Running in the Family

  ACCLAIM FOR

  Running in the Family:

  “It sparkles with the intensity and vividness of its multifaceted tales of romance and intrigue.”

  – Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “A brilliant, charming, poetic, hyperbolic holiday of a book.… Ondaatje walks the line between fact and fiction with a delicately rendered delight.”

  – Vancouver Province

  “… the brilliant and moving book he has written is original in every way that matters.”

  – W. S. Merwin

  “A beautiful, luscious book of discovery and remembrance.”

  – Hamilton Spectator

  “With a prose style equal to the voluptuousness of [Ondaatje’s] subject and a sense of humor never too far away, Running in the Family is sheer reading pleasure.”

  – Washington Post

  “It dazzles with its range of imagination, richness of language and the consistently involving changes of mood and tempo.”

  – Toronto Star

  “This is an intriguing, funny, dream-like book, impossible to put down.”

  – Winnipeg Free Press

  “… brief, vivid scenes, moments revived out of remote memories, pictures of the intensities lived by his passionate parents … amid the lush flora, the predatory fauna, and the old-fashioned life of the British colonies. This is great story-telling.…”

  – Leon Edel

  BOOKS BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE

  PROSE

  Coming through Slaughter 1976

  Running in the Family (memoir) 1982

  In the Skin of a Lion 1987

  The English Patient 1992

  Anil’s Ghost 2000

  The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film 2002

  POETRY

  The Dainty Monsters 1967

  The Man with 7 Toes 1969

  The Collected Works of Billy the Kid 1970

  Rat Jelly 1973

  Elimination Dance 1976

  There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do 1979

  Tin Roof 1982

  Secular Love 1984

  The Cinnamon Peeler (selected poems) 1992

  Handwriting 1998

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Long Poem Anthology 1967

  From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories 1991

  Lost Classics 2000

  Copyright © 1982 by Michael Ondaatje

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Ondaatje, Michael, 1943–

  Running in the family

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77664-8

  1. Ondaatje, Michael, 1943– . 2. Poets, Canadian (English)

  – 20th century – Biography.* 3. Sri Lanka – Biography. I. Title.

  PS8529.N283Z53 2001 C811′.54 COO-933312-6

  PR9199.3.O5Z47 2001

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  The Canadian Publishers

  481 University Avenue

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5G 2E9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  For Griffin and Quintin.

  For Gillian, Janet, and Christopher.

  “I saw in this island fowls as big as our country geese having two heads … and other miraculous things which I will not here write of.”

  Oderic (Franciscan Friar, 14th century)

  “The Americans were able to put a man on the moon because they knew English. The Sinhalese and Tamils whose knowledge of English was poor, thought that the earth was flat.”

  Douglas Amarasekera, Ceylon Sunday Times 29.1.78

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  ASIAN RUMOURS

  Asia

  Jaffna Afternoons

  A FINE ROMANCE

  The Courtship

  April 11, 1932

  Honeymoon

  Historical Relations

  The War between Men and Women

  Flaming Youth

  The Babylon Stakes

  Tropical Gossip

  Kegalle (i)

  DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT MATISSE

  Tabula Asiae

  St. Thomas’ Church

  Monsoon Notebook (i)

  Tongue

  Sweet like a Crow

  The Karapothas

  High Flowers

  To Colombo

  Women like You

  The Cinnamon Peeler

  Kegalle (ii)

  ECLIPSE PLUMAGE

  Lunch Conversation

  Aunts

  The Passions of Lalla

  THE PRODIGAL

  Harbour

  Monsoon Notebook (ii)

  How I Was Bathed

  Wilpattu

  Kuttapitiya

  Travels in Ceylon

  Sir John

  Photograph

  WHAT WE THINK OF MARRIED LIFE

  Tea Country

  “What We Think of Married Life”

  Dialogues

  Blind Faith

  The Bone

  THE CEYLON CACTUS AND SUCCULENT SOCIETY

  “Thanikama”

  Monsoon Notebook (iii)

  Final Days / Father Tongue

  Last Morning

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Michael Ondaatje

  Drought since December.

  All across the city men roll carts with ice clothed in sawdust. Later on, during a fever, the drought still continuing, his nightmare is that thorn trees in the garden send their hard roots underground towards the house climbing through windows so they can drink sweat off his body, steal the last of the saliva off his tongue.

  He snaps on the electricity just before daybreak. For twenty five years he has not lived in this country, though up to the age of eleven he slept in rooms like this—with no curtains, just delicate bars across the windows so no one could break in. And the floors of red cement polished smooth, cool against bare feet.

  Dawn through a garden. Clarity to leaves, fruit, the dark yellow of the King Coconut. This delicate light is allowed only a brief moment of the day. In ten minutes the garden will lie in a blaze of heat, frantic with noise and butterflies.

