Men at sea face a new danger off the coasts of Africa and in the Indian Ocean, in the form of piracy. This is the theme of Captain Norbert Rebello’s second novel set at sea.
Cloaking this serious issue in the garb of fiction, Capt. Norbert takes the reader from the south-eastern Bangladesh and its Karnaphuli river, to the Ivory Coast, and off the coast of Indonesia. But the main action is set off the Somalia coast, where the partly-Indian crew — a growing reality in the merchant navy these days — gets caught up with a racy story of desperation, violence, mid-sea piracy and love.
Capt. Rebello has been writing since his school-days, and happens to be the nephew of the pioneers who ran the Konkani weekly ‘Cine Times’ in Bombay. His earlier novel Memories of Another Day, published in 2008, is set in Eastern Europe, after the 1999 sinking of an oil tanker off the Atlantic coast and the Bay of Biscay in France, causing an economic loss of $500 million. The fleet owner abandoned three other vessels with hundreds of seafarers on board in Montenegro. His next book, now being worked on, is set amidst seamen, and is to be called ‘Cruise the Horizon’ about the hardships faced in a supposedly cheerful cruise line industry.
