Book: Hijack: And Its Repercussions | Author: Prashantha Naveen Karkera | Category: Non-Fiction (General)
Hijack: And Its Repercussions can be read as a book about a ship, a conflict, diplomacy, and rescue, but its most enduring subject is memory. Prashantha Naveen Karkera writes about a real incident that placed her husband, Captain Bangare Navindra Karkera, and the crew of Princess Kash in grave danger during the Sri Lankan civil war. Yet she writes from a later point in life, with the knowledge that survival did not make time infinite. That perspective gives the book a tenderness and poignancy that separates it from conventional accounts of hijacking or maritime crisis.
At the beginning of the author’s personal account, the future appears to collapse in a single moment. She learns through the news that the ship captained by her husband has been hijacked and bombed, and the crew’s condition is uncertain. The emotional violence of that discovery is central to the book. One of the great cruelties of such news is that it forces the mind to imagine the finality of death before death has actually been confirmed. The author begins grieving a possibility while still desperately hoping it is untrue. That psychological state, suspended between loss and hope, gives the narrative a raw emotional intensity.
The book is especially moving because the author continually returns to unfinished life. She thinks about what has been left unsaid, about her young son’s need for his father, about the ordinary happiness of a close family, and about the assumption that loved ones will return because they always have before. These reflections transform the hijack from an isolated dramatic episode into a meditation on the fragility of normal life. Most readers will never face a ship hijacking, but nearly everyone knows what it means to take tomorrow for granted. The book’s emotional reach grows from that universal truth.
The relationship between the author and her husband is therefore one of the book’s quiet centres. Her repeated insistence that she wanted him back alive may seem simple, but simplicity is what makes it powerful. In genuine crisis, philosophical complexity often disappears. A person wants one thing: the loved one home. Everything else becomes secondary. The author’s actions, prayers, appeals, and sleepless attention to information are all expressions of that love.
At the same time, the narrative gives love an active form. Prashantha Naveen Karkera does not remain only a waiting spouse. She becomes an advocate. She searches for contact details, sends faxes, appeals to political and diplomatic authorities, follows developments, and pushes for attention to the crew’s situation. Her love becomes persistence. This is one of the book’s most distinctive qualities. It portrays devotion not as sentiment alone but as the refusal to stop trying when institutions appear remote and events feel uncontrollable.
The preface by Shivshankar Menon strengthens this dimension because it shows that the author’s private struggle was connected to a larger diplomatic effort. From the Indian High Commission’s point of view, the incident unfolded amid the confusion and danger of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Menon recalls the mission’s priority of protecting the Indians aboard and later securing their release. His presence in the book serves almost as a bridge between memory and record. The author remembers fear from within the family; Menon remembers the event from within the diplomatic apparatus. Together, they preserve a fuller picture.
The return of the captain is naturally the emotional climax, but the book’s real maturity lies in recognising that survival leaves a residue. A person can return alive and still carry trauma. A family can celebrate and still remember the terror that came before the celebration. Questions of suspicion and professional integrity can continue even after physical danger has passed. The author’s life does not simply reset to the day before the hijack. Something has changed permanently.
That change is the essence of the word “repercussions.” The author describes becoming more conscious of the value of time and more unwilling to postpone affection, gratitude, or care. She also develops a heightened empathy for families who wait for loved ones in dangerous professions and conflict situations. Once she has known the fear of imagining that her husband may never return, distant reports of war, bombings, and missing people no longer feel distant in the same way. She understands that behind every such report there may be a family living minute by minute.
This transformation gives the book a moral depth that goes beyond the specific facts of the incident. It asks readers, without preaching, to examine how casually we assume continuity. We make plans because we expect time. We postpone conversations because we expect another opportunity. We treat ordinary mornings as ordinary because we do not expect a headline to divide life into “before” and “after.” The author’s experience challenges those assumptions.
The later note that Captain Karkera eventually passed away after a prolonged illness in 2017 adds a profound layer to the book. The earlier rescue becomes not merely the end of a crisis but the recovery of years that the family once feared had been lost. In retrospect, every additional season of life after the hijack acquires meaning. The author’s gratitude for his safe return is therefore inseparable from her later grief. She knows both what it means to fear losing him and what it means, years later, to lose him permanently.
This temporal perspective makes the book unusually affecting. It is written not only from the urgency of 1998 but from the distance of remembrance. Memory selects details differently from a news report. It preserves the feel of a morning, the shock of a headline, the anxiety of waiting, the importance of a telephone call, and the joy of seeing someone alive again. Such details are not minor. They are the substance of lived history.
The book’s historical value also deserves recognition. Incidents associated with larger conflicts can easily disappear beneath more famous battles, political agreements, and national narratives. By documenting the experience of Princess Kash and its crew from a family perspective, the author preserves a fragment of history that might otherwise survive only in archives and scattered reports. Personal testimony gives that fragment emotional continuity. It tells future readers not only that something happened, but why it mattered to the people involved.
Readers interested in true stories, maritime crises, South Asian history, diplomacy, or conflict will find the subject inherently compelling. But the book may resonate even more deeply with readers who have experienced waiting, bereavement, or the sudden realisation that someone they love is vulnerable. Its language of prayer, fear, gratitude, and memory is intimate because the author is not writing from theoretical distance. She is writing from a life that was changed.
The unique strength of Hijack: And Its Repercussions is therefore its combination of public history and private remembrance. The hijack belongs to the record of a conflict; the repercussions belong to a family. The book makes both visible. It honours the efforts that helped secure the crew’s return, but it also honours the emotional labour of those who waited and fought from far away. It shows how survival can become a lifelong reference point and how gratitude can coexist with later grief.
By the final pages, the reader is left with more than the memory of a dangerous incident. The book leaves a broader awareness of how precious ordinary presence can be. A loved one walking through the door, a family sitting together, a child having a father beside him, a day passing without catastrophe: these are not dramatic events, yet the author’s experience teaches us to see them differently. In that sense, Hijack: And Its Repercussions is not only a story about escaping danger. It is a book about learning, after danger, how to value life.
Amazon: https://amzn.in/d/3x4P3nN
