‘Missing in action is the worst state to which we can lose a human being,’ avers Commodore (Ret.) Ajith Boyagoda — and he should know. A not especially academic young chap from the hill country, Boyagoda joined the then Ceylonese navy for the glamour of it; progressed fair-to-middlingly; saw Southampton, Suez and South India; and, in September 1994, on his final voyage, found himself in command of the Sagarawardene, Sri Lanka’s biggest warship, on the night that it was sunk by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Hauled out of the sea by his assailants, he became a ‘show-prisoner’ — the LTTE’s highest-ranking military captive — and, abandoned by the nation on whose behalf he had been fighting, he and a dozen or so compatriots were left to rot in the malarial jungle of the Tigers’ northern sub-state.
For eight years they measured time in Red Cross visits, artillery attacks and (of course) the occasional cricket tournament.
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