Pi reflects that most people begin life without religion until someone introduces them to God, and he notes that many later lose faith, while his own has only grown. He identifies the first such “figure” in his life as Auntie Rohini, his mother’s older, more traditional sister.

When Pi was a baby in Madurai, just after a long train journey, Auntie Rohini insisted on taking him and his mother to a Hindu temple as his symbolic “first outing,” calling it a samskara. Though Pi has no conscious memory, he believes the temple’s incense, light, flame, color, and atmosphere planted a lasting seed of religious exaltation.

Pi explains why he is Hindu through vivid sensory devotion: offerings of kumkum and turmeric, bells, music, bare feet on stone, arati flames, bhajans, elephants’ blessings, murals, and the shared mark of faith. In a temple he feels “Presence,” is moved by the murti in the inner sanctum, and longs for prasad and the blessing of the flame brought to eyes and forehead.

He then outlines Hinduism’s meaning beyond ritual: Brahman as the world soul, both nirguna (beyond qualities and description) and saguna (manifest and approachable through forms like Shiva, Krishna, Shakti, and Ganesha). Pi describes the relationship between Brahman and atman as mysterious, and frames life as repeated birth and death guided by karma toward liberation.

Pi warns against clinging and religious possessiveness, cursing fundamentalists and literalists, and illustrates the point with a story of Krishna dancing with milkmaids until their jealousy makes him vanish. He closes with a Toronto anecdote about his Québécoise foster mother “Auntieji,” who misheard “Hare Krishnas” as “Hairless Christians,” which Pi turns into a playful argument that the world’s faiths overlap in spirit.