Jungle boy was a very special character and long stay guest in the early 80’s in the village of Nilaveli at Sri Lanka’s east coast where I wrote my M.A. thesis. He was a young engineer from Stuttgart who worked ‘beim Daimler’ (i. e. the Mercedes-Benz plant) as he told me. He lived in a bungalow near a creek in a banana plantation. When I met him, he had unauthorizedly extended his annual leave by three months and apparently had no intention of ever returning to ‘Daimler’. The sunburnt, long-haired fellow walked around in leopard pattern swimming trunks and was nicknamed ‘jungle boy’ by the locals – not least because of his trunks. He confided to me that he found the name so fitting that he adopted it for himself. Well, he really did look a bit like Tarzan. Somehow he was an odd guy who was a bit hard to befriend. In 1985, during my last visit to Nilaveli for decades (the area was off limits because of the Tamil Tigers’ activities), his name came up in a conversation I had with my old friend Reggie Samson of the ‘Trail’s End Inn’ (the one with an ox skull on the gate). “How’s that German guy, Jungle Boy, by the way?”. “The case is still pending!” he told me. “What case?” I asked, and Reggie was amazed that I didn’t know he was in prison on suspicion of murder. “I’m sorry, come again! What exactly has happened?”.