The Elephants in My Backyard

by Rajiv Surendra

  We never heard back from the studio about the part. After a few weeks, it was clear that I was out of the running. I wondered for a moment if I was crazy, boldly calling the studio myself with a “take it or leave it” approach. No, I concluded. I had no choice here. This was the clarity I needed—Pi was everything to me, and here on out, it was all or nothing.

  From: yann_martel1963@yahoo.com

  To: rajivsca@yahoo.ca

  Subject: RE: Nuvo Magazine

  Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:27:19

  Hello, Rajiv.

  Long time no hear. Summer is good here. I’d practically forgotten about the Nuvo interview.

  Book still in the works, so it will be a while.

  Jeunet will no longer be doing the movie, alas. Everything was in place—a studio backing it, a great director, a terrific script—except for the downward spiraling US dollar. Because of it, an already hefty budget ballooned by more than 25%. They couldn’t agree on budget.

  Another big name is being bandied about. Can’t tell, but he’s good. Things should firm up soonish, but who knows? When this is finally cast, you might be 52 years old.

  Stay well,

  Yann

  12.

  MAYBE I WAS JUST LOOKING for something to distract myself from the disappointment of learning that Jeunet was no longer attached to the film. Or maybe it was simply something to give me hope that there was yet another aspect of this book that could use my attention, that I had more work to do, and that further research would lead me closer to landing the role of Pi. Whatever it was, I listened. And I started asking myself what parts of Yann’s novel were things I still couldn’t relate to.

  Odysseus was a big part of my third year at the University of Toronto. I had a bunch of mandatory course requirements in both classics and art history, and Homer’s epic poem seemed to pop up in almost every class. The painted depiction of Odysseus strapped to the mast of a ship as he is tempted by the sirens appeared on a red-figure vase in my class on ancient Greek pottery. He played a starring role in my class on the classical literature of antiquity, and he even managed to appear in the one mandatory science course I needed to fulfill my degree requirements—Astronomy 101.

  Tuesday was my busiest day of the week in my second semester. It was early January and I was still getting used to my new schedule, making my way from Greek Pottery to my swimming lesson for the day, Butterfly 101, where we were introduced to the dolphin kick.

  My hair was still damp when I slipped into my next class, The Romantic Movement in French Art. The instructor, Ryan, a frazzled blond guy who seemed way too young to be teaching this course, apologized in advance for being “kind of out of it” that day, before admitting that he had taken a few muscle relaxants just before class. He tripped, fumbled with his notes, and the class laughed lightly, before he joined in to laugh at himself. The lights went out, the slide projector synced to his laptop, and the first image popped up—a painting of a dimly lit pile of severed human limbs, close-up and strikingly beautiful, despite the gore.

  “We’re talking about Géricault today,” Ryan announced through a cough. “He was a commercial failure, and was labelled a madman, but to me, he was a forerunner of the French romantics.” More coughing.

  The next image came up. Naked and semiclothed figures entwined together in a pyramid-shaped pile, heaped on a wooden platform that is being tossed around the rough seas. As opposed to the prissy, flowery portraits of Marie Antoinette and King Louis that prefaced the works we were shown in this class, the slide on the screen evoked a dark sense of the tragic, the figures full of movement in a haunting tableau of desperation. This was my kind of painting.

  “In 1816, a French ship called the Medusa sunk on its way to Senegal,” Ryan read from his notes. “Of the hundred and fifty people that were able to climb onto a makeshift raft, only fifteen survived. The event was a huge scandal, and Géricault becomes obsessed with creating a depiction of what had actually happened. He tracks down one of the survivors and gets a firsthand account of the event. Then he spends the next year in complete isolation in his studio—making miniature wax models of the raft and its survivors, bringing home amputated body parts from the hospital and painting them in both daylight and lamplight, studying, obsessing, and completely engrossed in the beautiful horror of his confined world.”

  I’ve never been one to overthink why a strange coincidence played out in front of me; I usually take the hint and run with it.

  Odysseus. The Raft of the Medusa. Castaways. Cast adrift. Lost at sea. Just like Pi.

