How Quintus Andradi and Mylevaganam Tried to Cross the Palk Strait From Sri Lanka to India by Catamaran

The plan was daring even before the weather turned.

Quintus Andradi and Mylevaganam would leave Point Pedro in a catamaran, cross the water to India and continue overland until they reached England. There was no carefully plotted route in Andradi’s account, no reserve vessel and no experienced crew waiting beyond the shore. There were two restless young sailors, a narrow craft and the conviction that another life must exist somewhere beyond Ceylon.

For Andradi, England had occupied that somewhere since childhood. He had discovered it in David Copperfield and the Bright Story Readers, then begun cutting school to sit on the Galle Face wall and watch ships enter Colombo Harbour. He once tried to stow away on the P&O liner Stratheden. That attempt failed. The longing remained.

By 1958, he had found a more respectable route to the sea. He had joined the Royal Ceylon Navy Volunteer Force before he was eighteen, using a hundred-bird chicken pen as proof that he had a business. Then he entered the Regular Force in its largest intake to that point: nearly four hundred recruits.

The timing could hardly have been worse. The 1958 riots broke out. The recruits lost their passing-out parade and were sent directly into patrol duties. The barracks became so crowded that a man returning at night might find his groundsheet and pillow stolen from beneath another sailor’s bed. Then Andradi contracted hepatitis and spent about a month in the sickbay.

When he came out, he did not report back to his platoon. He was frustrated, restless and increasingly convinced that service in what he called a “one-ship Navy” would never take him far enough.

Mylevaganam came from Point Pedro. He had trained beside Andradi at Diyatalawa and served as a Radio Electrician’s Mate. When Andradi proposed travelling north and crossing to India, Mylevaganam did more than offer local help: he said he would go too.

They pushed out from Point Pedro. Then night came, and with it a storm.

Andradi remembered the swell as being “as high as coconut trees.” The image is not nautical measurement; it is the memory of a young man watching a wall of water approach and believing it might bury him. A moment later the catamaran would rise like a cork to the crest, leaving the two sailors looking down into the dark hollow beyond it.

The sea continued that way for hours.

At about four in the morning, according to Andradi, it began to settle. Around eight, a fishing catamaran approached. The fishermen spoke in Tamil. Mylevaganam answered them.

Only later did Andradi learn what had been said. The fishermen apparently understood what the two young men were attempting and asked whether they wanted to be taken onward: India, they said, was close. Mylevaganam asked them to take the pair back instead.

The rescue was not quick. Even under sail, they did not reach the beach until around five that evening. A fisheries inspector who was related to Mylevaganam helped settle the consequences. The owner of the catamaran was to receive five hundred rupees. Andradi sent the money after payday, borrowing the balance from his father.

The adventure could be read as youthful foolishness, and it was. But in Andradi’s memoir, it also becomes an early declaration of character. He was capable of making a wild decision for an imagined life, accepting the loss when it failed, and remembering the people more vividly than the danger.

He remembers the fishermen as kind. He remembers Mylevaganam as mild, devout and able to sit in meditation while other sailors threw shoes at him and tried to break his concentration. Years later, after both men had left the Navy, Andradi invited him to live with his family. Mylevaganam stayed for a time, then returned to the road and the life of an itinerant hermit. He disappeared during the anti-Tamil violence of 1983.

There is no grand conclusion in Andradi’s telling. One friend makes it home from the Palk Strait and eventually writes the night down at the age of 87. The other vanishes into one of the country’s darkest years.

England would have to wait. The sea, however, had not finished with Quintus Andradi. Soon he would board H.M.Cy.S. Parakrama, the former British minesweeper HMS Pickle, and begin the years he remembered as the best of his life.

Read the source

This episode comes from Chapter 2 of Quintus Andradi’s Story of a Signalman in the Royal Ceylon Navy. The complete memoir preserves his account in his own words, together with photographs and documentary material. Read the complete digital edition.

Source note

• Primary source: Quintus Andradi, Story of a Signalman in the Royal Ceylon Navy, Chapters 1–2.
• Historical context: Sri Lanka Navy — History. The Navy’s official history confirms the period’s anti-illicit-immigration patrols in the Palk Strait and the fleet’s subsequent expansion. The particulars of the catamaran journey come from Andradi’s memoir.