Running in the Family

  “I was the commanding officer, you see. He had been drinking for months. Then one night at two in the morning he drives into the base in his jeep. He says the Japanese have invaded. He’s found one. Well I didn’t think so, but I climbed into the jeep and drove off with him. There was a man five yards out in the surf standing there like a statue. This fellow says, “There he is.” He had found him two hours earlier coming ashore, halted him, fired his pistol into the water between the man’s legs and said, stay there, stay right there, do not move till I get back, and jumped into the jeep and came to get us at the base. I put the jeep lights on him and we could see right away he was a Tamil. So then I knew.

  “Next morning I took him with me to Colombo by train. He played hell on the way.”

  The sambhur has eaten all the bananas, so we go back in, join Sir John’s doctor and the doctor’s wife and sit down in an open dining room to the real breakfast.

  Sir John’s breakfasts are legendary, always hoppers and fish curry, mangoes and curd. A breeze blows magically under the table, a precise luxury, and I stretch my feet to its source as I tear apart the first hopper. My sandal is wrenched off and goes flying down under the length of the table, luckily not in the direction of Sir John. My foot tingling. While everyone else eats I lean back and look underneath and there is a small portable fan a few inches from my toes ready to tear into flesh this time. I could have lost a toe during one of these breakfasts searching for my father.

  Sir John is talking about someone else now, delighting in some scandal about “one of the best liars we have.” The open windows that come down to within six inches of the floor have no glass. A crow steps up as if to make an announcement, moves away and then the peacock climbs in and steps down to the light brown parquet floor. His feet give a slight click at each step. No one has seen this wonder, it seems, but me. Sir John reaches for a hopper, tears off the brittle edges of the dough, and taking the soft delicious centre, holds it out and the peacock he has not even looked at but hears, perhaps just senses, takes a final step forward, declines his neck and accepts the hopper walking away to a less busy part of the dining room, eating as he walks.

  While we eat, an amateur theatre group from Colombo which is producing Camelot receives permission to be photographed on the grounds. The dream-like setting is now made more surreal by Sinhalese actors wearing thick velvet costumes, pointed hats, and chain mail in this terrible May heat. A group of black knights mime festive songs among the peacocks and fountains. Guinevere kisses Arthur beside the tank of Australian fish.

  The photographers outside, the idea of Camelot, all remind Sir John of his political tribulations. For he claims that if anything lost him elections it was the grandness of the house and his parties—pictures of which appeared in the newspapers. He tells us of one of the most scandalous photographs organized by the Opposition. A demure young couple visited him along with a third friend who had a camera. They asked if he minded their taking some photographs and he gave them permission. The photographer took several pictures of the couple. Suddenly the man dropped to his knees, lifted up the woman’s sari and started chewing away at her upper thigh. Sir John who was watching casually a few yards away rushed forward and asked what was happening. The man on his knees unburied his head and grinned at him saying, “snake bite, sir,” and returned to the thigh of the woman.

  A week later three photographs appeared in the newspapers of this blatantly sexual act with Sir John also in the picture chatting casually to the woman whose face was in the throes of ecstasy.

  PHOTOGRAPH

  My Aunt pulls out the album and there is the photograph I have been waiting for all my life. My father and mother together. May 1932.

  They are on their honeymoon and the two of them, very soberly dressed, have walked into a photographic studio. The photographer is used to wedding pictures. He has probably seen every pose. My father sits facing the camera, my mother stands beside him and bends over so that her face is in profile on a level with his. Then they both begin to make hideous faces.

  My father’s pupils droop to the south-west corner of his sockets. His jaw falls and resettles into a groan that is half idiot, half shock. (All this emphasized by his dark suit and well-combed hair.) My mother in white has twisted her lovely features and stuck out her jaw and upper lip so that her profile is in the posture of a monkey. The print is made into a postcard and sent through the mails to various friends. On the back my father has written “What we think of married life.”

  Everything is there, of course. Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual humour, and the fact that both of them are hams of a very superior sort. The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father’s tanned skin, my mother’s milk paleness, and this theatre of their own making.

  It is the only photograph I have found of the two of them together.

  WHAT WE THINK OF MARRIED LIFE

  TEA COUNTRY

  “The thing about Mum was—she was a terrifically social person. And he came down to Colombo and swooped her up and took her to the tea estate. OK. They were in love, happy with each other, they had kids. But later there was nothing for her to do there.”

  Tea country. The sleepy green landscape that held her captive. And now, 40 years later, in early May, on the verge of monsoon weather, I have come here to visit my half-sister Susan and her husband Sunil. The green pattern of landscape and life-style almost unchanged.

  The one hundred mile drive from Colombo took us five hours. The gearshift was giving trouble, the horn was fading, and the engine heated up so fast we had to stop every twenty minutes to cool off and refill the radiator. We came along a road that climbed five thousand feet in thirty miles. Eventually the transmission broke in second gear, and the last miles were driven praying we wouldn’t have to stop, not for oncoming trucks and buses, not for the numerous May Day parades along the mountain roads. The car stalled a mile away from the house and we walked under the thunder clouds that made the dark tea bushes brighter, through the lines of pluckers, Sunil carrying his Colombo whiskey and Susan and I some bags of food.

