Running in the Family (18 page)

Once, when there was nobody staying in this bungalow except the cook, a leopard paced up and down the porch. This is the porch onto which we have moved all the beds and slept these last three nights, telling each other ghost stories and feeling absolutely secure in the jungle heat. At one of the other bungalows guests have to sleep behind closed doors, for a bear comes regularly each night, climbs the stairs slowly as if exhausted, and sleeps on whatever free bed is available.

On this last morning I leave the others and go downstairs to find my soap which I left on a railing after one of our rain baths. It has rained every day from five thirty until six, hard perfect thunderstorms. No sign of the soap. I ask the cook and the tracker and they both give the same answer. The wild pig has taken it.
My
wild pig. That repulsively exotic creature in his thick black body and the ridge of non-symmetrical hair running down his back. This thing has walked off with my bar of Pears Transparent Soap? Why not my copy of Rumi poetry? Or Merwin translations? That soap was aristocratic and kept me feeling good all through the filthy hotels of Africa, whenever I could find a shower. The tracker and cook keep giving me evidence that it is the pig. He constantly removes things after taking a small bite, once even took a handbag. As the pig comes to the back door for garbage daily I am beginning to believe them. What does this wild pig want soap for? Visions begin to form of the creature returning to his friends with Pears Transparent Soap and then all of them bathing and scrubbing their armpits in the rain in a foul parody of us. I can see their mouths open to catch drops of water on their tongues, washing their hooves, standing complacently under the drain spout, and then moving in Pears fragrance to a dinner of Manikappolu garbage.

With me irritated at this loss we leave Wilpattu, the jeep following the Volkswagen. My eyes are peeled for a last sight of the oora, my soap caught in his tusk and his mouth foaming.

The last estate we lived on as children was called Kuttapitiya and was famous for its gardens. Walls of flowers—ochre, lavender, pink—would flourish and die within a month, followed by even more exaggerated and inbred colours. My father was superintendent of a tea and rubber plantation and each morning at
5 A.M.
a drummer began his slow rhythmic beat, an alarm clock for all those who worked there. He played for half an hour and slowly and lazily we rose into the pale blue mornings. At breakfast we could watch the flamboyant tree and lavender-cotton catch fire. House and garden were perched high above the mist which filled the valley below like a mattress, cutting us off from the real world. My mother and father lived there for the longest period of their marriage.

Looking down off the edge of the garden we could see the road to Pelmadulla wind and disappear like a lethargic dark yellow
snake into overhanging foliage. Everything seemed green below us. Where we stood, the muted purple leaves of orchid fell at the gentlest breeze onto someone’s shadow. It was the perfect place for children who were allowed to go wild. My brother borrowing a pakispetti box, attaching wheels, and bumping down the steep slopes—a dangerous training for his future bobsledding. Having our hair cut on the front lawn by a travelling barber. And daily arguments over Monopoly, cricket, or marital issues that blazed and died on the privacy of this mountain.

And there was Lalla too, like a bee attracted to the perfume of any flower, who came up every other week solely to ransack the garden and who departed with a car full of sprigs and branches. With hardly any room to move or stretch, she rode back to Colombo, still as a corpse in a flower-packed hearse.

In his last years my father was a founding member of “The Ceylon Cactus and Succulent Society” and this interest began during his time in Kuttapitiya—all because of his devious and defensive nature. He loved ordered gardens and hated to see beds ravaged by Lalla’s plundering. Gradually the vegetation at Kuttapitiya took on a prickly character. He began with roses, then Lalla wore gloves, and so he progressed to the cactus. The landscape turned grey around us. He welcomed the thorn bush, experimented with gnarled Japanese fig trees, retreated to pragmatic vegetables or spears of the succulent. His appreciation of growing things became more subtle, turned within a more limited spectrum and gradually Lalla’s visits tapered away. Her journeys were in any case made solely for the effect of arriving at friends’ houses in Colombo bearing soft rain-grown flowers.

This left the family alone once more. We had everything. It was and still is the most beautiful place in the world. We drove up, my family, Gillian’s family, from the south coast, dusty, with
headaches, tired, up a terrible stone broken road and stopped at the big bungalow. And my daughter turned to me on the edge of the lawn where I had my first haircuts and said, “If we lived here it would be perfect.” “Yes,” I said.

Ceylon falls on a map and its outline is the shape of a tear. After the spaces of India and Canada it is so small. A miniature. Drive ten miles and you are in a landscape so different that by rights it should belong to another country. From Galle in the south to Colombo a third of the way up the coast is only seventy miles. When houses were built along the coastal road it was said that a chicken could walk between the two cities without touching ground. The country is cross-hatched with maze-like routes whose only escape is the sea. From a ship or plane you can turn back or look down at the disorder. Villages spill onto streets, the jungle encroaches on village.

The Ceylon Road and Rail Map resembles a small garden full of darting red and black birds. In the middle of the 19th century, a 17-year-old English officer was ordered to organize the building of a road from Colombo to Kandy. Workers tore paths out of the
sides of mountains and hacked through jungle, even drilled a huge hole through a rock on the hairpin bend of the Kadugannawa Pass. It was finished when the officer was thirty-six. There was a lot of this sort of casual obsession going on at that time.

My father, too, seemed fated to have an obsession with trains all his life. Rail trips became his nemesis. If one was to be blind drunk in the twenties and thirties, one somehow managed it on public transport, or on roads that would terrify a sober man with mountain passes, rock cuts, and precipices. Being an officer in the Ceylon Light Infantry, my father was allowed free train passes and became notorious on the Colombo-Trincomalee run.

He began quietly enough. In his twenties he pulled out his army pistol, terrified a fellow officer—John Kotelawela—under his seat, walked through the swaying carriages and threatened to kill the driver unless he stopped the train. The train halted ten miles out of Colombo at seven-thirty in the morning. He explained that he expected this trip to be a pleasant one and he wanted his good friend Arthur van Langenberg who had missed the train to enjoy it with him.

The passengers emptied out to wait on the tracks while a runner was sent back to Colombo to get Arthur. After a two-hour delay Arthur arrived, John Kotelawela came out from under his seat, everyone jumped back on, my father put his pistol away, and the train continued on to Trincomalee.

I think my father believed that he owned the railway by birthright. He wore the railway as if it was a public suit of clothes. Trains in Ceylon lack privacy entirely. There are no individual compartments, and most of the passengers spend their time walking through carriages, curious to see who else is on board. So people usually knew when Mervyn Ondaatje boarded the train, with or without his army revolver. (He tended to stop trains more often
when in uniform.) If the trip coincided with his days of dipsomania the train could be delayed for hours. Messages would be telegraphed from one station to another to arrange for a relative to meet and remove him from the train. My uncle Noel was usually called. As he was in the Navy during the war, a naval jeep would roar towards Anuradhapura to pick up the major from the Ceylon Light Infantry.

When my father removed all his clothes and leapt from the train, rushing into the Kadugannawa tunnel, the Navy finally refused to follow and my mother was sent for. He stayed in the darkness of that three-quarter-mile-long tunnel for three hours stopping rail traffic going both ways. My mother, clutching a suit of civilian clothing (the Army would not allow her to advertise his military connections), walked into that darkness, finding him and talking with him for over an hour and a half. A moment only Conrad could have interpreted. She went in there alone, his clothes in one arm—but no shoes, an oversight he later complained of—and a railway lantern that he shattered as soon as she reached him. They had been married for six years.