the places in the Life of Pi

Pondicherry: 29th May

Today, my last day at Pondicherry, I walked the length of Goubert Salai, the esplanade where Mr Martell’s fictitious protagonist Pi Patel has a charming inter-faith dialogue with the three wise men, one Hindu, one Muslim and one Christian. Families stroll down here every evening, and buy ice creams and roasted nuts, and their children grip pink fuzzes of candy floss and helium-filled balloons. There is a imposing statue of Mahatma Gandhi donated by the French, where in the book the Pi Patel envisioned that he heard his conversation that all religions are true in his debate with the three wise men.

From the esplanade I rode to the Botanical Gardens, which have a large collection of trees and plants, an aquarium and a toy train. Pi lived in the zoo in the botanical gardens where his father was the zookeeper, but today it is no longer there. Perhaps it never was. I went down to the Indian Coffee House in Nehru Street, where a waiter served me an excellent frothy Nilgiri Hills coffee for 3 rupees. It’s a simple room with high ceilings and green walls, that serves cheap, good food. The atmosphere is abuzz with chatter, and patrons chat on red plastic chairs under fast-moving ceiling fans. It was here Mr Martell mentions in his author’s note at the start of the book, that he met a certain Francis Adirubasamy who told him the story of Pi Patel, a story that would make you believe in God, a story of the boy who survived a shipwreck stranded with an adult male Royal Bengal Tiger. One of the waiters there remembers Mr Martell who would sit there and write, and claims to even know Mr Adirubasamy. Now I was confused, fiction and fact became strangely blurred.