Running in the Family Read online

  TABULA ASIAE

  On my brother’s wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The result of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations—by Ptolemy, Mercator, François Valentyn, Mortier, and Heydt—growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. Amoeba, then stout rectangle, and then the island as we know it now, a pendant off the ear of India. Around it, a blue-combed ocean busy with dolphin and sea-horse, cherub and compass. Ceylon floats on the Indian Ocean and holds its naive mountains, drawings of cassowary and boar who leap without perspective across imagined “desertum” and plain.

  At the edge of the maps the scrolled mantling depicts ferocious slipper-footed elephants, a white queen offering a necklace to natives who carry tusks and a conch, a Moorish king who stands amidst the power of books and armour. On the south-west corner of some charts are satyrs, hoof deep in foam, listening to the sound of the island, their tails writhing in the waves.

  The maps reveal rumours of topography, the routes for invasion and trade, and the dark mad mind of travellers’ tales appears throughout Arab and Chinese and medieval records. The island seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as its shape—Serendip, Ratnapida (“island of gems”), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon—the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language.

  This pendant, once its shape stood still, became a mirror. It pretended to reflect each European power till newer ships arrived and spilled their nationalities, some of whom stayed and intermarried—my own ancestor arriving in 1600, a doctor who cured the residing governor’s daughter with a strange herb and was rewarded with land, a foreign wife, and a new name which was a Dutch spelling of his own. Ondaatje. A parody of the ruling language. And when his Dutch wife died, marrying a Sinhalese woman, having nine children, and remaining. Here. At the centre of the rumour. At this point on the map.

  ST. THOMAS’ CHURCH

  In Colombo a church faces west into the sea. We drive along Reclamation Street through markets and boutiques. The church ahead of us is painted a pale dirty blue. Below us, an oil-tanker dwarfs the harbour and the shops. We get out, followed by the children. A path about twelve feet wide bordered by plantain trees. The gothic doors give a sense, as all church doors do, of being wheeled open. Inside are wooden pews and their geometrical shadows and stone floors that whisper against the children’s bare feet. We spread out.

  After all these generations the coming darkness makes it necessary to move fast in order to read the brass plaques on the walls. The first ones are too recent, 19th century. Then, by the communion rail, I see it—cut across the stone floor. To kneel on the floors of a church built in 1650 and see your name chiseled in large letters so that it stretches from your fingertips to your elbow in some strange way removes vanity, eliminates the personal. It makes your own story a lyric. So the sound which came immediately out of my mouth as I half-gasped and called my sister spoke all that excitement of smallness, of being overpowered by stone.

  What saved me was the lack of clarity. The slab was five feet long, three feet wide, a good portion of it had worn away. We remained on our knees in that fading light, asked the children to move their shadows, and peered sideways to try to catch the faint ridge of letters worn away by the traffic of feet. The light leaned into the chiseled area like frail sand. To the right of that slab was another; we had been standing on it totally unaware, as if in someone’s rifle sight. Gillian wrote on a brown envelope as I read

  Sacred to the memory of Natalia Asarrapa—wife of Philip Jurgen Ondaatje. Born 1797, married 1812, died 1822, age 25 years.

  She was fifteen! That can’t be right. Must be. Fifteen when she married and twenty-five when she died. Perhaps that was the first wife—before he married Jacoba de Melho? Probably another branch of the family.

  We carry six ledgers out of the church into the last of the sunlight and sit on the vicarage steps to begin reading. Lifting the ancient pages and turning them over like old, skeletal leaves. The black script must have turned brown over a hundred years ago. The thick pages foxed and showing the destruction caused by silverfish, scars among the immaculate recordings of local history and formal signatures. We had not expected to find more than one Ondaatje here but the stones and pages are full of them. We had been looking for the Reverend Jurgen Ondaatje—a translator and eventual chaplain in Colombo from 1835 until 1847. It seems, however, as if every Ondaatje for miles around flocked here to be baptised and married. When Jurgen died his son Simon took his place and was the last Tamil Colonial Chaplain of Ceylon.

  Simon was the oldest of four brothers. Every Sunday morning they came to this church in carriages with their wives and children and after the service retired to the vicarage for drinks and lunch. Just before the meal, talk would erupt into a violent argument and each brother would demand to have his carriage brought round, climb into it with his hungry family and ride off to his own home, each in a different direction.

  For years they tried but were never able to have a meal together. Each of them was prominent in his own field and was obviously too didactic and temperamental to agree with his brothers on any subject of discussion. There was nothing one could speak about that would not infringe on another’s area of interest. If the subject was something as innocent as flowers, then Dr. William Charles Ondaatje, who was the Ceylonese Director of the Botanical Gardens, would throw scorn on any opinion and put the others in their place. He had introduced the olive to Ceylon. Finance or military talk was Matthew Ondaatje’s area, and law or scholarship exercised Philip de Melho Jurgen’s acid tongue. The only one who had full freedom was the Reverend Simon who said whatever he felt like during the sermon, knowing his brothers could not interrupt him. No doubt he caught hell as soon as he entered the vicarage next door for what he hoped would be a peaceful lunch. Whenever a funeral or baptism occurred, however, all the brothers would be there. The church records show Simon’s name witnessing them all in a signature very like my father’s.

