The Tigers’ Captive Tells His Tale

A Long Watch: War, Captivity and Return in Sri Lanka
by Cdre Ajith Boyagoda
as told to Sunila Galappatti
2016, London, Hurst


On the night of 19 September 1994, in shallow water off the Kalpitiya Peninsula, the Sri Lanka Navy patrol vessel Sagarawardene was attacked and sunk by the Sea Tigers, the naval commando arm of the infamous Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Most of those aboard were killed in the attack or drowned in the aftermath. Among the survivors was the captain of the vessel, Ajith Boyagoda. Rescued by the Tigers, he would spend the following eight years as their prisoner.

In A Long Watch, Commodore Boyagoda tells the story of his captivity, release and return, assisted by the author and ‘dramaturge’ Sunila Galappatti. I am not fond of war stories, and must confess that it was only Ms Galappatti’s involvement that persuaded me to pick up this book at all; I know her socially and was keen to find out what kind of a writer she is. It is a pleasure to report that A Long Watch is lucidly and elegantly written, and has been edited and proofread by people who actually knew what they were doing.

Ms Galappatti has seen to it that Cdre Boyagoda’s story is told in British rather than Sri Lankan English – so British, in fact, that every instance of a South Asian coinage such as mammoty is loquaciously defined in the endnotes. I, for one, am not complaining. What a delight to find a book written in English by Sri Lankans that is, for once, unsullied by barbarous grammar, obstacle-course punctuation, florid capitalization and the shameless fondling of battered ornaments. Better even that this, here is a first-person narrative wholly free of sentimentality, pomposity and cliche. It won’t win any style awards, but A Long Watch is a pleasure to read. I was particularly impressed by the unobtrusiveness of Ms Galappatti’s skill: although it is obvious from internal evidence that it was she who did the actual writing, it is Cdre Boyagoda’s voice, and his alone, that we hear in our mind’s ear as we read.

It is, given the context in which we encounter it, a remarkable voice: judicious and temperate, full of worldly experience and psychological insight, devoid of belligerence or animosity. You wait in vain for the note of resentment, the flash of anger towards the Tigers or those on Boyagoda’s own side who accused him of cowardice and treachery. After a while, its non-appearance begins to make you suspicious. Surely the commander of a naval vessel involved in combat operations cannot be as saintly a fellow as this?

From the moment of his capture, the Commodore seems to do just about everything right. He surrenders to the Tigers like a gentlemen. He doesn’t make trouble, or try to escape when an opportunity (of sorts) presents itself. He accepts the various pains and deprivations of his confinement stoically, insisting that he and his fellow prisoners were, for the most part, well treated. Even when his group of captives is briefly delivered into the hands of a vengeful and sadistic custodian, his account passes lightly over the cruelties they endure and focuses instead on the ways they find to cope with and make the best of the situation. Selflessly, he acts as counsellor and confessor to his fellow captives and as their advocate with the Tigers and the Red Cross inspectors who come to visit. He takes part in Prisoners vs. Tigers cricket matches, enjoys visits from his captors’ children, attends social gatherings in the jungle. Most remarkable of all, he shows no sign of resentment against a Sri Lankan government and military establishment that abandoned him and his fellows to the mercy of the LTTE, making no effort at all to contact them or secure their safety – far less their release – until it became politically advantageous to do so. Instead, throughout the narrative, he takes pains to emphasize the common humanity of the prisoners and their captors, and more broadly that of Sinhalese and Tamils.

All this is laudable indeed, but it sounds rather too good to be true. The Commodore speaks often of the anguish, frustration and despair of imprisonment; did they never drive him to rage, to curse, to rattle his chains? This reader, for one, found it impossible to believe that they did not.

I do not suppose this lack of candour is intentional. The trouble, rather, is that Ajith Boyagoda has told his story many, many times, to a great many different interrogators and audiences. As stories always do, it has improved with the telling. In the Commodore’s mind, over the many years that have passed since his release, the older man has gradually replaced the younger in remembered captivity; the experience and wisdom of sixty years or more now inform the thoughts, words and deeds of the imprisoned forty-year-old naval officer.

To note this is not necessarily to slight Cdre Boyagoda; such are the ways of human nature. The fault, if there is one, lies with his amanuensis. It is hard to believe that Sunila Galappatti did not notice the implausibility of the character she was helping create on the page. If it is so evident to the reader – and more than one reviewer has commented upon it – it must have been equally obvious to her. But perhaps the ‘dramaturge’ sees objective truth as lying somehow beyond her remit: she may have conceived her task as simply that of a midwife, whose job is to deliver the baby and not to count the fingers. Or perhaps she is a good Postmodernist and rejects the very concept of objective truth. Or maybe the Commodore just wanted his story told like that, and wouldn’t let her change a word.

I think the last explanation somewhat unlikely. There are passages in the book that would probably have benefited from a more decisive input by the Commodore – the bit, for instance, where a naval officer with decades of seafaring experience defines the bows of a ship as ‘a platform near the front’, or the unnecessarily laboured technical paragraph about LTTE mortar pellets that ends with the hilarious coinage ‘ball razor’ – and which seem to indicate that Ms Galappatti had as much control over the text as she wanted. If so, it’s a shame she wasn’t a little harder on her subject, that she didn’t ask more probing questions, hang him over the edge a few times; the dramaturgical relationship might have suffered, but the result would have been a more honest, more credible book.

Still, the one that did emerge isn’t at all bad. I wouldn’t go as far as Michael Ondaatje, who apparently thinks it is ‘the best book to come out of the Sri Lankan war’. It certainly isn’t that, but it’s pretty good, and I recommend it heartily. Just don’t go believing everything that you read in it.