At fifteen, Pi explores Pondicherry and wanders into the Muslim quarter near the zoo, noticing Arabic writing and crescent moons on house façades. Curious but wary of Islam’s reputation, Pi peers into the Jamia Masjid (the Great Mosque) from outside and finds it quiet, clean, and unexpectedly pleasant.

Just beyond the mosque, Pi approaches a small, rundown shop selling flat, pale rounds of bread. Startled to discover the baker sitting close by, Pi accidentally tosses a piece of bread into the street, where it lands on fresh cow dung. The baker responds calmly, saying it will feed a cow, and offers Pi another.

Pi and the baker eat the tough, rubbery bread together, and the baker invites Pi into his simple two-room home to show how the bread is made. As the baker explains the oven and heated pebbles used for baking, the muezzin’s call to prayer drifts in from the mosque.

Interrupting his work without hesitation, the baker fetches a carpet, unrolls it in the bakery amid the flour, and prays right there in his workplace. Pi watches the physical sequence—standing, bowing, kneeling, touching forehead to the floor—repeated in cycles with Arabic muttering, and Pi first dismisses it as easy exercise.

When the baker finishes, he calmly returns to his task as if nothing unusual happened. The sight stays with Pi, and later, while Pi prays silently in church, Pi finds the memory of the baker’s quick, embodied prayer resurfacing, marking Pi’s growing pull toward Islam.