Suddenly Richard Parker emerges from under the tarp, and kills and eats the hyena. To Pi's distress, the hyena also mortally wounds the orangutan in a fight.
A spotted hyena emerges from the tarp covering half of the boat, and kills the zebra. After the storm, Pi finds himself in the lifeboat with an injured zebra, and is joined by an orangutan, named Orange Juice, who lost her offspring in the shipwreck. He tries to find his family, but a crew member throws him into a lifeboat from the rough sea, he watches helplessly as the ship sinks, killing his family and its crew. One night, the ship encounters a heavy storm and begins to sink while Pi is on deck marveling at the storm. On board the ship, Pi's father gets into an argument with the ship's cook (Gerard Depardieu) when he speaks to Pi's mother, Gita Patel (Tabu) rudely. They book passage with their animals (to be sold in North America) on a Japanese freighter named the Tsimtsum.
When Pi is 16 (Ayush Tandon), his father decides to close the zoo and move his family to Canada, and sell the zoo animals, to ensure a good future for his children. He is raised Hindu and vegetarian, but at 12 years old, he is introduced to Christianity and then Islam, and starts to follow all three religions as he "just wants to love God." When asked if he is also Jewish, he replies that he lectures in Kabbalah at the university. Pi tries to feed the tiger, endangering himself to being attacked, and to teach him the reality of the tiger's nature as a carnivore, Pi's father, Santosh Patel (Adil Hussain) forces him to witness it killing a goat. His family owns a local zoo, and Pi takes an interest in the animals, especially a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker because of a clerical error. He changes his name to "Pi" (the mathematical symbol,) when he begins secondary school (Gautam Belur), even repeating numerous digits of pi, because he is tired of being taunted with the nickname "Pissing Patel". Pi relates an extended tale: His parents had named him Piscine Molitor after a swimming pool in France. Pi Patel (Irrfan Khan), an immigrant from Pondicherry in India living in Montreal, Canada, is approached by a local novelist (Rafe Spall) who has been referred to him by his "uncle" (a family friend), believing that Pi's life story would make a great book.The synopsis below may give away important plot points. But the largest and most fascinating part of his story concerns how he ended up on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific with the zoo's Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, and the progression of their time and understanding of each other during that close connection, Richard Parker to who he attributes his survival despite they being initial adversaries as a human and a wild carnivorous beast.
Pi proceeds to tell him his life story, which starts in Pondicherry as the son of zookeepers, the zoo property where he grew up: how he was given his full name of Piscine Molitor Patel largely on Mamaji's suggestion which included Mamaji teaching him how to swim, why at age eleven he made a concerted and extraordinary effort to shorten his name to Pi, his concurrent belief in several religions as he was growing up which affected his relationships not only with humans but what he wanted it to be with the animals at the zoo, and his mid-teen burgeoning relationship with a dancer named Anandi just before his family decided to make the move to Canada. Mamaji felt Pi telling the writer his story would be karmic as the writer was a Canadian in French India, and Pi an Indian man in French Canada. They were brought together by Pi's deceased father's longtime friend Francis, who Pi calls Mamaji, who knew Pi's family when they lived in Pondicherry, India, where the writer met Mamaji.
A writer, looking for a story idea, is visiting with South Asian-Canadian Pi Patel.