  In a wet shirt and with a headache it was good to walk. Twenty degrees cooler up here than in Colombo. And a sourceless light that seems to brighten the landscape from underneath, as if yellow flowers in the garden are leaking into wet air. Dampness hangs over the house, while three of us and one servant rattle around this huge long bungalow from which all furniture has been sent to be upholstered save for a few cane chairs, and where the loudest noise is the excited breathing of two dogs.

  An hour later I am standing in the hall with Susan when I hear a pistol shot. Blue waves of flame. The house—hit by lightning, hit at the fuse-box on the wall just above my head. I am so shaken I act calmly for the rest of the afternoon. Lightning has never touched this house before even though, perched on top of a tea estate, it seems an obvious target. The bolt is a signal for the end of quietness and the weather bursts open windows and steps into hallways. During the long evening we play scrabble, shouting out scores, almost unable to be heard over the stereophonic field of the rain.

  * * *

  We wake to a silence. Now the long quiet mornings. Susan moves up and down halls to the kitchens, organizing meals, reorganizing after the chaos of the first monsoon storm (burned out fuse-boxes, knocked down telephone wires, chicken wires, dismantled gardens).

  The dining room doors open to the wet lawn and the francisco bushes. Their blossoms, like torn blue and white paper, release perfume into this room. When the dogs bark, eight or so parakeets swerve out of the guava tree and disappear over the cliff of the hill. Across the valley, a waterfall stumbles down. In a month or two the really hard rains will come for eighteen hours a day and that waterfall will once again become tough as a glacier and wash away the road. But now it looks as delicate as the path of a white butterfly in a long-exposed photograph.

  I can leave this table, walk ten yards out of the house, and be surrounded by v
ersions of green. The most regal green being the tea bush which is regal also in its symmetrical efficient planting. Such precision would be jungle in five years if left alone. In the distance the tea pickers move, in another silence, like an army. The roads weave and whorl away—bright yellow under the grey sky. The sun, invisible, struggles up somewhere. This is the colour of landscape, this is the silence, that surrounded my parents’ marriage.

  “WHAT WE THINK OF MARRIED LIFE”

  She is very gentle, Susan, my half-sister. Almost utterly humble. So sitting here with Susan and Sunil I find myself surprised they are younger than me. She has this calmness and quietness as opposed to the anger and argument which I see in myself, my brother, and two sisters.

  I have been thinking that if she has Ondaatje blood and no Gratiaen blood then obviously it is from my mother’s side that we got a sense of the dramatic, the tall stories, the determination to now and then hold the floor. The ham in us. While from my father, in spite of his temporary manic public behaviour, we got our sense of secrecy, the desire to be reclusive.

  My father loved books and so did my mother, but my father swallowed the heart of books and kept that knowledge and emotion to himself. My mother read her favourite poems out loud, would make us read plays together and acted herself, even running a small dance and theatre school that people still remember in Colombo. Her reading out loud demanded the whole room, and while young her grace and dancing caught everyone’s attention. Later it was her voice, her stories with that husky wheezing laugh that almost drowned out the punch lines. She belonged to a type of Ceylonese family whose women would take the minutest reaction from another and blow it up into a tremendously exciting tale, then later use it as an example of someone’s strain of character. If anything kept their generation alive it was this recording by exaggeration. Ordinary tennis matches would be mythologized to the extent that one player was so drunk that he almost died on the court. An individual would be eternally remembered for one small act that in five years had become so magnified he was just a footnote below it. The silence of the tea estates and no doubt my mother’s sense of theatre and romance (fed by vociferous readings of J. M. Barrie and Michael Arlen) combined the edited delicacies of fiction with the last era of a colonial Ceylon.

  My father’s actions were minimal and more private. Although he tormented his own father’s rules of decorum he simultaneously and almost secretly valued the elements of honour and gentleness. He reportedly couldn’t stand his mother-in-law, Lalla, for what he saw as her crudeness, although the stories about my father are closer in style to those about Lalla than anyone else. While we used to love rushing around the house and estate at Lalla’s insistence to catch the dog Chindit, who had run off with her false breast, my father would retire to a book or his office acutely embarrassed. Either that, or, and of this we were never sure, he would secretly train the dog to torment his mother-in-law by such acts. We know he encouraged Chindit to fart whenever possible in her vicinity and by raising his eyebrows would surreptitiously make us feel it was she who made us recoil to the other end of the room.

  My father’s dramatic nature pleased only himself and sometimes the four of us. Or he would tell a hilarious joke in everyone’s presence that would convulse just my mother and himself.

