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. It was April 2003 and already airports were nervous about the SARS virus which had been extending its deathly grip to South China and northern Vietnam. Governments were getting twitchier and twitchier; SARS was something not to be sneezed at. A contact in Bangkok emailed me to say that some people were wearing masks and tourists who came from affected countries would have to undergo 2 weeks quarantine. Quarantine? For humans? That made me think of people in kennels with masks on at Bangkok International Airport, and staff swinging leashes at them screaming, “Walkies”. Fortunately I didn’t have to deliberate for too long, SARS-fearing Indian Airlines pilots were refusing to fly the Guwahati – Bangkok route. They had made the decision for me.

So where could I go? I needed a Plan “B”. The answer was staring me in the face, literally – the book Life of Pi starts off in Pondicherry, a union territory in south India, which belonged to France before 1954. I would be travelling a ‘V’ shaped route on the southern tip of India through the states of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu: south to Bangalore, Mysore, Trishur, Kochi, Alappuzha, Kollam, Trivanthapuram, Kanyiakumari and then north to Madurai, Chidambaram, Pondicherry, and finally Chennai (Madras)


The journey would take me a month on bus and trains, drifting on wooden boats in sleepy backwaters, past the oldest Churches in India, to a festival of elephants with gold headdresses and spinning silken umbrellas on their backs. There would be a Maharajah’s palace, a rock out at sea where a swami once meditated, ancient Hindu temple complexes, a synagogue and an ashram to visit.