I was new at this game and still unfamiliar with the inner workings of Hollywood protocol. Thus far, I hadn’t really discussed business with anyone of authority on set. There was definitely an unspoken code of propriety here, and I had witnessed the boundaries being crossed a couple of times. While shooting one of the final scenes in the film, Tina Fey had quietly given me direction about saying a line she had written. The line was “I feel that . . .” and she pulled me aside to tell me that the emphasis was to be placed on “I” rather than “feel.” I think we had both forgotten that she was wearing a lapel microphone and that the director could hear her, because he made a beeline over to me and, in a slightly reprimanding tone, told me that like he had said earlier, he wanted the emphasis on “feel.” Tina and I exchanged glances of “eek” and “oops.”
Another time, I was shooting a classroom scene with Tina, and we were waiting quietly between takes when I noticed one of the extras who was playing a mathlete (a very socially awkward, pimply kid) creepily staring at Tina’s face with his mouth slightly ajar. Uncomfortably close to each other, the three of us were standing on our marks (small pieces of tape on the ground indicating our positions for the shot), stuck there while technical adjustments were being made to lights and lenses. She must have felt him staring, because she turned to face him briefly and gave him a little smile. All of a sudden, he blurted out, “How’d you get that?” running his index finger along the side of his face, referencing the scar she had on her cheek. She didn’t miss a beat and politely but firmly chided, “It’s none of your business. You should know not to ask people questions like that.”
“Oh, sorry,” he wheezed out.
“Don’t worry about it,” she consented with a smile.
I looked away, pretending to be distracted, embarrassed for this kid, and wanting no part of the awkward interaction. My experiences of working on a real, bona fide Hollywood production were teaching me that there was no handbook on how to navigate through this world, and if I was going to seek the help of key players in the industry, it would need to be made clear to them that I deserved their assistance.
Mean Girls was released in theaters in April of 2004 and debuted at number one at the box office that weekend. I envisioned the blonde hairdresser on a Harley somewhere, rolling her eyes when she found out, her large breasts heaving and falling as the bike bounced over bumps in the road.
I took a huge posse of my cousins to the theater on opening night, and found it oddly bizarre to see my own face blown up twenty times its normal size on the big screen. There it was, the manifestation of a goal I had fantasized about—I can remember casually telling Ma once that if I were ever in a movie, I’d take all my cousins to go see it together. It was an emboldening feeling, sitting in the theater of Scarborough Town Centre and munching on popcorn while the crowd around me laughed in all the right places. Success. People seemed amused by the antics of the rapping mathlete. I had already seen the movie a few times, so I guess I zoned out and began to wonder if this was just the beginning of something much bigger. My face popped up on the screen once again. Why shouldn’t I be Pi? I can do this. I’ll make it happen.
My first year of university was coming to a close, and the more I thought about the Pi movie, the more I realized that school would always be there, but there would only be a small window of opportunity to even attempt to seize this part. This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I found myself standing dangerously close to the edge of a cliff. Far below me was an incredible abyss with no end in sight. I could turn back and safely return to where I had come from, or I could throw caution to the wind, lift my arms up into the air . . . and jump. When the time came to audition for the role of Pi, I wanted to walk into the casting agent’s office and know that I wasn’t just acting—I wanted to go in there knowing that I had become Pi, that I had the experiences, feelings, and history that the character had.
Just like Tongua, the tiger at the zoo, there were elements of Yann Martel’s fictional tale that actually existed out there in the real world. All I had to do to encounter them on a tangible level was seek them out. My instincts told me that I needed to throw every bit of myself into landing the role of Pi. At the registrar’s office on the university campus, a few weeks before my classes were over, I inquired about pulling out of school and signed the necessary paperwork, making it official that I wouldn’t be returning in September. And then I called the travel agent my parents used and booked a one-way ticket to India.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: hello-from-t.o.
Date: Wed, 19 May 2004 03:42:50
Dear Rajiv,
Thank you for your letter. Your penmanship is worthy of the 16th century.