  My mother loved, always loved, even in her last years long after their divorce, his secretive and slightly crooked humour. It bound them together probably more than anything. They were in a world to themselves, genial with everyone but sharing a code of humour. And if there was to be drama in their lives my father preferred it to be just between the two of them. My mother on the other hand would somehow select the one action that would be remembered by everyone in the vicinity of the tea estate and would reach Colombo in twenty-four hours. On one of the last occasions that my mother left my father, after the tirade that was brief, loud, alcoholically one-sided, she told him she was leaving him at 11:00 P.M. She bundled us all up and, after my father grabbed the car key and threw it into the darkness of a hundred tea bushes, she got four servants and with each of us on a pair of shoulders, marched off through tea estate and dense jungle in utter darkness to a neighbouring home five miles away.

  It was she who instilled theatre in all of us. She was determined that we would each be as good an actor as she was. Whenever my father would lapse into one of his alcoholic states, she would send the three older children (I would be asleep—too young, and oblivious) into my father’s room where by now he could hardly talk let alone argue. The three of them, well coached, would perform with tears streaming, “Daddy, don’t drink, daddy, if you love us, don’t drink,” while my mother waited outside and listened. My father, I hope, too far gone to know the extent of the wars against him. These moments embarrassed my older brother and sister terribly; for days after they felt guilty and miserable. Gillian, the youngest of the three, threw herself with eagerness into these one-act plays and when they returned to the living room my mother would pat her on the back and say, “Well done Gillian—you were by far the best.”

  Her motive was to cure my father of manic alcoholic consumption. Those were moments of total war as far as she was concerned. During all the months of soberness the two of them were equals, very close and full of humour, but in his moments of darkness she drew on every play she had been in or had read and used it as a weapon, knowing that when my father sobered up this essentially shy man would be appalled to hear how my mother had over-reacted. Her behaviour in his drunken moments was there to shock him in his times of gentleness when he loved muted behaviour. Whatever plays my mother acted in publicly were not a patch on the real-life drama she directed and starred in during her married life. If Mervyn was to humiliate her she could embarrass him by retaliating with some grand gesture—whether it was a celebrated walk through the jungle or actually holding her breath until she fainted at the Kitulgala resthouse when she saw him beginning to drink too much, so that he had to stop and drive her home.

  His victories came when he was sober. Then he would discover some outrageous thing she had done and begin to mend fences. Within a week, by his charm and wit, he would have made my mother’s behaviour more ludicrous than his—a bomb to disturb a butterfly, till he seemed the more sane of the two. In this way an incident, which most had felt could never be surmounted and which no doubt would destroy the marriage, was cemented over. Rather than being jealous, my mother was never happier and for the next six months or so they were delightful company, wonderful parents. And then with the first drink, after which he could almost never stop, the wars would begin again.

  Finally, when it all came to an end, she played her last scene with him. She arrived at the divorce court in a stunning white dress and hat (she had never worn a hat in her life before) and calmly asked for a divorce, demanding no alimony—nothing for her and nothing for the children. She got a job at the Grand Oriental Hotel, trained herself as a housekeeper-manager and supported us through schools by working in hotels in Ceylon and then England till she died. The easy life of the tea estate and the theatrical wars were over. They had come a long way in fourteen years from being the products of two of the best known and wealthiest families in Ceylon: my father now owning only a chicken farm at Rock Hill, my mother working in a hotel.

  Before my mother left for England in 1949 she went to a fortune-teller who predicted that while she would continue to see each of her children often for the rest of her life, she would never see them all together again. This turned out to be true. Gillian stayed in Ceylon with me, Christopher and Janet went to England. I went to England, Christopher went to Canada, Gillian came to England, Janet went to America, Gillian returned to Ceylon, Janet returned to England, I went to Canada. Magnetic fields would go crazy in the presence of more than three Ondaatjes. And my father. Always separate until he died, away from us. The north pole.

  DIALOGUES

  (i)

  “Once he nearly killed us. Not you. But the three older children. He was driving the Ford and he was
drunk and taking the corners with great swerves—and you know those up-country roads. We began by cheering but soon we were terrified. Yelling at him to stop. Finally on one corner he almost went off the cliff. Two wheels had gone over the edge and the car hung there caught on the axle. Below us was a terrific plunge down the mountainside. We were in the back seat and once we calmed down, we looked in the front seat and saw that Daddy was asleep. He had passed out. But to us he was asleep and that seemed much worse. Much too casual.

  As he had been driving he was on the right hand side—the side which was about to tilt over, so we all scrambled to the left. But if we climbed into the front seat and got out then he would have gone over by himself. We didn’t know what to do. We had passed some tea pluckers a few hundred yards back and the only hope was that they might be able to lift the car back onto the road. We decided the lightest one should go but Janet and Gillian got into a fight as to who was the lightest. They were both sensitive about their weight at the time. Finally Gillian went off and Janet and I tried to pull him towards the passenger seat.

  When he wakened the car had already been lifted and moved to the centre of the road. He felt better, he said, started the car up and told us to hop in. But none of us would get into the car again.”

  (ii)