I want to go back to my mother, says pirate

In popular imagination, a pirate wears a bandana, a hat and a black eye-patch. But the stereotype does not sit well on the pirates arrested by the coast guard and the navy last week.

On Thursday, 28 skinny and heavily tanned men in the 15-35 age group, dressed in worn-out pants, shirts and t-shirts, were handed over to the police.

With their faces covered and everyone’s physique more or less similar, differentiating one from the other was difficult. They had everything in common, including the use of their hands to indicate a ‘no’ when asked whether they spoke English.

However, a soft reply of ‘Little little English’ set apart 26-year-old Vennav Mark who spoke with DNA.

“They told me there is money in this, and I wanted money,” was his simple rationale for becoming a pirate. He said that he would have been a shopkeeper had financial and personal crises not hit him so early in life. “I have a mother, no father. He dead. I want to go back to my mother. She is alone,” he said in his broken English.

Mark said that he had joined the group only 18 days ago. But he refused to reveal for how long he had been a pirate. “I am the translator. I do deal between both the parties,” he said.

Talking softly throughout the conversation, he raised his voice when asked if he had fired bullets. “I have no gun,” he said.