How It REALLY Should Have Ended

 H.I.S.H.E: Life of Pi

    Following the last afternoon of chai and biscuits that Mr. Patel and I engaged in after his story, I proceeded to find myself in a hefty amount of busywork. I suppose, after having let my mind drift aboard a 30 foot long lifeboat for 277 days with a plenitude of unorthodox occurrences accompanying me along the way, the withdrawal to reality and finishing my story hit me like an onslaught of flying fish, so to speak.

    And what struck me as even more fascinating, I suppose, than the mundane scrabble to usher money into my pockets was the manner in which I proceeded with my religious life from that day forth. I used to sparsely find myself akin to Mr. Patel in his devout nature, yet by some mysterious, superstitious phenomena, I felt myself being ploddingly dragged towards many a religious affair. From the weekly sermon at my church to an accompaniment of Mr. Patel to his mosque, it was as though a sweet, saccharine aura gushed out from his pores and lured me over to all of his religious affinities like a puppy tempted by a bone.

    Maybe it was true. This was a story to make me believe in God, and it seemed as though I too, had finally found my way into His hands. 

    Yet there were so many haunting details, so many oracular elements to his journey that lay buried beneath the surface of a cool vein of water. And for every instance in which I endeavored to outreach through that vein, to lunge forth and retrieve the pulp from the lassi, a ripple would munch upon my arm like that hellish carnivorous sanctuary of a floating island, and the truth would burst into an intangible frenzy.

    That was, of course, until one fateful Monday morning, July 2, 1979, when Mr. Patel invited me and my family over to his house for Bonalu celebrations in worship of the Goddess Mahakali. It was not this festivity that struck me as particularly atypical for the day, as Mr. Patel habitually hosts many resplendent pious gatherings such as this one. What led me to uncover a fascinating new component came from the density of the gathering, as over 200 guests and individuals all claiming to be distant relatives of Mr. Patel’s ex-lawyer or babysitters for his uncle’s second nephew-in-law stuffed the house to its gills. 

    While the bustling crowd retracted me back through the house like a horizontal escalator, a faint growling glistened through my ears like a wisp of faint perfume striking the nose. My cheeks instantly mantled, and I meekly admonished my stomach to hush up, yet it impetuously denied any guilt. My suspicions on the rise, I corked my ears and perked them up like the bats Mr. Patel was so fond of back in Pondicherry, and the low frequency growl rumbled once more. It was too dauntless of a cacophony, I concluded, to arise from the confines of my own body.

    As I scoured around, a glimpse of a sleek golden doorknob with the words “Private: Please Keep Out of Basement” imprinted on it struck my curiosity index, and I lurched towards it. I had hardly paid any attention to this sign in my past ventures through the house, as a respect to privacy was the least I could have given Mr. Patel following his warm and hospitable nature towards me.

    But now, reaching the zenith of my incessant boredom, I was sure I could pass the event off as an honest mistake, an aberrant excavation to navigate a new domain in the household. And besides, I was sure Mr. Patel wouldn’t really mind, right?

    Opening the door, an obstreperous, rusty creek jingled through the air and my teeth gritted in trepidation. My eyebrows furrowed, warped around, and scanned the perimeter, while my extremities worked to tacitly close the door behind me. As I descended the stairs, it felt as though a militia of eyeballs all had their sniper rifles tilted perfectly in line with my head, and a single mistimed shudder or uncalled twinge of my shoulder would send this silent equilibrium into its own miniature warfare.

    Sliding down the stairs like melted butter, I thought I heard the door unlatch behind me, but my mind was too solely concentrated on uncovering the secrets of this uncouth basement to be stimulated elsewhere. Like the three-toed sloth that Mr. Patel had so emphatically introduced me to in his zoological studies, I felt out of place, mismatched in a foreign realm where only the miracle of God was holding me in conjunction.

    Then it hit me. Not an astounding new realization or fanciful chimera to humor me as I peeked behind the black sulfuric stairwell. No, something physically hit me.

    A large wooden club with the engravings “Mrityu” bludgeoned my right temple as my reflexes spasmed into recoil from failure of operation. I collapsed to the ground in a pathetic heap of silky black cloth and fabric, while thin wooden splinters swam like dorados in a storm down the gentle ocean of blood gushing out from my forehead. I had always been told that there would be a flash of light before darkness consumed someone, and that this surge of light was the only fashion of clinging to life, of holding on to the hope that one day, this darkness would pass over and a new dawn would reign on.

    Oh how ironic that the very person who introduced this concept to me was the one looming over me, with nothing but a dark, shadowy cascade entrenching his chipped, murky face, and his image fixated in place as the final conception my mind would every fathom before plummeting down to nothingness.

    “You know what they say Mr. Caesar, don't you?” Piscine Molitor Patel chortled out between raspy grunts. “Curiosity killed the cat. Now it’s time that the cat seeks out his revenge, like every wholesome end to a perfect story, no?”

    The faint growl from earlier heightened in capacity by mega decibels, and the blurry sclera of my eye caught a glimpse of 450 pounds of voluminous, orange and black terror tumbling forwards, slobber oozing from its mouth as sweat does from a novice sprinter on any day past 40 degrees Celsius.

    “Hush now, Richard Parker, there’s my beta. Appa promised you a 4 course meal of chapatis and paneer in the afternoon, but he was caught up in some unconventional affairs, so to say. So how about something better, wouldn’t you like that? You haven’t tasted human in a very long time, have you, my dear feline friend?” Mr. Patel’s once emaciated grin now lashed out like the ends of a banana being compressed horizontally.

    “My dear Little Caesar, oh how daft of you it was to believe that after all this time, a perfect end to a blemished journey could simply conclude without my goodbyes. No, I had rigorously trained Richard Parker, and his hapless, imbecilic brain could not bear witness to seeing me leave without a farewell. So he stayed with me, under the infirmary cot on that day in the hospital, and embedded into the shadows of my life from that moment forth. The Canadians don’t take well to such eldritch creatures residing anywhere near their city, so I hid him here, stowed away but possessed by my potency and all assembled together into the finest of mechanisms for my disposal, like my dear son Nikhil would do to his little lego soldiers.”

    A mixing pot of emotions struck me once more in the temple, and the Angel of Death was drawing in on me, its spiny fingers tickling the corner of my consciousness. Pain drowned out horror, horror combated with anxiety, and anxiety took fear by the neck and launched him off a ten-story building. In the end, I chose the finer option: tranquility. A death by choice triumphs over that by an adult Bengal tiger any day, and I went the way of all flesh in a manner of self-suffocation.

    So what was to come of all this? This book was born as I was hungry, but it ends at the very pit of Richard Parker’s stomach, the truth of his continual dwelling terminated by a single, hardly audible, GROWL.