The Pirates Are Coming

N what was supposed to be a relaxed Sunday, April 11, 2010, Pralav Dhyani, a deck cadet on the cargo ship RAK Afrikana, was engaged in routine deck work after breakfast.

- AKASH CHATTERJEE

His peaceful morning was disrupted by an unfamiliar sound, initially dismissed as a car backfiring. However, when the sound repeated, Dhyani recognised it as something out of the ordinary. Moments later, the unsettling truth dawned on him: the cargo ship was under attack by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean.

This is how the author and 36-year-old founder of ARC Continental FZE, a ship brokerage and consulting firm in Dubai, describes the attack on his cargo ship by pirates in his book, Hijacked: A True Story of Surviving 331 Days with Somali Pirates (HarperCollins). At present, a businessman in Dubai, 15 years after the incident, Dhyani, in an interview with The Morning Standard, recalls those turbulent 331 days when he was at the mercy of the pirates. "The idea of writing the book came to me during COVID-19. The world came to a standstill during the pandemic. People were forced to stay inside their homes. They were desperate to move out and move around freely. At that time, I remembered the days when I was grounded and a hostage of the Somali pirates. I thought of writing and sharing my story to tell readers how I overcame my confinement under gunpoint for 331 days," he says.