  Ryan had moved on to Delacroix and was picking apart a painting of a woman with her tits out, standing on a bunch of dead bodies as she waved the French flag. I gave myself permission to mentally opt out of class so I could made a checklist in my head of every imaginable element of the novel that could warrant being researched.

  Living in a zoo, observing animals?

  Check.

  India, Pondicherry?

  Check.

  Religion? Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam?

  Check. Wait, really? I hadn’t done that much research on Islam. It wasn’t a big deal, Pi practiced all three religions in the novel, but Islam only had a minor role. Yeah, right, good—check, yeah, check.

  Swimming?

  Check.

  Being lost at sea? Hmmm . . . I guess I could imagine what it was like, Yann did a pretty good job of describing the mental and physical struggle in the novel. That was enough, right? Check? I thought about it for a while.

  Was it really enough?

  No, it wasn’t. Because it was fiction. It still wasn’t real to me. Sure, I could hope that when the time came to audition I’d have the acting skills to make that leap of faith and be immersed in the life of a kid stranded in the middle of the ocean . . . but the whole concept seemed fantastical, unreal, like a scene on an eighteenth-century oil painting or the engraved frieze on an ancient Greek amphora. Was it even possible, I wondered, for a single person to survive actually being lost at sea for more than a few days . . . or weeks?

  Was there someone out there who actually survived being cast adrift? It seemed like a newspaper headline from a bygone era—from the time of wooden ships with mermaid figureheads.

  I quietly closed my notebook, grabbed my coat, and slipped out of class. Ryan seemed too dazed to even notice me leaving.

  There were four large libraries on the U of T campus, and their computer system catalogued every book in their entire collection. Various combinations of “lost,” “sea,” “adrift,” ‘and “survivor” proved fruitless, so I abandoned the U of T library system and turned to good ol’ faithful, never-let-you-down Yahoo.com. Yes, there were indeed modern shipwreck survivors. And yes, they had written about their ordeals. Most were out of print, but I tracked down and ordered three castaway sagas.

  The first arrived two days later, Survive the Savage Sea by Dougal Roberston, and I devoured it completely within one night, ravenously licking up every single detail. 1972—Dougal, his wife, and their four kids are sailing in a remote part of the Pacific, when a group of killer whales attack, puncturing the walls of their schooner, Lucette. As the ocean rapidly gushes into their boat, the family frantically scurries into survival mode, inflating their emergency life raft and tethering it to their fiberglass dinghy while Dougal scrambles to salvage whatever he can get his hands on. He throws a bag of onions, a bag of oranges, and a small bag of lemons into the dinghy, and commands his eldest son to make his way over to the raft. Their nine-year-old is clutching his teddy bear when Dougal shouts to him to abandon ship! The boy plunges into the sea and—

  “Kanna, come and eat!” Ma interrupted, calling me down to dinner, but I ignored her.

  —he swims strongly and makes it to the raft. Dougal stands in the dinghy, now completely swamped with water, the oranges and lemons floating around in it. He tosses the precious fruit over to the raft, catching a last glimpse of Lucette, now only the tops of her sails visible. “Slowly she cur
tsied below the waves, a lady to the last: she was gone when I looked again.”

  This book was full of the real details I was craving that I had been introduced to in Life of Pi—but this time, they were real; dorado and flying fish the family caught and consumed, raw. A passing cargo ship causes overwhelming excitement with the possibility of being saved—rocket flares are lit and projected into the air—but it’s no use, they go unnoticed and a haunting reality sets in, giving way to utter fear, despair, complete exhaustion, and then, in the end, salvation.

  The following week, I eagerly checked the mailbox every day as I arrived home from school. When a little padded Kraft paper envelope showed up from a used bookseller in Indiana, I ripped it open right there on the porch, frantically unlocked the front door of the house, and ran up to my bedroom.

  I grabbed the book and took in each minute detail of the dust jacket, turning it over in my hands, and reading every single word on its surface—the title: 117 Days Adrift, below it, “Maurice & Maralyn Bailey,” and at the very bottom of the cover, “foreword by Sir Peter Scott.” On the back, in bold, white print sitting on a navy blue background: “For two people alone in a tiny life raft, rescue is at last at hand. Maurice and Maralyn Bailey’s survival after almost four months of incredible hardship must stand as a feat of unparalleled fortitude. At this, the moment of rescue, a line thrown from the deck of a Korean fishing boat finally severs their utter dependence on the sea.”

