Life of Pi – Chapter 3 Summary

Chapter 3 Summary

Chapter 3 is all about how Pi got his name, and it’s a longer chapter than it first seems with a lot of detail packed in.

It starts with Pi telling us he was named after a swimming pool, which he immediately acknowledges is peculiar, especially since his parents never really took to water. The whole story traces back to a man called Francis Adirubasamy, a close family friend Pi calls Mamaji. “Mama” is the Tamil word for uncle, and “ji” is a suffix used in India to show respect and affection. So right away you get this sense of how close this man was to the family.

Mamaji was no ordinary man around water. He was a champion competitive swimmer, champion of all South India, and he looked the part his whole life. Pi’s brother Ravi had this ridiculous explanation for Mamaji’s distinctive body shape, the enormous chest and the skinny legs. He claimed that when Mamaji was born he didn’t want to stop breathing water, so the doctor had to grab him by the feet and swing him around above his head until he coughed the water out and started breathing air. The spinning supposedly pushed all his flesh upward to his chest. Pi believed every word of it. Ravi was apparently a merciless teaser and Pi was a willing audience, though Pi did get his revenge once by leaving a banana peel in Ravi’s bed after Ravi called Mamaji “Mr. Fish” to his face.

Even into his sixties, slightly stooped and showing his age, Mamaji still swam thirty lengths every single morning at the pool of the Aurobindo Ashram. He tried to teach Pi’s parents to swim but never got them past wading up to their knees at the beach while making these completely useless arm movements. Pi describes them trying the breaststroke and looking like they were walking through a jungle pushing tall grass aside, or trying the front crawl and looking like they were running downhill flailing their arms to avoid falling. Ravi was just as unenthusiastic. So Mamaji had to wait for Pi to find his willing student.

Mamaji decided that the proper swimming age was seven, which distressed Pi’s mother, and on that day he brought Pi down to the beach, spread his arms out toward the sea and told him “This is my gift to you.” Pi’s mother’s version of events was that Mamaji then nearly drowned him. But Pi remained loyal to his swimming teacher regardless.

The training started on the beach, with Pi lying in the sand fluttering his legs and scratching at the ground, turning his head to breathe with every stroke. He says he must have looked like a child throwing a slow motion tantrum. Then they moved to the ashram pool, training three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with the clockwork regularity of a good front crawl stroke. Pi describes how gruelling the training was but also how deeply satisfying it became, the repetition of each stroke getting easier and faster until it was almost hypnotic, the water feeling like it transformed from molten lead to liquid light. That image is really striking and tells you swimming became something almost spiritual for Pi, not just physical.

On his own, separately from his lessons, Pi also returned to the sea by himself, drawn by the crashing waves that would reach toward him as gentle tidal ripples. He describes them as “gentle lassos that caught their willing Indian boy,” which is beautiful. And as a gift to Mamaji on one of his birthdays, around age thirteen, Pi swam two full lengths of butterfly stroke and finished so exhausted he could barely lift his hand to wave. That detail tells you everything about how seriously he took swimming and how much Mamaji meant to him.

Pi’s father had a different relationship with swimming. He resisted actually doing it but absolutely loved talking about it. Swim stories were his escape from the everyday business of running a zoo, and he particularly loved listening to Mamaji’s stories about Paris. Mamaji had studied in Paris for two years in the early 1930s, when the French were still trying to make Pondicherry feel as French as the British were trying to make the rest of India feel British. Pi can’t actually remember what Mamaji studied there, something commercial he guesses. Because whenever Mamaji told stories about Paris, they were never about the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or the cafes of the Champs Elysees. Every single story was about swimming pools.

And Paris had a LOT of swimming pools, which Pi proceeds to describe in detail through Mamaji’s memories. There was the Piscine Deligny, the oldest pool in the city, dating back to 1796, an open air barge moored on the Quai d’Orsay that actually hosted the swimming events of the 1900 Olympics. But here’s the catch: none of the times from those Olympics were officially recognised because the pool turned out to be six metres too long. The water came straight from the Seine river, unfiltered and unheated, cold and filthy. Mamaji described it as disgusting and used it as evidence for his opinion, delivered in conspiratorial whispers, that the French had very low standards of personal hygiene. The Bain Royal was apparently even worse than Deligny. At least at Deligny they scooped out the dead fish.

Then there were better options. The Piscines Chateau Landon, Rouvet and du boulevard de la Gare were indoor pools with roofs, open year round, fed by condensation from nearby factory steam engines so the water was cleaner and warmer. But they were still a bit dingy and overcrowded. Mamaji described swimming through so much floating spit that he felt like he was swimming through jellyfish. The Piscines Hebert, Ledru Rollin and Butte aux Cailles were a step up again, bright and modern and spacious, fed by artesian wells, setting the proper standard for what a municipal pool should be. And there was the Piscine des Tourelles, the city’s other great Olympic pool, inaugurated at the 1924 Paris games.

But none of them, not a single one, matched the Piscine Molitor. This is where Mamaji goes from enthusiastic to almost speechless. Molitor was the crowning aquatic glory of Paris and, in his view, of the entire civilised world. It had two pools, indoor and outdoor, both enormous. The indoor pool always kept two lanes free for swimmers who just wanted to do lengths. The water was so clean and clear you could have made your morning coffee with it. Blue and white wooden changing cabins surrounded the pool on two floors so you could look down and see everything. The porters who marked occupied cabins with chalk were old limping men who were friendly in an ill tempered way and never got rattled no matter how much noise people made. The showers ran hot. There was a steam room, an exercise room, a bar, a cafeteria, a large sunning deck and even two small beaches with real sand. In winter the outdoor pool became a skating rink. Every tile, every piece of brass and wood gleamed. It was, Mamaji said, a pool the gods would have delighted to swim in. And then he went quiet, because even his storytelling couldn’t do it full justice.

That is the pool Pi was named after. Mamaji remembered it, Pi’s father dreamed about it, and when Pi was born, a last and welcome addition to the family three years after his brother Ravi, his parents named him Piscine Molitor Patel. It’s this wonderfully unexpected detail that connects a boy growing up in India to a legendary Parisian swimming pool he’s never seen, all through the love and memories of an old man who once swam there as a young champion.