There are three big zoos in the south of India that I visited. The best is in Mysore, Karnataka. The one I spent the most time in is in Trivandrum, in Kerala. And there’s one just south of Madras, so that would be the one closest to Pondicherry, though it was the least appealing of the three.
Congratulations on Mean Girls. That’s a big movie. When I have a moment, I’ll go see it.
Good luck in India. Take your time. Poke around. Open yourself. It’s an amazing place.
Stay well.
Yours,
Yann
4.
I WAS GREETED WITH the wild chaos, disorder, and craziness in which India seemed to function perfectly well. My first major challenge: I had to cross the street.
Having just arrived in Pondicherry, the air, thick with moisture and heat, exuded a kind of primeval energy that had a strangely calming effect on me. Even the light seemed different here. I was fueled by a sense of adventure, my feet now planted in a completely new world.
For a few weeks prior to my arrival, I had been corresponding with the principal of Petit Séminaire, the very real boy’s school that the fictional Pi attended. After explaining to him why I wanted to learn how to walk, talk, and behave like a local boy, and that I hoped to absorb as much of life in Pondicherry as possible, he granted me permission to sit at the back of an eleventh grade classroom for a few weeks, observing the boys who went to school there. He had read Life of Pi and told me that the school was happy to help me with my quest. He even offered me accommodations on the premises, but suggested that I would be more comfortable at a nearby hotel and graciously took the initiative of booking my room for me.
I checked into the Hotel Surguru and then ventured out, walking down the main road to Petit Séminaire. Yes! The first destination on my Pi checklist in India—a real building with a real history that I could physically become a part of. There it was, in front of me but across the street, which was a discombobulated mess of motorbikes, rickshaws, bicycles, and cows—Bam! Boom! Thaka-thom!—an immediate assault on my senses with rich smells, new sounds, and people everywhere. It was all moving, around, about, up the street, and down. I felt as though I was being pulled into it, like I wasn’t allowed to just stand there, being overwhelmed and scared, but forced to move, move somewhere, out of someone’s way or into someone else’s, to just walk, walk and become a part of it. There weren’t any actual lanes of traffic as far as I could tell, and everything just seemed to weave in and out of itself, all higgledy-piggledy. No traffic lights or crosswalks. I surveyed my immediate surroundings—a crumbling sidewalk and two sari-clad, nose-pierced old ladies sitting nearby on a straw mat selling five different types of bananas. One of the ladies adjusted the thick bun of hair on her head and yelled at me, telling me in Tamil that I needed to taste her bananas. But I had bigger issues to deal with—I was beginning to wonder whether people simply never crossed the streets in India when I noticed a woman in a teal-colored sari just step in front of oncoming traffic and make her way across. Amazingly, everything seemed to weave around her as she kept her eyes on the other side of the street and sauntered through.
I took a deep breath and followed her lead, stepping into the road. The traffic just made its way around me as I
held my steadfast gaze straight ahead on the iron gates of Petit Séminaire. Good, good, you got this. I was feeling the vibe, already starting to fit in with the locals. You look like one of them—they’ll never know you’re faking it—just keep walking, casually, keep your head up, squint your eyes, like the rest of them, gently swing your arms as you walk; yeah, yeah, you got this. And then I made a grave error—I looked to my left and registered that a kid on a huge, black bicycle was headed right for me. And then I stopped walking, instinctively, to let him pass. Big, big mistake. The boy screeched to a halt, bouncing down from the seat of his bike—causing a rickshaw that was just slightly behind him to crash into him. The pedal of his bike was somehow caught on the side of the rickshaw and the lady seated in the back started yelling at the boy in Tamil, who piped up and was yelling back at her. I interjected, waving my hands as I tried my best to tell them, in very broken Tamil, that I was to blame—“No, no, me mistake make, no him!”—but it was of no use; they hardly looked my way. With all the traffic stopped around me, I guiltily used the opportunity to slip away to the entrance of the school, where a cow chewing on some mango leaves eyed me suspiciously.