  This book differs from the first one in that it was a couple, instead of a family, and their ordeal lasted much longer. More than just the physical trials they endured during their time adrift, it was the mental one that spoke to me the most. I finish the book, weary, and then realized that at the very least, Maurice and Maralyn had each other. Pi was alone. And what a huge difference it would be to not have anyone else to turn to, to talk to, to give you hope, in the face of such dire circumstances.

  There was three feet of snow on the ground and more was falling as I walked home from the bus stop one evening. It was early January, but the package in the mailbox made it feel like Christmas morning. I sat down at my little 1820s writing table, opened the drawer, and pulled out my heavy pair of hand-forged scissors. Here was the book that I had longed for the most, I was happy it had arrived last. Adrift: 76 Days Lost at Sea by one Steven Callahan. Not as long a struggle as the Baileys endured, I thought, but the single feature I was seeking in this book was something that the other two didn’t have. This was the struggle of one single, lonely survivor.

  I didn’t rush through this one; I savored it slowly. Ma called me to dinner just after I had started reading, so I put Mr. Callahan’s book face-down on my bed before going downstairs. Ma had made one of her “quick” Tamil meals, one of my favorites—basmati rice served with curried lentils, tomato and onion salad, and two fried eggs on top, smothered in black pepper. As I ate, I thought about what I had just read.

  “Finally,” he had stated in his acknowledgments section at the opening of the book, “I would like to express my gratitude to the sea. It has taught me quite a lot in life. Although the sea was my greatest enemy, it was also my greatest ally. I know intellectually that the sea is indifferent, but her richness allowed me to survive.”

  Back upstairs, dinner was sitting comfortably in my belly while I read a little more and then thought about it as I showered that night. Seventy-six days in a raft on the Atlantic. Nine ships passed him and not one noticed his raft. Water, water everywhere . . . not a drop to drink. A few more pages and then bed.

  I got up in the morning and Mr. Callahan accompanied me to the breakfast table.

  “I find food in a couple of hours of fishing each day, and I seek shelter in a rubber tent. How unnecessarily complicated my past life seems. For the first time, I clearly see a vast difference between human needs and human wants.”

  More reading on the bus ride to school.

  When I had leisurely finished the book, I read it over again. I came to the end for the second time, back on my bed, lying face up with the book propped up on my chest.

  “The accident has left me with a sense of loss and a lingering fear,” read the epilogue on the last page of the book, “but I have chosen to learn from the crisis rather than let it overcome me.”

  Being lost at sea? A voice in my head asked meekly, check? There was a long moment of internal silence.

  “No,” another voice answered deeply, ominously—as if it were a grand and ancient oracle.

  “What?!” shouted the first voice. “Why the hell not?”

  “Patience, peasant!” the oracle bellowed. “We must pause to contemplate our present situation.”

  Snow continued to fall outside my window. I turned the final page of the book, revealing the rear flap of the dust jacket. There was a little black-and-white picture of the author, with tousled, shoulder-length hair. He was squinting from the sunshine. “Steven Callahan, a naval architect, lives in Lamoine, Maine” it stated underneath the photo. That was all, nothing else.

  “It just doesn’t feel real to me,” the other voice said, back in its normal, colloquial tone.

  “What are you talking about?” the first voice snapped, “it’s a true story, dummy.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still just a book. It may be nonfiction, but it’s a book. A story in a book.”

  Steven Callahan, I read again, contemplating the little black-and-white picture. Teeny, weeny text above his picture gave credit to the photographer with a copyright symbol appearing beside it: ©1986. How old was this Steven Callahan? I wondered. I flipped through the book—he was thirty years old when his boat sank in 1982. He spent his thirtieth birthday on a life raft on the Atlantic. Was he still alive? I wondered. He would be fifty-seven years old if he were still alive. Not old, I thought. Maybe he is still alive.

  The winter light was pink with the sun starting to set. I propped myself up in bed and leaned over to glance at the old clock on my wall that I hand-wound every night—almost four thirty. Steven Callahan. Lamoine, Maine.

