Hijacked and held hostage: A first-hand account of facing a Somali pirate's gun

On 11 April 2010, Pralav Dhyani was a trainee deck officer on a cargo merchant vessel, looking forward to an exciting career at sea. But little did he anticipate the chaos that befell his life in a few hours. Later that day, armed pirates forcefully boarded the ship off the coast of Africa and took the crew hostage. For the following 331 days, the small group of men who had come from different countries to work on the ship were held captive in Somalia. As the negotiations for their release went on, the prisoners suffered mock executions, mental torture, terror and betrayal. It was the toughest initiation into a life at sea that Dhyani could have expected. In Hijacked, his recently published memoir, he tells the story. The excerpt below captures a vignette from Dhyani’s life in captivity.

We had just finished our cargo operations in the beautiful island country of Seychelles and were heading to Zanzibar, where my senior cadets were about to sign off and go back home, and new cadets were about to sign on. This would make me and my two batchmates, Shikhar (whom we called ‘SK’) and Anubhav (‘Bade’), senior cadets. I also had a nickname, ‘Bonge’, but more on that later.

We were excited, because being a senior cadet comes with its own perks—think of it like being a final-year student in college. But what we got instead was a situation in which the entire crew of the ship was consigned to the position of junior cadets. 

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Our main engine chose the worst possible part of the ocean to break down, right off the coast of Seychelles, and soon, three or four gun-toting Somali pirates took over our ship. They made us steer it to within a few nautical miles from the coast of Somalia, where we were ordered to drop anchor.

In captivity, one spends a lot of time thinking about death. There was fear of having a gun pointed at me, with the threat of the trigger being pulled at any moment. There was still hope that I wouldn’t get to experience the feeling. But I did experience it—two months after the hijacking.

I stood on the deck, my hands in the air, as one of the pirates pointed an AK-47 right at my forehead, the tip of the barrel barely an inch from my skin. My heart was beating faster than ever; I was shitting bricks as I waited for my brains to leak out of the imminent gunshot wound.

In the movies, when someone is about to die, their life flashes in front of their eyes. But when the gun was an inch from my forehead, my mind went blank, waiting for the pirate’s next move. My life depended on that one-dollar bullet in his gun. How do I know the price? Because after I returned from captivity, I worked for a company providing maritime security guards to ships navigating the waters that I had been unable to cross safely. A one-dollar bullet was all that was needed to end everything for a person and their family.

I looked at the pirate holding the gun. This one always reeked of something other than just tobacco, which meant that we could always smell him before we saw him. The tops of his cigarette packs were always torn, presumably to make roaches. He was a six-foot-tall, skinny, bald, older man with a white goatee, always dressed in shorts or three-quarters, and usually with a bed sheet wrapped around him like a shawl. His teeth were yellow, and one of them was chipped. Even his eyes were yellow, as if he had jaundice. He had an elongated, V-shaped face with a pronounced jawline, because of which we had nicknamed him ‘Jafar’, after the villain in Disney’s Aladdin. He tried hard to be intimidating, though he didn’t need to, because he had the gun in his hands.

Jafar had been around from the time we had anchored in Somali waters, but we hadn’t interacted with him much, compared to the other pirates. He and the others were always eating ‘khat’, a plant that looked indistinguishable from any other. We wondered why human beings would eat jungle grass like that, and each of us had our own theories about why they loved it so much. Someone said it was good for their sex life and libido, but then we wondered why they were having it on the ship, miles away from their partners. The logical reason was that it gave them a high. 

Much later, I found out that khat is indeed a stimulant that makes one more alert and energetic, and causes loss of appetite and euphoria, so it helped the pirates stay up during their long hours of keeping watch. It is banned in most countries, but the Somalis seemed to have it incessantly.

They wouldn’t even wash it before eating, and ate it along with all the dirt it was covered in. Out of curiosity, I once tried it while sitting with the pirates, but just couldn’t take the taste after a point. SK and Bade kept asking if something was happening, but nothing did. We came to the conclusion that maybe we needed to have it like the Somalis—chewing it for hours and washing it down with extremely sweetened milk and tea. Maybe that was the key, but we really did not have the patience to sit and eat grass like goats.

Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins India from Hijacked: A True Story of Surviving 331 Days with Somali Pirates, by Pralav Dhyani.

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