Stupid, stupid me. I felt like a dumb tourist. How, when I couldn’t even make it across the street, could I think that I was worthy of playing a young, authentic Tamil kid? It was a very good lesson to learn early on. If I was to fit in, I would have to do so by observing and adapting to a new way of behavior, however foreign it might seem to me.
Petit Séminaire was an expansive complex of loggias that opened onto a huge central courtyard built in the nineteenth century, and as I left the noisy street and entered the school, I heard faint shouting—short, high-pitched, little yelps. As I got closer to the principal’s office, the whimpers got louder and were separated by a thwacking sound. I turned the corner to the principal’s office, and saw a Tamil man, dressed in a long, white Catholic priest’s cassock, standing in front of a kneeling boy, about twelve years old. The priest, using his bare hand, was beating the kid on his back . . . whack—squeal . . . whack—squeal . . . I froze in horror.
After he was finished, the priest and the boy exchanged a few quiet words in Tamil, then the boy turned around and walked out, wiping tears away from his face. I made a mental note to be a good boy while I was here.
The priest looked at me curiously. I nervously spoke in English and told him who I was, that I had been in contact with the principal, and was to check in with him when I arrived. He left the room and returned with another Tamil man, also dressed in a priest’s cassock.
The principal’s name was Father Antonisamy and he was a Tamil Catholic priest. Although I hardly spoke Tamil, I grew up hearing my parents speak it and could understand it almost fluently. I knew that the principal’s very title and name was a sort of religious oxymoron. “Father Antony” was wham-bam in-your-face Roman Catholic, but Sami (also Swami) was the colloquial Tamil word for God, and the traditional Tamil reference to God—way before Jesus arrived in India—would have been a reference to a Hindu god. Hinduism is one of the oldest religions in existence that is still being practiced—and the Tamils are associated with its origins. Somewhere along the line, some Roman Catholic missionaries in South India convinced a handful of ever-obliging, welcoming Tamils to do away with their prostrations before stone idols dressed in silk and gold, and trust in a more inconspicuous form of worship. They happily consented, but with the one clause they hold on to just a teeny-weeny bit of their heritage, for tradition’s sake—and this was the “samy” suffix of the principal’s name.
Oddly enough, I was in a similar position to Father Antonisamy, a kind of oxymoron with regards to my own identity. In Canada, I grudgingly identified as being Tamil—when I was asked in Toronto where I “was from,” the question always implied deciphering my ethnicity. The sassy response was that I was simply “Canadian,” but when pushed, I would consent to saying, “Sri Lankan” or “Tamil.” My cousins and I usually did everything we could to shy away from having to admit that we were Tamil to people, who might mistakenly associate our identity with the FOBs (Fresh off the Boat) that filled the suburbs with their backward ways, hacking and hoarking up their winter boogers while seated on the bus or strolling to the corner store in their sarongs. We would make fun of how Tamil immigrants, recently arriving in Toronto, would pronounce certain words—“app-ra-kate” (appreciate) was a big one—and we’d point and roll our eyes embarrassingly at the behavior ingrained in these people from the land in which they were raised.
That land was now where I had traveled to, and here in Pondicherry, I saw myself, for the first time, in another light—an unflattering one. I too was in a sort of nowhere place with regards to a firm cultural identity. No, I could not confidently say that I was only Canadian. And now, in India, I felt completely unworthy of calling myself Tamil when I couldn’t even speak the language or cross the damn street. What was I? Where was I from? It was kind of a traumatic realization so far away from home . . . or was it even really home? I was here to learn of the ways that I had previously balked at, and with humility I hoped that I would not be treated in the same manner that I had so snobbishly displayed toward these people on my turf. The behavior, gestures, and accents that I had once dismissed as being crude, uneducated, and completely beneath me were now the jewels that I had come to India to find, the vital elements of becoming Pi. Now I was the one with a desperate need to assimilate.