  We stand outside the church in twilight. The building has stood here for over three hundred years, in the palm of monsoons, through seasonal droughts and invasions from other countries. Its grounds were once beautiful. Lights begin to come on slowly below us in the harbour. As we are about to get into the Volks, my niece points to a grave and I start walking through the brush in my sandals. “Watch out for snakes!” God. I make a quick leap backwards and get into the car. Night falls quickly during the five minute drive back to the house. Sit down in my room and transcribe names and dates from the various envelopes into a notebook. When I finish there will be that eerie moment when I wash my hands and see very clearly the deep grey colour of old paper dust going down the drain.

  MONSOON NOTEBOOK (i)

  To jungles and gravestones.… Reading torn 100-year-old newspaper clippings that come apart in your hands like wet sand, information tough as plastic dolls. Watched leopards sip slowly, watched the crow sitting restless on his branch peering about with his beak open. Have seen the outline of a large fish caught and thrown in the curl of a wave, been where nobody wears socks, where you wash your feet before you go to bed, where I watch my sister who alternatively reminds me of my father, mother and brother. Driven through rainstorms that flood the streets for an hour and suddenly evaporate, where sweat falls in the path of this ballpoint, where the jak fruit rolls across your feet in the back of the jeep, where there are eighteen ways of describing the smell of a durian, where bullocks hold up traffic and steam after the rains.

  Have sat down to meals and noticed the fan stir in all the spoons on the dining table. And driven that jeep so often I didn’t have time to watch the country slide by thick with event, for everything came directly to me and passed me like snow. The black thick feather of bus exhaust everyone was sentimental against, the man vomiting out o
f a window, the pig just dead having his hairs burnt off on the Canal Road and old girlfriends from childhood who now towel their kids dry on the other side of the SSC pool, and my watch collecting sea under the glass and gleaming with underwater phosphorus by my bed at night, the inside of both my feet blistering in my first week from the fifteen-cent sandals and the obsessional sarong buying in Colombo, Kandy, Jaffna, Trincomalee, the toddy drink I got subtly smashed on by noon so I slept totally unaware of my dreams. And women and men with naked feet under the dinner table, and after the party the thunderstorm we walked through for five seconds from porch to car, thoroughly soaked and by the time we had driven ten minutes—without headlights which had been stolen that afternoon at the pool—we were dry just from the midnight heat inside the vehicle and the ghosts of steam cruising disorganized off the tarmac roads, and the man sleeping on the street who objected when I woke him each of us talking different languages, me miming a car coming around the corner and hitting him and he, drunk, perversely making me perform this action for him again and again, and I got back into the car fully wet once more and again dry in five miles. And the gecko on the wall waving his tail stiffly his jaws full of dragonfly whose wings symmetrically disappeared into his mouth—darkness filling the almost transparent body, and a yellow enamel-assed spider crossing the bidet and the white rat my daughter claims she saw in the toilet at the Maskeliya tennis club.

  I witnessed everything. One morning I would wake and just smell things for the whole day, it was so rich I had to select senses. And still everything moved slowly with the assured fateful speed of a coconut falling on someone’s head, like the Jaffna train, like the fan at low speed, like the necessary sleep in the afternoon with dreams blinded by toddy.

  TONGUE

  In the early afternoon several children and I walk for an hour along the beach—from the foot of the garden at Uswetakeiyawa, past the wrecks, to the Pegasus Reef Hotel. After twenty minutes, with sun burning just the right side of our faces and bodies, climbing up and down the dunes, we are exhausted, feel drunk. One of my children talking about some dream she had before leaving Canada. Spray breaking and blazing white. Mad dog heat. On our left the cool dark of village trees. Crabs veer away from our naked steps. I keep counting the children, keep feeling that one is missing. We look down, away from the sun. So that we all suddenly stumble across the body.

  From the back it looks like a crocodile. It is about eight feet long. The snout however is blunt, not pointed, as if a crocodile’s nose has been chopped off and the sharp edges worn smooth by tides. For a moment I actually believe this. I don’t want the others going too close in case it is not dead. It has a double row of pointed scales on its tail, and the grey body is covered in yellow spots—with black centres so they form yellow rings. He looks fat and bulky. No one from the village about ten yards away seems to have noticed him. I realize it is a kabaragoya. In English a sub-aquatic monitor. He is dangerous and can whip you to death with his tail. This creature must have been washed out to sea by a river and then drifted back onto the beach.

  Kabaragoyas and thalagoyas are common in Ceylon and are seldom found anywhere else in the world. The kabaragoya is large, the size of an average crocodile, and the thalagoya smaller—a cross between an iguana and a giant lizard. Sir John Maundeville, one of the first travellers to write of Ceylon, speaks of their “schorte thyes and grete Nayles.” And Robert Knox says of the kabaragoya that “he hath a blew forked tongue like a string, which he puts forth and hisseth and gapeth.” The kabaragoya is in fact a useful scavenger and is now protected by law as it preys on fresh water crabs that undermine and ruin the bunds of paddy fields. The only thing that will scare it is a wild boar.

