India Introduces America to Faith

In the high school English class that I teach, I frequently enjoy challenging my students' preconceived notions about literature, stories, and writing in general.  Often they come to me with clear likes and dislikes.  Alexander Dumas: like.  Ernest Hemingway: dislike.  Yann Martel: like.  John Steinbeck: dislike.  So I make them prove their "likes".  Why does Dumas, in Count of Monte Cristo, effectively convey revenge for you when Hemingway, in Old Man and the Sea, through the character of the beaten and battered Santiago who has finally caught the fish of his life and then is robbed of it, does not?  Why?  Some of them articulate what they see well; others struggle.

I'm about to do that to you.

In the opening lines of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, the main character tells us that this story, his survival story on the ocean and subsequent adventures, is one that will make us believe in God.  Without going into too much detail, I finished that story with the exact opposite reaction.  It made me believe that faith and religion were just choices.  Choices that people make for very idiosyncratic reasons and sometimes reverse for inexplicable reasons.  It is, in the end, unpersuasive for me.

But last weekend I went to see The Hundred-Foot Journey, another movie-from-book, by Richard C. Morais and while I have not read the book yet, I think I have a good sense of why this story is a more powerful and persuasive argument for faith and spirituality than Martel's.  Interesting, by the way, that both are stories of boys raised in India who move somewhere else.  Pi is moving to Canada and ends up in the U.S.  Hassan and his family flee India after being attacked and end up in France.  I have to acknowledge my prejudices here: am I more moved by European sentiments of faith than American ones?

Early in the story, Hassan narrates his family's arrival in France: "When we arrived, the sun was setting, like a mango sorbet dripping over the horizon..."  Some of my students are not moved by similes but good ones, for me, are straight-up poetry.  Comparing the horizon to food doesn't hurt either.  But this was the first line that caught me as particularly spiritual.  There are plenty of moments in Life of Pi when Pi contemplates a sunset or sunrise or moonscape over the ocean from his makeshift life raft but all of those descriptions are detailed, by which I mean scientific.  They involve pointing out angles and shapes.  So it strikes me that in Journey we have a simple comparison to a particularly tasty dessert.

Is that it?  Food?  Is food essentially spiritual to us?  To me?  A month ago or so I went to see Chef and while I don't sense any underlying spirituality in that film it was an interesting and convincing riff on family.  In that movie, there is a scene where the main character takes his son aside after the son has suggested that feeding people okay food it just as good as feeding them great food.  The father tells the son that half-cooked food is unconscionable.  It's a crime.  It's obscene.

I had the same sense in Journey.  When Hassan arrives in France with his family he is the first one to sense the power of food in the area.  In this way he reminds me of the better moments of Pi who early in his story dabbles in different faiths.  (He tries Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all at the same time.)  Somehow Hassan's desire to learn more recipes feels more spiritual, more authentic, than Pi's search for a religion that fits him.  They both involves conflict: Pi versus the tiger, Hassan versus those around him who hope for his demise.  That hope, by the way, is manifested both outwardly, as one of the chef's in a luxury French kitchen across the street attacks and burns part of Hassan's family's restaurant, and inwardly, as Marguerite (Hassan's love-interest) vies for the same position he receives under Madame Mallory in the kitchen.  I don't mean to diminish Pi's struggle, for it is important to the story, but just as that horrible ending admonishes us to choose "the one we like better" so Hassan's struggle is not one he can choose.  It was ordained the moment that his family put the down payment on the restaurant in France.

So here's the part that convinced me.  Late in the story Hassan has predictably risen above all the chef's in this little French village and gone to Paris to train with the best of the best in the culinary world.  His new boss at this Parisian restaurant repeated "innovation" in all his scenes as though he is the Steve Jobs of the French food world.  And it is there, amid the science and technicality of those kitchens, that he loses his love for food.  This isn't much of a revelation and I'm not saying it's impressive storytelling.  What I am saying is that it makes a stronger argument for a human's sense of faith: the food that he knows and remembers (from his deceased mother, from his distant father, from the woman he stomped on to get to this position) is a more persuasive argument for God.  The taste of food, the dripping mango sorbet itself.