Father Antonisamy led me into his small wood-paneled office and gestured for me to sit on the other side of his desk. I was wearing jeans and a polo shirt (which was now soaked with perspiration), and was speaking to him as an equal, but thinking of Ma, I began to worry that I hadn’t been deferential enough. In her reminiscences of her childhood, Ma had always referred to her teachers with much reverence—they were treated like gods.
Father Antonisamy was a lot more reserved than I had imagined for the position he held at the school, and as we conversed, we were regularly interrupted by his servant, Samandam (about fifty, barefoot, bald, and clad in a pale blue polyester shirt and pants set), who would enter the room, speak in hushed tones while remaining in a permanent position of bowing, and then exit the room without turning his back to us. Whatever the dynamic was between the principal and me, Father Antonisamy might have been making a bold effort to treat me as an equal, because after telling me that I could start attending classes at the school the following day, he mentioned that he had a good friend who owned a restaurant by the ocean and asked me to have dinner with him that night. I wanted to say yes right away, but started second-guessing myself, wondering whether he was just being polite and debating whether I was obliged to say, as my older relatives always did when offered something, “No, I wouldn’t want to be a bother . . .” It was a Tamil thing, for sure, so I just hemmed a little, audibly, “Uhhhhh . . . heh . . . hmm . . .” and then accepted humbly, “only if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
The vestibule outside Father Antonisamy’s office was quiet and empty as I waited for him later that evening. He told me to meet him at eight, and I was a little early. I was curiously poking around the two-hundred-year-old building when the deafening caws of crows drew me to the open courtyard. There were hundreds of crows in the huge trees that anchored the corners of the tropical garden. Darkness hid the details, but everything was softly lit with a blue hue from the moon, nearly full in the indigo sky above. I have entered the book, I thought. Just a few months ago Life of Pi was an inch and a half of pages that I could hold in one hand, and now I was standing in the middle of a setting that I could see, smell, and touch. I am here.
Father Antonisamy walked up quietly from behind, without me noticing, and explained that the crows sought refuge there because it was one of the few quiet, secluded places in the middle of town.
In his long cassock, he seemed to float about like a sort of angelic being, but now he was dressed in plain clothes, and seeing him in trousers brought him down to earth, to my level.
We walked out to the front of the school where Samandam was waiting for us with a car, and as we were driven to the restaurant, Father Antonisamy turned to me with a concerned look on his face. “Now, Surendra,” he said (I wasn’t sure why exactly he continued to use my last name—maybe it was another local formality that I was unfamiliar with), “I am told you were in an accident in the street earlier today? Are you all right?”
How did he know about that? Perhaps he really was all-seeing, all-knowing.
Dinner was traditional Tamil food, the delicious comfort food that I had grown up with—fluffy basmati rice and a huge spread of vegetable curries—lentils, aubergines, tomatoes with cucumber and green beans with shredded coconut. This was followed by a very traditional dessert—fruit salad. It was something Ma had often made for us during the summer, when fresh mangoes were in season at the Tamil grocery stores in Scarborough. As she cut up the fruit, her eyes would glaze over while she rambled on about her father taking her to some thatched roof café near the ocean in Ceylon where the fruit salad was divine. We’d eat the concoction she was trying to emulate in Scarborough, but it never really lived up to the hype of her reminiscing. Then I tried the fruit salad in Pondicherry and was floored—everything was local, ripe, and seasonal. Plain fruit, chopped up and served in a glass goblet, had never tasted so good, and it blew my mind.
Father Antonisamy’s friend, who ran the restaurant, came out at the end of our meal and seemed very excited to be hosting a foreigner. He was introduced as Mr. Venu, and was a former schoolteacher who had moved on to become a successful businessman. “Surendra is my esteemed Canadian guest,” Father Antonisamy said, introducing me. “It is my mission to ensure that he never forgets his time in Pondicherry.”
The Elephants in My Backyard Page 4