  Half a page—and the morning is already ancient.

  ASIAN RUMOURS

  ASIA

  What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto. I was sleeping at a friend’s house. I saw my father, chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape. The noises woke me. I sat up on the uncomfortable sofa and I was in a jungle, hot, sweating. Street lights bounced off the snow and into the room through the hanging vines and ferns at my friend’s window. A fish tank glowed in the corner. I had been weeping and my shoulders and face were exhausted. I wound the quilt around myself, leaned
back against the head of the sofa, and sat there for most of the night. Tense, not wanting to move as the heat gradually left me, as the sweat evaporated and I became conscious again of brittle air outside the windows searing and howling through the streets and over the frozen cars hunched like sheep all the way down towards Lake Ontario. It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia.

  Once a friend had told me that it was only when I was drunk that I seemed to know exactly what I wanted. And so, two months later, in the midst of the farewell party in my growing wildness—dancing, balancing a wine glass on my forehead and falling to the floor twisting round and getting up without letting the glass tip, a trick which seemed only possible when drunk and relaxed—I knew I was already running. Outside the continuing snow had made the streets narrow, almost impassable. Guests had arrived on foot, scarved, faces pink and frozen. They leaned against the fire-place and drank.

  I had already planned the journey back. During quiet afternoons I spread maps onto the floor and searched out possible routes to Ceylon. But it was only in the midst of this party, among my closest friends, that I realized I would be travelling back to the family I had grown from—those relations from my parents’ generation who stood in my memory like frozen opera. I wanted to touch them into words. A perverse and solitary desire. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion I had come across the lines, “she had been forced into prudence in her youth—she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning.” In my mid-thirties I realized I had slipped past a childhood I had ignored and not understood.

  Asia. The name was a gasp from a dying mouth. An ancient word that had to be whispered, would never be used as a battle cry. The word sprawled. It had none of the clipped sound of Europe, America, Canada. The vowels took over, slept on the map with the S. I was running to Asia and everything would change. It began with that moment when I was dancing and laughing wildly within the comfort and order of my life. Beside the fridge I tried to communicate some of the fragments I knew about my father, my grandmother. “So how did your grandmother die?” “Natural causes.” “What?” “Floods.” And then another wave of the party swirled me away.

  JAFFNA AFTERNOONS

  2:15 in the afternoon. I sit in the huge living room of the old governor’s home in Jaffna. The walls, painted in recent years a warm rose-red, stretch awesome distances away to my left to my right and up towards a white ceiling. When the Dutch first built this house egg white was used to paint the walls. The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling themselves from each other’s shoulders.

  The fan hangs on a long stem, revolves lethargic, its arms in a tilt to catch the air which it folds across the room. No matter how mechanical the fan is in its movement the textures of air have no sense of the metronome. The air reaches me unevenly with its gusts against my arms, face, and this paper.

  The house was built around 1700 and is the prize building in this northern region of Ceylon. In spite of its internal vastness it appears modest from the outside, tucked in one corner of the fort. To approach the building by foot or car or bicycle one has to cross a bridge over the moat, be accepted by two sentries who unfortunately have to stand exactly where marsh gases collect, and enter the fort’s yard. Here, in this spacious centre of the labyrinth of 18th-century Dutch defense I sit on one of the giant sofas, in the noisy solitude of the afternoon while the rest of the house is asleep.

  The morning has been spent with my sister and my Aunt Phyllis trying to trace the maze of relationships in our ancestry. For a while we sat in one of the bedrooms sprawled on two beds and a chair. The twin to this bedroom, in another part of the house, is dark and supposedly haunted. Walking into that room’s dampness, I saw the mosquito nets stranded in the air like the dresses of hanged brides, the skeletons of beds without their mattresses, and retreated from the room without ever turning my back on it.

  Later the three of us moved to the dining room while my Aunt plucked notorious incidents from her brain. She is the minotaur of this long journey back—all those preparations for travel, the journey through Africa, the recent 7-hour train ride from Colombo to Jaffna, the sentries, the high walls of stone, and now this lazy courtesy of meals, tea, her best brandy in the evenings for my bad stomach—the minotaur who inhabits the place one had been years ago, who surprises one with conversations about the original circle of love. I am especially fond of her because she was always close to my father. When someone else speaks, her eyes glance up to the ceilings of the room, as if noticing the architecture there for the first time, as if looking for the cue cards for stories. We are still recovering from her gleeful résumé of the life and death of one foul Ondaatje who was “savaged to pieces by his own horse.”

