South-West Monsoon

Eight winters ago in India I fled the manila-folder-bound desiccation of Delhi for the south and Kerala. The backwaters there have a sensuality that slides about you as you enter, moving you away from the frantic buzz of life, separating you from a sense of time and place. The slowness starts to seep into your skin, spreading itself over you, drinking you in.

I took with me a novel that was making a lot of noise at the time, an overripe Booker prizewinner that, being in my impressionable twenties and passionate about my adopted subcontinent, I felt duty-bound to read. That took a day, and then I found myself with nothing else except decades’ worth of back copies of the Reader’s Digest piled up in the sitting-room of the houseboat on which drifted. Except there was something else, buried at the bottom of my suitcase and momentarily forgotten – a small and beautifully produced Bloomsbury Classics hardback edition of Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje (who himself won the Booker Prize another year). My sister had sent it to me as a Christmas present. The problem was that it was set in Sri Lanka, to which I was travelling on from Kerala. I like to read books in situ, and I had been trying to save it up, at least until my plane hit the tarmac in Colombo. But in the end, unable to resist the feel of it, I opened it and began to read. Running in the Family is Ondaatje’s memoir of his birthplace, of is Dutch-Sinhalese family and the characters who peopled the first eleven years of his life. His father, Mervyn Ondaatje – part Errol Flynn, part South Asian aristocrat – had taken a boat to England in the late 1920s, where, having managed to convince his parents that he had passed the Oxbridge entrance exam, he proceeded to live in elegant style in Cambridge without ever darkening the doors of the university. At his parents’ expense, Mervyn boated, had numerous love affairs, including one with a Russian countess, and even, at one point, donned a uniform to fight the rebels in Ireland. Eventually he was rumbled and dragged home, where he quickly announced his engagement to Doris Gratiaan, a Dutch-Sinhalese beauty with whose brother, Noel, Mervyn had caroused in England. Noel too had returned home. He had been sent down from Oxford for setting fire to his rooms – a not entirely unusual occurrence then but one which was made unpardonable when he threw the flaming furniture out of the window and dragged it to the river, where it sank three of the Oxford rowing crews’ boats. Mervyn had lost his heart to Noel’s exotic sister when he saw her and a pal, got up in swimsuits and gold paint, giving their version of Isadora Duncan’s wild new interpretation of dance. So, in 1932, the union was made that produced the author and his three siblings. Running in the Family winds its way between past and present, gathering memories rather as the family were gathered into cars when the hot season crushed Colombo. Children were taken out of school, and amid a mélêe of books, sweaters, golf clubs, rifles and dogs, the Ondaatjes transplanted themselves to the heights of Nuwara Eliya, 6,000 feet up, a place of parties, ‘serious golf ’ and the All Ceylon Tennis Tournament. Within the confines of an island everything that happens is connected and everyone is related to everyone else: Sinhalese with Tamil, Dutch with British. But within these limits the Ondaatjes spread themselves, leaving behind them, over the years, a trail of broken marriages – love drowned and numbed in gin, to the clinking of ice in the glass. To Ondaatje Sri Lanka is an island of allegorical earth and air, a place of both Caliban and Ariel, where the sea fuses with the sky, and the past co-exists with the present. His parents – Mervyn, sometime tea and rubber plantation superintendent and full-time alcoholic, and Doris, the part-time erotic dancer – were driven apart by Mervyn’s drinking. They separated in 1954 and Ondaatje moved to England with his mother. This is his story of leaving and returning to family – of finding again the reality behind the dreams of Sri Lanka that he had had across the years, through ice-bound winters looking out over Lake Ontario, where he finally settled:

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.

His magnificent, mono-breasted maternal grandmother, Lalla, had indeed been swirled to her death by floodwaters in 1947. She was a tiny explosion of humanity, strangely proud of being the first person in Ceylon to have had a mastectomy, even though it later proved to have been unnecessary. She was the kind of personality who is a gift to any author – how could you not win the Booker with a grandmother like that? Widowed young, she ran a dairy herd. Next door lived another young widow. Lalla, it was rumoured, had encouraged her neighbour’s husband to commit suicide because he was a wife and chicken-bully – it was the poultry torture that Lalla particularly minded. Lalla taught her grandchildren to walk across paddy fields on stilts so that they could not be accused of making muddy paddy prints in the house next door belonging to the rather grand Daniels family. She was a wanderer who pulled up her own roots and who had a habit of pulling up prize roses by their roots too, right in front of the owner, just so she could drink in their full beauty; a grandmother who would humiliate her grandchildren by hiking up her skirt, when the need arose, to pee in public; a mad, maddening woman who was carried to her death in the top of a jacaranda tree by flood waters that she had not even noticed rising, her false breast bobbing somewhere nearby in the roaring torrent. As I lay on my houseboat roof on the lagoon reading about Lalla’s end, the heavy lead of the south-west June monsoon began to fall, attacking the water all around with the same ferocity as Lalla’s terminal flood. Kerala had become Ceylon, Ceylon had become Sri Lanka. Lalla died with the old country, but Ondaatje’s memories of the island, of the lives, marriages and infidelities of the people who shaped him, are what made him a writer.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 7 © Justine Hardy 2005