He lives with his brother Ravi, his mother, and his father. His father employed Pi to help him at the family zoo, until they sold it to move out of the country. Pi’s father decides to relocate the family to Canada due to the politics in India. They get tickets for a cargo ship heading for Canada via the Pacific Ocean, and set sail. It is pretty smooth sailing for awhile; there are many animals on the ship, so Pi feels right at home. He talks about a friend named Richard Parker whom is aboard also. Then one night, Pi wakes up during a storm, and tries to get his brother to wake up so they can go exploring together. Ravi won’t wake up, so he goes out to the deck by himself.

He looks into the water, and notices that he seems to be much closer to it than he was the day before, but he thinks nothing of it; it’s a storm, so the water is probably supposed to be higher. Suddenly, he starts to notice that the deck was slanting. He realized that the boat was sinking, and ran to find help. He found some of the crew up on the deck, and frantically tried to tell them that the boat was sinking. They picked him up, and threw him down onto a lifeboat partially covered in tarpaulin. He looks up just in time to see a zebra jump off the ship and land in the boat with him, just missing the tarpaulin. He sees Richard Parker in the water, and helps him into the boat, then, realizing what he had done, he jumped into the water.

Now, this is where the first story begins: the one that Pi has told us all throughout the book. He tells this story to Tomohiro Okamoto and Atsuro Chiba, two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport who bribe Pi with cookies. They come to hear his story and to attempt to figure out how the Tsimtsum (the cargo ship Pi and his family were on) sank. The interview begins on February 19, 1978, tape-recorded in a hospital in Tomatlán, Mexico. This is the first story he told them; the one he told us, the readers.

When Pi wakes up, he is on the tarpaulin in the lifeboat. Since he is floating out in the middle of the Pacific and the ship is nowhere in sight, he knows it sank. He looks over to see whom, if anybody, else is with him, and he sees quite a strange site. There is a zebra with a broken leg, a female orangutan named Orange Juice, a hyena, and a 450 pound Royal Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker. Well, technically, he doesn’t see Richard Parker until later, but he was there, under the tarpaulin. All of the animals live for a few days in peace, until the hyena gets hungry. The zebra tries it’s hardest to fight back while the hyena attacks it, but loses horribly because of its leg. It lives on for a while longer though, bearing the pain of being eaten alive by a hyena.

Eventually, it is just Pi and Richard Parker left; Richard Parker got hungry and made a mid-adventure snack out of the orangutan and the hyena, and Pi made a raft out of the oars and lifejackets that trailed behind the boat. He started fishing off the side of the boat, but Richard Parker kept taking his food from him whenever he caught anything. That’s when Pi got the idea of training Richard Parker so he could have his territory all to himself. He used a whistle that had been on the lifejacket, stood up on the bench, and rocked the boat every time the tiger stepped onto Pi’s designated area. He keeps this up for a while, and the tiger soon learns where his territory is. Pi’s raft got destroyed soon after, in a major storm that overtook the little lifeboat.

By this point, Pi has no clothes; they have been shredded by the unfortunate climate of the ocean. Richard Parker’s fur is matted, and the shine is gone. Both castaways are emaciated, and just barely surviving. Pi describes his legs as being covered in welts and bruises, and his skin being raw.

One day towards the later half of the adventure, Pi realizes that Richard Parker has gone blind from the salt in his eyes. He starts to get worried that the same will happen to him, and he has good reason. Somewhere in the next few days he starts losing the outer rims of his vision, until he is totally blind. He stays put on the tarpaulin, afraid that he will fall into the water, and that he will run out of food. He starts thinking, and hears a voice. At first he thought it was himself going crazy, but then he yelled out “Hello! Is anyone there?” and heard an echo. He thought for a moment, and yelled his name, because an echo would echo his name back to him. But it wasn’t an echo at all. It was a Frenchman, who claimed to also be blind. He was in a lifeboat too, and said that he had no food, and asked to come aboard. Pi helped him into his boat, but before he could properly warn him, Richard Parker snuck up and ate him.

Pi woke up a little while later, and rinsed his eyes out, which helped him start to see again. He looked over to the horizon, and saw an island. They sailed for it, and in a few hours they were there. Pi tried to walk, but his legs gave way. He practiced walking back and forth, to and from a large tree. Richard Parker took off over the ridge, and when Pi followed, he saw it was full of meercats. Every night, Pi slept in the big tree with the meercats. He tried to eat one of the “fruits” that were in the tree, but when he peeled it back, it opened up to a human tooth. On a hunch, he tried to step onto the island that night, but it hurt him when he stepped on the ground. The next day, he and Richard Parker set sail again, leaving the carnivorous island behind.

The lifeboat floated on, and ended up on the shore of Mexico. Richard Parker hops out of the lifeboat, and starts heading towards the forest line. Without looking back, he disappears into the trees. Pi just laid there until someone comes to find him. His rescuers take him to the hospital, where he stays until the two officials come to interview him.

Okamoto and Chiba tell Pi that they found his story very interesting, but they express their disbelief to the readers in Japanese. They give Pi another cookie, which he stores under his bed sheet. Okamoto decides to take a break, and the two men excuse themselves from Pi’s room.

When the two men return to the room, they tell Pi that they don’t believe his story. One of the points that they bring up is that bananas don’t float.