  Eventually we move out onto the wicker chairs of the porch which runs 50 yards along the front of the house. From ten until noon we sit talking and drinking ice-cold palmyra toddy from a bottle we have filled in the village. This is a drink which smells of raw rubber and is the juice drained from the flower of a coconut. We sip it slowly, feeling it continue to ferment in the stomach.

  At noon I doze for an hour, then wake for a lunch of crab curry. There is no point in using a fork and spoon for this meal. I eat with my hands, shovelling in the rice with my thumb, crunching the shell in my teeth. Then fresh pineapple.

  But I love the afternoon hours most. It is now almost a quarter to three. In half an hour the others will waken from their sleep and intricate conversations will begin again. In the heart of this 250-year-old fort we will trade anecdotes and faint memories, trying to swell them with the order of dates and asides, interlocking them all as if assembling the hull of a ship. No story is ever told just once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgements thrown in. In this way history is organized. All day my Uncle Ned, who is heading a commission on race-riots (and so has been given this building to live in while in Jaffna), is at work, and all day my Aunt Phyllis presides over the history of good and bad Ondaatjes and the people they came in contact with. Her eye, which by now knows well the ceilings of this house, will suddenly sparkle and she will turn to us with delight and begin “and there is another terrible story.…”

  There are so many ghosts here. In the dark mildewed wing, where the rotting mosquito nets hang, lives the apparition of the Dutch governor’s daughter. In 1734 she threw herself down a well after being told she could not marry her lover, and has startled generations since, making them avoid the room where she silently exhibits herself in a red dress. And just as the haunted sections are avoided for sleeping, the living room is avoided for conversation, being so huge that all talk evaporates into the air before it reaches the listener.

  The dogs from the town, who have sneaked past the guards, are asleep on the porch—one of the coolest spots in Jaffna. As I get up to adjust the speed of the fan, they roll onto their feet and move a few yards down the porch. The tree outside is full of crows and white cranes who gurgle and screech. A noisy solitude—all the new stories in my mind and the birds totally compatible but screaming at each other, sweeping now and then over the heads of drowsy mongrels.

  * * *

  That night, I will have not so much a dream as an image that repeats itself. I see my own straining body which stands shaped like a star and realize gradually I am part of a human pyramid. Below me are other bodies that I am standing on and above me are several more, though I am quite near the top. With cumbersome slowness we are walking from one end of the huge living room to the other. We are all chattering away like the crows and cranes so that it is often difficult to hear. I do catch one piece of dialogue. A Mr. Hobday has asked my father if he has any Dutch antiques in the house. And he replies, “Well … there is my mother.” My grandmother lower down gives a roar of anger. But at this point we are approaching the door which being twenty feet high we will be
able to pass through only if the pyramid turns sideways. Without discussing it the whole family ignores the opening and walks slowly through the pale pink rose-coloured walls into the next room.

  A FINE ROMANCE

  THE COURTSHIP

  When my father finished school, his parents decided to send him to university in England. So leaving Ceylon by ship Mervyn Ondaatje arrived at Southampton. He took his entrance exams for Cambridge and, writing home a month later, told his parents the good news that he had been accepted at Queen’s College. They sent him the funds for three years of university education. Finally he had made good. He had been causing much trouble at home and now seemed to have pulled himself out of that streak of bad behaviour in the tropics.

  It was two and a half years later, after several modest letters about his successful academic career, that his parents discovered he had not even passed the entrance exam and was living off their money in England. He had rented extravagant rooms in Cambridge and simply eliminated the academic element of university, making close friends among the students, reading contemporary novels, boating, and making a name for himself as someone who knew exactly what was valuable and interesting in the Cambridge circles of the 1920s. He had a good time, becoming briefly engaged to a Russian countess, even taking a short trip to Ireland supposedly to fight against the Rebels when the university closed down for its vacation. No one knew about this Irish adventure except an aunt who was sent a photograph of him posing slyly in uniform.

  On hearing the distressing news, his parents decided to confront him personally, and so his mother and father and sister Stephy packed their trunks and left for England by ship. In any case my father had just twenty-four more days of high living at Cambridge before his furious family arrived unannounced at his doors. Sheepishly he invited them in, being able to offer them only champagne at eleven in the morning. This did not impress them as he had hoped, while the great row which my grandfather had looked forward to for weeks and weeks was deflected by my father’s useful habit of retreating into almost total silence, of never trying to justify any of his crimes, so that it was difficult to argue with him. Instead he went out at dinnertime for a few hours and came back to announce that he had become engaged to Kaye Roseleap—his sister Stephy’s closest English friend. This news stilled most of the fury against him. Stephy moved onto his side and his parents were impressed by the fact that Kaye leapt from the notable Roseleaps of Dorset. On the whole everybody was pleased and the following day they all caught the train to the country to stay with the Roseleaps, taking along my father’s cousin Phyllis.