  I ran down to the basement where the computer was, passing my sisters lounging on the couch, watching a rerun of Gilmore Girls. My older sister had a hand-held mirror in front of her, and was plucking tiny hairs out of her chin with a pair of tweezers.

  I hit the power button on the computer and as it warmed up I realized that my sisters were completely unaware of my Pi quest. I bet they have no idea what I’m doing, I thought. Wait, but I really had no idea what they’re up to . . . nor did I care. Things at home were great without my dad, and my sisters and I no longer had the need to band together against our common enemy. Maybe the trauma between Ma and my dad had left my sisters and me with the need to fend for ourselves out there in the real world, without support from each other . . . I don’t know. I realized I wasn’t close to them, and it didn’t bother me.

  The computer screen came to life, jolting me out of my daze. I started typing, in a frenzy. Yahoo.com gave me exactly what I was looking for. I grabbed the cordless phone and ran back up to my room, shut the door, and dialed the eleven-digit American phone number I had scribbled down on a Post-it.

  Ringing. This is real, I thought. One ring, two rings—

  “Lamoine Town Office,” a gruff male voice answered.

  “Hi, there . . . uh . . . this may be a long shot, but do you by any chance know a man named Steven Callahan?”

  There was quite a long moment of silence on the other side before he cleared his throat and replied, “I do, actually.”

  I thought he might go on, so I waited, but when the silence continued, I spoke up, “Steven Callahan, a sailor? He wrote a book about being cast adrift.”

  “Yup,” the man chirped with a bit of intrigue in his voice. I had the feeling he was smiling. “That’s the one.”

  “Would you be able to give me his number, please?” I asked.

  “No. But I can give him your number.”

  Surprised that he didn’t question me further, I was all aflutter as I gave
him my number.

  “And one last thing,” I added for good measure, “please tell Mr. Callahan that it’s very important.”

  From: yann_martel1963@yahoo.com

  To: rajivsca@yahoo.ca

  Subject: RE: Happy New Year!

  Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 06:32:18

  Dear Rajiv,

  Happy New Year to you too. Hope 2009 keeps you busy in front of the camera.

  I see you’re doing your homework. Excellent book, Robertson’s. Understated and powerful.

  There’s some progress on finding a new director, but I have to keep mum about it. Fingers crossed.

  Yann

  13.

  IT WAS FREEZING IN MY window seat. My ass itself was the only thing that was warm, but for that reason alone I was reminded of Audrey once warning me about sitting on cold surfaces, telling me that I’d get hemorrhoids if my bum hole was cold. Phew, close call.

  “Steven Callahan, a naval architect, lives in Lamoine, Maine.” Bangor was the closest airport. I had finished the book for the third time, having begun it just before leaving Toronto and reading the entire time during my layover in New York, waiting for my connecting flight to Maine. It seemed counterintuitive to be flying south in order to go back north but there were no direct flights from Toronto and the easiest route ended up taking me an entire day of traveling.

  It was now almost 9 p.m., and I peered out of the window at the concentrated mass of orange lights below indicating the city of Bangor. The plane was quiet but I was bursting with a sense of adventure. I was going to Maine to make Steven Callahan’s story real to me. It was, essentially, the last piece of the puzzle, the final thing I needed to fully become Pi.

  Steven told me that he would be waiting for me when the plane landed, and not to worry, the tiny airport terminal was just one big room, so it would be easy to find him. I wondered what he looked like now, and whether I’d be able to recognize him. In his dust jacket photo, he was shirtless, but cropped only down to his collarbone, which jutted out deeply. He was thin, but maybe that was because he was still recovering from starving, almost to death. But it was now over twenty years later, and perhaps he had gained weight. Maybe he had succumbed to the American Dream and had become a huge Gargantua. Maybe he was a four-hundred-pound sailor missing his front teeth, and wore a ratty, sweat-stained undershirt, smoked a pipe, chewed tobacco, had to spit every three minutes, and was too fat to even walk, so he was in an electric wheelchair that he maneuvered with his fat pinky—and he had a nickname for his fat little finger: “Pinkus the Almighty.”