The form is a story within a story within a story. An unnamed Canadian author whom we assume to be Yann Martel himself (Rafe Spall) is told by an Indian he meets that there is a man in Montreal called Pi who has a story that will make you believe in God. He's Piscine Molitor Patel (Irrfan Khan), a philosophy teacher, and he tells the curious story of his own extraordinary life, beginning as the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, the French enclave in India that wasn't ceded until 1954.