How Quintus Andradi Lost His Safari Business in Sri Lanka and Spent a Year in Sweden

Quintus Andradi knew exactly what the decision cost him.

In 1977, one vehicle contract alone was bringing him about Rs. 25,000 a month. His wife, a doctor, earned roughly Rs. 2,000. There were safari clients as well, and the British engineering company Kellogg’s wanted another vehicle. After years of modest Navy and CARE International salaries, he had finally built something that worked.

Then friends invited him to Sweden.

Andradi had met them while conducting tours in Sri Lanka. He had wanted to see the wider world since childhood, when English storybooks made England feel painfully distant. The Navy had partly answered that longing—Cochin, Trincomalee, Hong Kong—but the old desire remained. His Swedish friends pressed him to visit. Eventually, he agreed.

Before leaving, Andradi tried to protect the vehicle contract. He handed the work to Colonel M.D. Fernando, the local security officer, along with his jeep, its driver and spare petrol. He offered the vehicle at the price he had originally paid, despite its value having increased. The arrangement was built on trust.

By the end of the month, the jeep and driver had been returned. The spare petrol cans were gone. The contract had been given to someone else, and Andradi received nothing for the use of the vehicle.

There were only days left before his departure.

He transferred the jeep and safari work to another man, who paid Andradi’s wife for about two months and then stopped. A thriving business had been reduced to a few loose promises just as its owner boarded a flight into a Scandinavian winter.

Andradi later called the trip “the stupidest thing I did in my life” financially. Then he spent the rest of the chapter explaining why it was worth it.

The Sweden he remembers is not primarily a country. It is a succession of people opening their doors.

Veterinary surgeon Hans Nelson and his wife Marianne took him in. Nelson, then a Scandinavian show-jumping champion, cared for him with what Andradi remembered as a father’s attentiveness. When Andradi worried about imposing, Nelson rented the floor above his clinic to him for a nominal sum.

Carla Wassberger, a teacher, treated him like a son. She cooked the meat he bought and invited him to meals. Strangers he met on a bus came home with him for tea. A driver stopped to offer him a lift one dark evening—an act that mattered to Andradi because it made him feel accepted rather than merely tolerated.

He arrived during a severe winter, with temperatures he remembered falling to minus 35. Yet the cold is almost incidental in his account. What he recalls are candles and flags. When friends invited him to their homes, they lit candles for the meal. On weekends, families raised the Swedish pendant at their summer houses. Warmth was made visible before he entered the room.

The work available to a foreign visitor paid little. Sweden tightly restricted the employment of foreigners, and Andradi earned only enough to support himself. It was nevertheless enough for a comfortable life and visits elsewhere in Scandinavia and Britain. He had prepared his family’s expenses before leaving and did not need to send money home.

Nothing about this compensated for the business he had surrendered. That is what makes the year important. He never pretended the arithmetic came out evenly.

The clearest moment arrived through Captain Lars Vilgon, president of a sea captains’ association. Vilgon invited Andradi to its annual meeting and dinner as guest of honour. After the formal business ended, Andradi was introduced to a room of perhaps a hundred sea captains and engineers.

They stood. They raised their glasses. Then they sang the Swedish drinking song Helan går to his health.

“For that moment, I felt like a king,” he wrote.

There is no attempt to reconcile that sentence with the financial loss. Andradi simply places both truths beside each other. The year cost him a business that might have secured his children’s future. It also gave him friendships he kept for decades.

Hans Nelson died in a plane crash in 1983. Nelson’s wife and children remained in touch with Andradi and later visited him in Sri Lanka. Many of the Swedish friends passed away. He remembered them by name and photograph, still measuring the year through the people who had welcomed him.

This is the pattern that quietly governs Andradi’s memoir. Money is counted precisely when it disappears—salary, vehicles, contracts, investments, loans—but experience is judged by another ledger. He repeatedly loses because he trusts. He repeatedly gives because he trusts. And when the calculation is finished, he often values the relationship more than what it cost him.

Financially, Sweden was his worst decision. In every other respect, he writes, “there was no comparison” to the year he spent there.

The reader is left with the uncomfortable possibility that both judgments are correct.

Read the source

The complete Sweden account—and the business, marriage and later losses surrounding it—appears in Chapters 4 and 5 of Quintus Andradi’s Story of a Signalman in the Royal Ceylon Navy. Read the complete digital edition.

Source note

• Primary source: Quintus Andradi, Story of a Signalman in the Royal Ceylon Navy, Chapters 4–5.
• Names, amounts, dialogue and events in this article follow Andradi’s first-person account.