“I should tell you about the black panther that escaped from the Zurich Zoo in the middle of winter.”
“Mr. Patel, a tiger is an incredibly dangerous wild animal. How could you survive in a lifeboat with one? It’s—”
“What you don’t realize is that we are a strange and forbidding species to wild animals. We fill them with fear. They avoid us as much as possible. It took centuries to still the fear in some pliable animals-domestication it’s called—but most cannot get over their fear, and I doubt they ever will. When wild animals fight us, it is out of sheer desperation. They fight when they feel they have no other way out. It’s a very last resort.”
“In a lifeboat? Come on, Mr. Patel, it’s just too hard to believe!”
“Hard to believe? What do you know about hard to believe? You want hard to believe? I’ll give you hard to believe. It’s a closely held secret among Indian zookeepers that in 1971 Bara the polar bear escaped from the Calcutta Zoo. She was never heard from again, not by police or hunters or poachers or anyone else. We suspect she’s living freely on the banks of the Hugli River. Beware if you go to Calcutta, my good sirs: if you have sushi on the breath you may pay a high price! If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it, you’d be amazed at all the animals that would fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants in untold numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without being seen by a soul. You should compare one day the things that stick to the soles of your shoes as you walk down the street with what you see lying at the bottom of the cages in the Tokyo Zoo—then look up! And you expect to find a tiger in a Mexican jungle! It’s laughable, just plain laughable. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
“There may very well be feral giraffes and feral hippos living in Tokyo and a polar bear living freely in Calcutta. We just don’t believe there was a tiger living in your lifeboat.”
“The arrogance of big-city folk! You grant your metropolises all the animals of Eden, but you deny my hamlet the merest Bengal tiger!”
“Mr. Patel, please calm down.”
“If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?”
“Mr. Patel—”
“Don’t you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”
“We’re just being reasonable.”
“So am I! I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.”
“Calm down, Mr. Patel, calm down.”
Mr. Chiba: [translation] “The bathwater? Why is he talking about bathwater?” [/translation]
“How can I be calm? You should have seen Richard Parker!”
“Yes, yes.”
“Huge. Teeth like this! Claws like scimitars!”
Mr. Chiba: [translation] “What are scimitars?”
Mr. Okamoto: “Chiba-san,, instead of asking stupid vocabulary questions, why don’t you make yourself useful? This boy is a tough nut to crack. Do something!” [/translation]
Mr. Chiba: “Look! A chocolate bar!”
Pi Patel: “Wonderful!”
[Long silence]
Mr. Okamoto: [translation] “Like he hasn’t already stolen our whole lunch. Soon he’ll be demanding tempura.” [/translation]
[Long silence]
Mr. Okamoto: “We are losing sight of the point of this investigation. We are here because of the sinking of a cargo ship. You are the sole survivor. And you were only a passenger. You bear no responsibility for what happened. We—”
“Chocolate is so good!”
“We are not seeking to lay criminal charges. You are an innocent victim of a tragedy at sea. We are only trying to determine why and how the Tsimtsum sank. We thought you might help us, Mr. Patel.”
[Silence]
“Mr. Patel?”
[Silence]
Pi Patel: “Tigers exist, lifeboats exist, oceans exist. Because the three have never come together in your narrow, limited experience, you refuse to believe that they might. Yet the plain fact is that the Tsimtsum brought them together and then sank.”
[Silence]
Mr. Okamoto: “What about this Frenchman?”
“What about him?”
“Two blind people in two separate lifeboats meeting up in the Pacific—the coincidence seems a little far-fetched, no?”
“It certainly does.”
“We find it very unlikely.”
“So is winning the lottery, yet someone always wins.”
“We find it extremely hard to believe.”
“So did I.”
[translation] “I knew we should have taken the day off. [/translation] You talked about food?”
“We did.”
“He knew a lot about food.”
“If you can call it food.”
“The cook on the Tsimtsum was a Frenchman.”
“There are Frenchmen all over the world.”
“Maybe the Frenchman you met was the cook.”
“Maybe. How should I know? I never saw him. I was blind. Then Richard Parker ate him alive.”
“How convenient.”
“Not at all. It was horrific and it stank. By the way, how do you explain the meerkat bones in the lifeboat?”
“Yes, the bones of a small animal were—”
“More than one!”
“—of some small animals were found in the lifeboat. They must have come from the ship.”
“We had no meerkats at the zoo.”
“We have no proof they were meerkat bones.”
Mr. Chiba: “Maybe they were banana bones! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
[translation] “Atsuro, shut up!”
“I’m very sorry, Okamoto-san. It’s the fatigue.”
“You’re bringing our service into disrepute!”
“Very sorry, Okamoto-san.” [/translation]
Mr. Okamoto: “They could be bones from another small animal.”
“They were meerkats.”
“They could be mongooses.”
“The mongooses at the zoo didn’t sell. They stayed in India.”
“They could be shipboard pests, like rats. Mongooses are common in India.”
“Mongooses as shipboard pests?”
“Why not?”
“Who swam in the stormy Pacific, several of them, to the lifeboat? That’s a little hard to believe, wouldn’t you say?”
“Less hard to believe than some of the things we’ve heard in the last two hours. Perhaps the mongooses were already aboard the lifeboat, like the rat you mentioned.”
“Simply amazing the number of animals in that lifeboat.”
“Simply amazing.”
“A real jungle.”
“Yes.”
“Those bones are meerkat bones. Have them checked by an expert.”
“There weren’t that many left. And there were no heads.”
“I used them as bait.”
“It’s doubtful an expert could tell whether they were meerkat bones or mongoose bones.”
“Find yourself a forensic zoologist.”
“All right, Mr. Patel! You win. We cannot explain the presence of meerkat bones, if that is what they are, in the lifeboat. But that is not our concern here. We are here because a Japanese cargo ship owned by Oika Shipping Company, flying the Panamanian flag, sank in the Pacific.”
“Something I never forget, not for a minute. I lost my whole family.”
“We’re sorry about that.”
“Not as much as I am.”
[Long silence]
Mr. Chiba: [translation] “What do we do now?”
Mr. Okamoto: “I don’t know.” [/translation]
[Long silence]
Pi Patel: “Would you like a cookie?”
Mr. Okamoto: “Yes, that would be nice. Thank you.”
Mr. Chiba: “Thank you.”
[Long silence]
Mr. Okamoto: “It’s a nice day.”
Pi Patel: “Yes. Sunny.”