I arrived in India on December 31 1996, a new year’s eve I won’t forget. I wandered around Bombay in a state of interior bleakness. I felt isolated in that crush of a city, without purpose and without buoys. When I look back, I see now that I had stepped into a great void that had three aspects.

It was a void of gods. I grew up in a contentedly secular family in a contentedly secular country. Gods were entertained in Canada as an anthropological feature of some peoples of the Earth, a characteristic that was no doubt interesting but not to be taken seriously. There was art instead, and citizenship, and science— gods far more worthy of worship because they delivered miracles on command.

It was a void of animals. I had not grown up on a farm— mine was an urban upbringing— and I had grown out of having pets. Pets, like gods, were for children.

And in those first days of travel to India, it was a void of known humans. To launch oneself completely alone into an alien culture, carrying only that symbol of lightness and detachment, the backpack, is an expansive and peculiarly western rite of passage. I submitted to it wholeheartedly, though this trip seemed to be starting a bit roughly.

I believe these voids are shared by many in North America and Europe. We peoples of the west are broadly and deeply secular, very trusting of what capitalism, science and technology can deliver. Why bother with gods and their stories when you’re healthy and wealthy? As for animals, we are a species uniquely obsessed with itself.
In our principal territory, the city, we have carefully pushed animals away, so that on a regular day, aside from two species of domesticated and infantilised mammals— the cat and the dog— the average homo sapien is likely to encounter nothing more wild or varied than a few squirrels and pigeons.

As for the void of people, is that not the very appeal of the big city, one’s anonymity in it, that endless flow of passers-by whom we don’t know and never will? The small town has been left behind, one’s community is scattered and entirely voluntary, the nuclear family is often reduced to a single proton, and thus we feel ‘free’.
So there I stood in Colaba, not far from the Gateway of India, godless and friendless. And all would have been fine if art hadn’t let me down.

There was that novel set in Portugal in 1939 that I mention in the author’s note of Life of Pi. It was supposed to sustain me. It didn’t. It proved to be a lifeless and wordy construct that was about nothing but itself. To have a story die in your hands is to witness the death of a small god.

Anchorless...
I experienced some harrowing days. ‘Harrowing’ may seem too strong a word, but that’s how it felt, to have so much future to account for and no idea how to live it. (No wonder I came to write a novel set in a lifeboat.)
I noticed the animals first. Not just the obvious sacred cows of India, or the loudly cawing crows, or the tribes of monkey, or the other living animals that openly go about India’s urban density. In Hindu temples, entered because they were both bustling and peaceful, I became aware of the many animals of Hinduism— Hanuman the monkey, Ganesha the elephant-headed, Nandi the bull, Garuda the eagle, and so on.

The gods followed. The many Hindu gods, of course. But round the corner from where the Hindu gods lived there was always a church or a mosque or a temple of another faith, each with its share of gods.

So many animals, so many gods— what were we in that multitude?

For the first time in my life I took both of them seriously. I looked into the eyes of animals and I looked into the eyes of gods, trying to understand each on its own terms. I visited all the zoos of south India. I bought a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and of the gospels. I camped near cows and observed them at length. I started attending masses, pujas and Friday prayers.

That is how I stepped into Pi’s lifeboat. I simplified the setting, brought together the extremes of existence on Earth— the animal and the divine— and let the story carry me where it might. Readers must decide on their own what Pi’s trip across the Pacific means to them. For me, it has meant an end to the voids. It’s not that wild animals are my friends. They are not. Nor is it that Jesus, Krishna and Allah sit on my shoulder like little angels with whom I have conversations. They don’t.

But I do now have the abiding feeling that this entire planet is a lifeboat and it is drifting across a cosmic Pacific. Every day I encounter a Richard Parker of sorts, sometimes a source of comfort, sometimes a source of distress. Together we scour the horizon, on the lookout for some salvational shore.