Yann Martel - Life of Pi

I peered into his eyes. They looked no different from any other day. Perhaps there was a little more discharge in the inner corners, but it was nothing dramatic, certainly not as dramatic as his overall appearance. The ordeal had reduced us to skin and bones.

I realized that I had my answer in the very act of looking. I was staring into his eyes as if I were an eye doctor, while he was looking back vacantly. Only a blind wild cat would fail to react to such a stare.

I felt pity for Richard Parker. Our end was approaching.

The next day I started feeling a stinging in my eyes. I rubbed and rubbed, but the itch wouldn’t go away. The very opposite: it got worse, and unlike Richard Parker, my eyes started to ooze pus. Then darkness came, blink as I might. At first it was right in front of me, a black spot at the centre of everything. It spread into a blotch that reached to the edges of my vision. All I saw of the sun the next morning was a crack of light at the top of my left eye, like a small window too high up. By noon, everything was pitch-black.

I clung to life. I was weakly frantic. The heat was infernal. I had so little strength I could no longer stand. My lips were hard and cracked. My mouth was dry and pasty, coated with a glutinous saliva as foul to taste as it was to smell. My skin was burnt. My shrivelled muscles ached. My limbs, especially my feet, were swollen and a constant source of pain. I was hungry and once again there was no food. As for water, Richard Parker was taking so much that I was down to five spoonfuls a day. But this physical suffering was nothing compared to the moral torture I was about to endure. I would rate the day I went blind as the day my extreme suffering began. I could not tell you when exactly in the journey it happened. Time, as I said before, became irrelevant. It must have been sometime between the hundredth and the two-hundredth day. I was certain I would not last another one.

By the next morning I had lost all fear of death, and I resolved to die.

I came to the sad conclusion that I could no longer take care of Richard Parker. I had failed as a zookeeper. I was more affected by his imminent demise than I was by my own. But truly, broken down and wasted away as I was, I could do no more for him.

Nature was sinking fast. I could feel a fatal weakness creeping up on me. I would be dead by the afternoon. To make my going more comfortable I decided to put off a little the intolerable thirst I had been living with for so long. I gulped down as much water as I could take. If only I could have had a last bite to eat. But it seemed that was not to be. I set myself against the rolled-up edge of the tarpaulin in the middle of the boat. I closed my eyes and waited for my breath to leave my body. I muttered, “Goodbye, Richard Parker. I’m sorry for having failed you. I did my best. Farewell. Dear Father, dear Mother, dear Ravi, greetings. Your loving son and brother is coming to meet you. Not an hour has gone by that I haven’t thought of you. The moment I see you will be the happiest of my life. And now I leave matters in the hands of God, who is love and whom I love.”

I heard the words, “Is someone there?”

It’s astonishing what you hear when you’re alone in the blackness of your dying mind. A sound without shape or colour sounds strange. To be blind is to hear otherwise.

The words came again, “Is someone there?”

I concluded that I had gone mad. Sad but true. Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.

“Is someone there?” came the voice again, insistent.

The clarity of my insanity was astonishing. The voice had its very own timbre, with a heavy, weary rasp. I decided to play along.

“Of course someone’s there,” I replied. “There’s always some one there. Who would be asking the question otherwise?”

“I was hoping there would be someone else .”

“What do you mean, someone else? Do you realize where you are? If you’re not happy with this figment of your fancy, pick another one. There are plenty of fancies to pick from.”

Hmmm. Figment. Fig -ment. Wouldn’t a fig be good?

“So there’s no one, is there?”

“Shush … I’m dreaming of figs.”

“Figs! Do you have a fig? Please can I have a piece? I beg you. Only a little piece. I’m starving.”

“I don’t have just one fig. I have a whole figment.”

“A whole figment of figs! Oh please, can I have some? I …”

The voice, or whatever effect of wind and waves it was, faded.

“They’re plump and heavy and fragrant,” I continued. “The branches of the tree are bent over, they are so weighed down with figs. There must be over three hundred figs in that tree.”

Silence.

The voice came back again. “Let’s talk about food …”

“What a good idea.”

“What would you have to eat if you could have anything you wanted?”

“Excellent question. I would have a magnificent buffet. I would start with rice and sambar. There would be black gram dhal rice and curd rice and—”

“I would have—”

“I’m not finished. And with my rice I would have spicy tamarind sambar and small onion sambar and—”

“Anything else?”

“I’m getting there. I’d also have mixed vegetable sagu and vegetable korma and potato masala and cabbage vadai and masala dosai and spicy lentil rasam and—”

“I see.”

“Wait. And stuffed eggplant poriyal and coconut yam kootu and rice idli and curd vadai and vegetable bajji and—”

“It sounds very—”

“Have I mentioned the chutneys yet? Coconut chutney and mint chutney and green chilli pickle and gooseberry pickle, all served with the usual nans, popadoms, parathas and puris, of course.”

“Sounds—”

“The salads! Mango curd salad and okra curd salad and plain fresh cucumber salad. And for dessert, almond payasam and milk payasam and jaggery pancake and peanut toffee and coconut burfi and vanilla ice cream with hot, thick chocolate sauce.”

“Is that it?”

“I’d finish this snack with a ten-litre glass of fresh, clean, cool, chilled water and a coffee.”

“It sounds very good.”

“It does.”

“Tell me, what is coconut yam kootu?”

“Nothing short of heaven, that’s what. To make it you need yams, grated coconut, green plantains, chilli powder, ground black pepper, ground turmeric, cumin seeds, brown mustard seeds and some coconut oil. You sauté the coconut until it’s golden brown—”

“May I make a suggestion?”

“What?”

“Instead of coconut yam kootu, why not boiled beef tongue with a mustard sauce?”

“That sounds non-veg.”

“It is. And then tripe.”

“Tripe? You’ve eaten the poor animal’s tongue and now you want to eat its stomach ?”

“Yes! I dream of tripes à la mode de Caen —warm—with sweetbread.”

“Sweetbread? That sounds better. What is sweetbread?”

“Sweetbread is made from the pancreas of a calf.”

“The pancreas!”

“Braised and with a mushroom sauce, it’s simply delicious.”

Where were these disgusting, sacrilegious recipes coming from? Was I so far gone that I was contemplating setting upon a cow and her young ? What horrible crosswind was I caught in? Had the lifeboat drifted back into that floating trash?

“What will be the next affront?”

“Calf’s brains in a brown butter sauce!”

“Back to the head, are we?”

“Brain soufflé!”

“I’m feeling sick. Is there anything you won’t eat?”

“What I would give for oxtail soup. For roast suckling pig stuffed with rice, sausages, apricots and raisins. For veal kidney in a butter, mustard and parsley sauce. For a marinated rabbit stewed in red wine. For chicken liver sausages. For pork and liver pâté with veal. For frogs. Ah, give me frogs, give me frogs!”