  The thalagoya, on the other hand, will eat snails, beetles, centipedes, toads, skinks, eggs and young birds, and is not averse to garbage. It is also a great climber, and can leap forty feet from a tree to the ground, breaking its fall by landing obliquely with its chest, belly and tail. In Kegalle the thalagoyas would climb trees and leap onto the roof or into the house.

  The thalagoya has a rasping tongue that “catches” and hooks objects. There is a myth that if a child is given thalagoya tongue to eat he will become brilliantly articulate, will always speak beautifully, and in his speech be able to “catch” and collect wonderful, humorous information.

  There is a way to eat the tongue. The thalagoya is killed by placing it on the ground, doubling its head under the throat, and striking the nape with a clenched fist. The tongue should be sliced off and eaten as soon as possible after the animal dies. You take a plantain or banana, remove the skin and cut it lengthwise in half, place the grey tongue between two pieces of banana making a sandwich, and then swallow the thing without chewing, letting it slide down the throat whole. Many years later this will result in verbal brilliance, though sometimes this will be combined with bad behaviour (the burning of furniture, etc.). I am not sure what other side effects there are apart from possible death.

  My Uncle Noel was given a thalagoya tongue. He spat half of it out, got very sick and nearly died. His mother, Lalla, who had a habit of throwing herself dangerously into such local practices, had insisted he eat it. In any case her son did become a brilliant lawyer and a great story teller, from eating just part of the tongue. My father, who was well aware of the legend, suggested we eat some when we were in the Ambalantota resthouse. One had just been killed there, having fallen through the roof. All the children hid screaming in the bathroom until it was time to leave.

  The thalagoya has other uses. It has the only flesh that can be kept down by a persistently vomiting patient and is administered to pregnant women for morning sickness. But as children we knew exactly what thalagoyas and kabaragoyas were good for. The kabaragoya laid its eggs in the hollows of trees between the months of January and April. As this coincided with the Royal-Thomian cricket match, we would collect them and throw them into the stands full of Royal students. These were great weapons because they left a terrible itch wherever they splashed on skin. We used the thalagoya to scale walls. We tied a rope around its neck and heaved it over a wall. Its claws could cling to any surface, and we pulled ourselves up the rope after it.

  About six months before I was born my mother observed a pair of kabaragoyas “in copula” at Pelmadulla. A reference is made to this sighting in A Coloured Atlas of Some Vertebrates from Ceylon, Vol. 2, a National Museums publication. It is my first memory.

  SWEET LIKE A CROW

  for Hetti Corea, 8 years old

  “The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world. It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line, or rhythm.”

  PAUL BOWLES

  Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed

  through a glass tube

  like someone has just trod on a peacock

  like wind howling in a coconut

  like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire

  across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,

  a vattacka being fried

  a bone shaking hands

  a frog singing at Carnegie Hall.

  Like a crow swimming in milk,

  like a nose being hit by a mango

  like the crowd at the Royal-Thomian match,

  a womb full of twins, a pariah dog

  with a magpie in its mouth

  like the midnight jet from Casablanca

  like Air Pakistan curry,

  a typewriter on fire, like a spirit in the gas

  which cooks your dinner,

  like a hundred pappadans being crunched, like someone

  uselessly trying to light 3 Roses matches in a dark room,

  the clicking sound of a reef when you put your head into the sea,

  a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience,

  the sound of a fan when someone throws brinjals at it,

  like pineapples being sliced in the Pettah market

  like betel juice hitting a butterfly in
mid-air

  like a whole village running naked onto the street

  and tearing their sarongs, like an angry family

  pushing a jeep out of the mud, like dirt on the needle,

  like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle

  like 3 old ladies locked in the lavatory

  like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep

  and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.

  THE KARAPOTHAS

  “This Ceylon part of the journey goes wearily! wearily! Tired out by being constantly disturbed all night—noisy sea, and noisier soda-bottle-popping planters, and the early dawn with crows and cocks.

  The brown people of this island seem to me odiously inquisitive and bothery-idiotic. All the while the savages go on grinning and chattering to each other.

  … The roads are intensely picturesque. Animals, apes, porcupine, hornbill, squirrel, pidgeons, and figurative dirt!”

  From the journals of Edward Lear in Ceylon, 1875

  “After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America—as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we’re rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.

  … Ceylon is an experience—but heavens, not a permanence.”

  D.H. Lawrence

  “All jungles are evil.”

  Leonard Woolf

  * * *

  I sit in a house on Buller’s Road. I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner. Looking out on overgrown garden and the two dogs who bark at everything, who fling themselves into the air towards bird and squirrel. Ants crawl onto the desk to taste whatever is placed here. Even my glass, which holds just ice water, has brought out a dozen who wade into the rim of liquid the tumbler leaves, checking it for sugar. We are back within the heat of Colombo, in the hottest month of the year. It is delicious heat. Sweat runs with its own tangible life down a body as if a giant egg has been broken onto our shoulders.