Pi recalls Father’s buoyant declaration, “We’ll sail like Columbus!”, while Pi answers sullenly that Columbus was trying to find India. The Patel family commits to leaving for a new country and a new life by selling the Pondicherry Zoo completely, using the proceeds to fund immigration and a fresh start in Canada.

The zoo sale succeeds largely because American zoos offer higher prices, and because new restrictions under CITES are closing the era of trading captured wild animals. The Pondicherry Zoo happens to shut down at the right moment, prompting a scramble among buyers; many animals are purchased by institutions such as the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and the Minnesota Zoo, with others dispersed to several U.S. cities.

Pi explains that he and Ravi feel like “two animals being shipped to the Canada Zoo” and resist the move, imagining Canada as an inhospitable land outside their familiar world. The departure is prolonged not by family preparations but by the enormous logistical difficulty of relocating animals; despite their “lightness of being,” moving a zoo requires the coordination and infrastructure of moving a city.

The process becomes a grinding marathon of bureaucracy: offers, negotiations, certificates, permits, quarantine rules, and transportation arrangements multiply until Father is nearly driven to despair. Pi notes the zoo-business joke that paperwork outweighs the animals themselves, and Father comes close to giving up more than once.

Unexpected complications arise when certain animals are unwanted or come with conditions. A buyer demands that Elfie the hippopotamus undergo cataract surgery, which Father angrily rejects, and some animals are deemed “too common,” prompting Father to trade lions and baboons for other species; Elfie ultimately goes to the Trivandrum Zoo. A team of three competent, sweating Americans arrives to examine and test the animals, and the inspections effectively grant the animals “working papers,” making them future “Yankees” as the family becomes future “Canucks.”