Narendra Sethia was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1956, the son of an Indian jute merchant and his English wife.

Expelled from draconian preparatory and public schools in Britain, he spent time on a freighter in the Congo and Angola, before joining the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth as a Midshipman.

After service in a mine-hunter, a frigate and an aircraft carrier, he qualified as a submariner, was promoted to Lieutenant and, after wrongful arrest for vagrancy in St James’s Park, London, in August 1980, saw active service in the Malvinas (Falklands) War in 1982, when he served as a watch-keeping Officer on board HMS Conqueror, the nuclear-powered submarine which torpedoed and sank the Argentinean cruiser General Belgrano. Fortunately, the only casualty on board the submarine was a Petty Officer Stores Accountant who broke a collar bone when he fell out of his bed one morning.

He resigned from the Navy in July 1982 and he and a friend sailed across the Atlantic in a fat, slow, 31-foot wooden sloop, arriving in Barbados at the end of that year. After 4 months of sailing the islands of the Eastern Caribbean, sustaining a living by selling cheap, unpleasant wines to luxury yachts, he reached St Lucia where he obtained work, first as a yacht Captain and later as Managing Director of a yacht charter company.

Married in 1987, later that year he won what was at that time the third largest libel award in Britain, at the end of a much-publicised litigation against a leading UK newspaper which had falsely suggested that he had absconded with the logbook from the submarine Conqueror. He added to this award, settlements from two other leading newspapers and also from the BBC, and then divorced his wife.

Leaving St Lucia aboard his new yacht in August 1989, he was promptly ship-wrecked in the American Virgin Islands during Hurricane Hugo, one of the most devastating Caribbean hurricanes on record.

Exchanging yachts with a friend, he then spent a year sailing the West Indian islands on a 28-foot steel cutter, and arrived, penniless, in Venezuela, early in 1991. Here, he acquired an elderly jeep which he drove 15,000 miles from the Andes to the Orinoco, operating an illicit taxi service for visiting tourists.

Selling his yacht in January 1992, he went to Barbados to buy his mother a new roof for her house, and then continued to India where he bought large quantities of silk shirts and silver jewellery which he then peddled on the streets of London and Hamburg.

In September 1992 he went to the USA to run the reservations office of the same charter company that he had previously managed in St Lucia. Falling out with his corpulent boss in 1996, he went to work with Mary Barnard at Barefoot Yacht Charters in St Vincent and the Grenadines which is where he has finally put down his roots and bought his first home.

In September 2000, he flew to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he stayed with a former Commander from the Belgrano, Nestor Cenci, universally known as “Coco” and he also met with the Belgrano’s former Captain Hector Bonzo. These extraordinary meetings in which the former enemies were able to shake hands, left a deep impression on him and enabled him to put certain ghosts to rest.

He lives with 3 dogs and innumerable lizards.

Narendra Sethia has written:

• Deathwish in the Caribbean
• Cops in the Caribbean - Shoot First, Ask Questions Later
• Surviving Hurricane Hugo Aboard a Yacht in the Caribbean
• The Traveler Scene in Kovalam, Goa
• A Pregnant Lieutenant in Argentina
• Dosing a British Consul With LSD to Get a New Passport
• Caribbean Romance
• The Woman Who Knew Too Much - Caribbean Intrigue
• Runaway Nazis on Caribbean Yachts
• Bill's Rat - Sailing with Rodents in the Caribbean
• Road to Nowhere, Looking for the Head Man in India
• India Bus Nightmare Travel Story
• Montserrat Yacht Story, Caribbean
• Grenada War, Caribbean Job
• A Caribbean Scam
• Mummy Lord's Rum Shop in Santa Lucia