Running in the Family (26 page)

Half an hour before light I am woken by the sound of rain. Rain on wall, coconut, and petal. This sound above the noise of the fan. The world already awake in the darkness beyond the barred windows as I get up and stand here, waiting for the last morning.

My body must remember everything, this brief insect bite, smell of wet fruit, the slow snail light, rain, rain, and underneath the hint of colours a sound of furious wet birds whose range of mimicry includes what one imagines to be large beasts, trains, burning electricity. Dark trees, the mildewed garden wall, the slow air pinned down by rain. Above me the fan’s continual dazzling of its hand. When I turn on the light, the bulb on the long three-foot cord will sway to the electrical breeze making my shadow move back and forth on the wall.

But I do not turn on the light yet. I want this emptiness of a
dark room where I listen and wait. There is nothing in this view that could not be a hundred years old, that might not have been here when I left Ceylon at the age of eleven. My mother looks out of her Colombo window thinking of divorce, my father wakes after three days of alcohol, his body hardly able to move from the stiffness in muscles he cannot remember exerting. It is a morning scenery well known to my sister and her children who leave for swimming practice before dawn crossing the empty city in the Volks, passing the pockets of open shops and their lightbulb light that sell newspapers and food. I stood like this in the long mornings of my childhood unable to bear the wait till full daylight when I could go and visit the Peiris family down the road in Boralesgamuwa; the wonderful, long days I spent there with Paul and Lionel and Aunt Peggy who would casually object to my climbing all over her bookcases in my naked and dirty feet. Bookcases I stood under again this week which were full of signed first editions of poems by Neruda and Lawrence and George Keyt. All this was here before I dreamed of getting married, having children, wanting to write.

Here where some ants as small as microdots bite and feel themselves being lifted by the swelling five times as large as their bodies. Rising on their own poison. Here where the cassette now starts up in the next room. During the monsoon, on my last morning, all this Beethoven and rain.

A literary work is a communal act. And this book could not have been
imagined
, let alone conceived, without the help of many people.

The book is a composite of two return journeys to Sri Lanka, in 1978 and 1980. On each occasion I stayed for several months, travelling alone and then joined by my wife and children. My sister, Gillian, took many of the journeys of research with me all over the island. She, and my other sister, Janet, and my brother, Christopher, were central in helping me recreate the era of my parents. This is their book as much as mine. My own family too had to put up with compulsive questioning of everyone we met, hearing again and again long lists of confused genealogies and rumour.

Raw material came from many sources; and I would like to thank a larger group of relatives, friends and colleagues who helped me in my inquisitiveness: Alwin Ratnayake, Phyllis and Ned Sansoni, Ernest and Nalini McIntyre, Zillah Gratiaen, Pam Fernando, Wendy Partridge, Dolly van Langenberg, Susan and Sunil Perera, Jennifer Saravanamuttu, Archer and Doreen Jayawardene, V.C. de Silva, Peggy and Harold Peiris, Sylvia Fernando, Stanley Suraweera, Hamish and Gill Sproule, Dhama Jagoda,
Ian Goonetileke, Yasmine Gooneratne, Wimal Dissanayake, Jilska Vanderwall, Rex and Bertha Daniels, Irene Vanderwall, Rohan and Kamini de Soysa, Erica Perera, Clarence de Fonseka, Nesta Brohier, Nedra de Saram, Sam Kadirgamar, Dorothy Lowman, John Kotelawala, Irangenie “Chandi” Meedeniya, Barbara Sansoni, Trevor de Saram, Thea Wickramasuriya, Jenny Fonseka, Yolande Ilangakoon, Babe Jonklaas, Verna and Mary Vangeyzel, Audrey de Vos … and Shaan, Eggily, and Hetti Corea.

While all these names may give an air of authenticity, I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or “gesture.” And if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.

* * *

Thanks to the Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council and Glendon College, York University, for their support. And to the editors of
The Capilano Review, periodics, The Canadian Forum
, and
Brick
, who published sections from the work in progress.

* * *

Finally, special thanks to three friends who helped me at many stages with the manuscript: Daphne Marlatt, Stan Dragland, and Barrie Nichol,
“for my papers ware promiscuous and out of forme with severall inlargements and untutored narrative.”

Credits

The stanza from the poem, “Don’t Talk to Me about Matisse,” comes from the book
O Regal Blood
by Lakdasa Wikkramaisinha, published in Colombo in February 1975.

The lines from Goethe are from a translation by James Wright in his
Collected Poems
. Published by Wesleyan University Press, 1971.

“Sea of Heartbreak” by Don Gibson. Copyright MCMLX and MCMLXI by Shapiro, Berstein & Co., Inc., 10 East 53 Street, New York 10022. International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

“It’s Been a Long, Long Time” by Sammy Cahn & Jule Styne, published by Cahn Music Company and Morley Music Company.

“A Fine Romance” by Dorothy Fields & Jerome Kern. Copyright © 1936 T. B. Harms Company (c/o The Welk Music Group, Santa Monica, CA 90401) Copyright renewed. International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

The lines quoted in
The Karapothas
sequence linking Robinson Crusoe with Robert Knox’s
An Historical Relation
, published by the Ceylon Historical Association.

The remarks by W. C. Ondaatje come from his “Report on the Royal Botanical Gardens, Peradeniya” which was published in Ceylon Almanac of 1853.

An excerpt from Rex Daniels’ journal is used with his kind permission.

Photograph of the 1947 Nuwara Eliya flood courtesy of Dr Wickrema Weerasooriya.

Photograph of Sensation Rock from Cave’s
Book of Ceylon
.

Every effort has been made to secure clearance for material used within this book.

Michael Ondaatje is the author of the internationally celebrated novels
In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient
, and, most recently,
Anil’s Ghost
. His other books include
Running in the Family, Coming Through Slaughter, The Cinnamon Peeler, Handwriting
, and
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, and came to Canada in 1962.

He lives in Toronto.

COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER

This novel brings to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era; it is the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players, some say the originator of jazz, who was a genius, a guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76785-5

THE ENGLISH PATIENT

Winner of the Booker Prize

During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion is woven, leaving them inextricably connected by the brutal circumstances of the war.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74520-4

RUNNING IN THE FAMILY

In the late 1970s, Michael Ondaatje returned to his native country of Sri Lanka. Recording his journey through the druglike heat and intoxicating fragrances of the island, Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family.

Memoir/Literature/978-0-679-74669-0

ALSO AVAILABLE:

Anil’s Ghost
, 978-0-375-72437-4
The Cinnamon Peeler
, 978-0-679-77913-1
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
, 978-0-679-76786-2
Divisadero
, 978-0-307-27932-3
Handwriting
, 978-0-375-70541-0
In the Skin of a Lion
, 978-0-679-77266-8
Lost Classics
, 978-0-385-72086-1
Vintage Ondaatje
, 978-1-4000-7744-1

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