Running in the Family

by Michael Ondaatje

  THE BABYLON STAKES

  “The Wall Street crash had a terrible effect on us. Many of the horses had to be taken over by the military.”

  The only occupation that could hope to avert one from drink and romance was gambling. In India only the aristocracy gambled; in Ceylon the bankers and lime-burners and fishmongers and the leisured class would spend their afternoons, shoulder to shoulder, betting compulsively. The rulers of the country genuinely believed that betting eliminated strikes; men had to work in order to gamble.

  If it was not horses it was crows. A crippled aunt, who could not get to the track, began the fashion of betting on which crow would leave a wall first. This proved so popular that the government considered putting a bounty on crows. In any case, soon after the time Gertie Garvin trained a pet crow, bird-gambling proved to be untrustworthy. But the real stars were involved with racing: horses such as “Mordenis,” jockeys like “Fordyce,” the trainer “Captain Fenwick.” There were racetracks all over the island. If you sat in the grandstand all bets were five rupees. Then there was the two-rupee enclosure and finally, in the middle of the track, the “gandhi enclosure” where the poorest stood. “From the grandstand you could watch them leaving like ants a good hour before the last race, having lost all their money.”

  The most dangerous track profession was starter of the race, and one of the few who survived was Clarence de Fonseka, who was famous for knowing every horse in the country by sight. As starter, he positioned himself at the far end of the track. And to forestall threats of death from the crowd in the gandhi enclosure, Clarence kept his fastest horse near him at all times. If a popular horse lost, the mob would race across the field to the starting post to tear him apart. Clarence would then leap onto his horse and gallop down the track in solitary splendour.

  Racing concerned everyone. During the whole month of August my mother would close down her dancing school and go to the races. So would my grandmother, Lalla. Her figure at the races is ingrained in several people’s memories: a large hat at a rakish angle that she wore with no consideration for anyone behind her, one hand on her hip, one hand on her hat, and a blue jacaranda blossom pinned to the shoulder of her dusty black dress, looking off into the drama of the one-hundred-yard stretch with the intensity of one preparing for the coming of the Magi. When the races were over, groups would depart for dinner, dance till early morning, go swimming and have a breakfast at the Mount Lavinia Hotel. Then to bed till noon when it was time for the races once more. The culmination of the season was the Governor’s Cup stakes. Even during the war the August races were not to be postponed. Ceylon could have been invaded during the late afternoon as most of the Light Infantry was at the race track during these hours. Many of my relatives owned a horse or two, which languished in comfort for much of the year and got trotted out for the August race meet. My grandmother’s horse, “Dickman Delight,” refused to step out of the stable if it was at all muddy. She would bet vast sums on her horse knowing that one day he would surprise everyone and win. The day this eventually happened, my grandmother was up north. She received a telegram in the early morning which read: “Rain over Colombo” so she put her money on another horse. Dickman Delight galloped to victory on dry turf. Japanese planes had attacked Galle Face Green in Colombo and the telegram should have read: “Raid over Colombo.” Dickman Delight never won again.

  Most people tried to own a horse, some even pooled their money, each “owning a leg.” The desire was not so much to have horse-sense but to be involved with the ceremonial trappings. Percy Lewis de Soysa, for instance, took great care selecting his colours, which were gold and green. In his youth, while successfully entertaining a woman at a Cambridge restaurant, he had ordered a bottle of champagne and at the end of the evening whispered to her that when he eventually owned a horse his racing colours would be taken from the label of the bottle. “Searchlight Gomez” chose his colours, pink and black, after a certain lady’s underwear and was proud of it.

  There were races all year long. The Monsoon Meet in May, the Hakgalle Stakes in February, the Nuwara Eliya Cup in August. Some of the horses had become so inbred that jockeys could no longer insure themselves. The Babylon Stakes was banned after one horse, “Forced Potato,” managed to bite a jockey and then leapt the fence to attack as many as it could in the jeering gandhi enclosure. But the jockeys had their perks. Gambling was so crucial to the economy of certain households that semi-respectable women slept with jockeys to get closer to “the horse’s mouth.”

  If the crowd or the horses did not cause trouble, The Searchlight, a magazine published by the notorious Mr Gomez, did. “One of those scurrilous things,” it attacked starters and trainers and owners and provided gossip to be carefully read between races. Nobody wished to appear in it and everyone bought it. It sold for five cents but remained solvent, as the worst material could be toned down only with bribes to the editor. “Searchlight Gomez,” went to jail once, and that for too good a joke. Every January issue featured the upcoming events for the year. One year he listed, under October 3rd, Hayley and Kenny’s Annual Fire. This blatant but accurate reference to the way fire insurance was used to compensate for sagging trade was not appreciated and he was sued.

  The Gasanawa group tried to take in all the races. In December they drove down to the Galle Gymkhana, stopping on the way to order oysters and have a swim at Ambalangoda. “Sissy,” Francis’ sister, “was always drowning herself because she was an exhibitionist.” The men wore tweed, the women wore their best crinolines. After the races they would return to Ambalangoda, pick up the oysters “which we swallowed with wine if we lost or champagne if we won.” Couples then paired off casually or with great complexity and danced in a half-hearted manner to the portable gramophone beside the cars. Ambalangoda was the centre for devil dances and exorcism rites, but this charmed group was part of another lost world. The men leaned their chins against the serene necks of the women, danced a waltz or two, slid oysters into their partner’s mouths. The waves on the beach collected champagne corks. Men who had lost fortunes laughed frantically into the night. A woman from the village who was encountered carrying a basket of pineapples was persuaded to trade that for a watch removed from a wrist. Deeper inland at midnight, the devil dances began, drums portioned the night. Trucks carrying horses to the next meet glared their headlights as they passed the group by the side of the road. The horses, drummers, everyone else, seemed to have a purpose. The devil dances cured sickness, catarrh, deafness, aloneness. Here the gramophone accompanied a seduction or an arousal, it spoke of meadows and “little Spanish towns” or “a small hotel,” a “blue room.”

  A hand cupped the heel of a woman who wished to climb a tree to see the stars more clearly. The men laughed into their tumblers. They all went swimming again with just the modesty of the night. An arm touched a face. A foot touched a stomach. They could have almost drowned or fallen in love and their lives would have been totally changed during any one of those evenings.

  Then, everyone very drunk, the convoy of cars would race back to Gasanawa in the moonlight crashing into frangipani, almond trees, or slipping off the road to sink slowly up to the door handles in a paddy field.

  TROPICAL GOSSIP

  “Darling, come here quickly. There’s trouble behind the tennis court. I think Frieda’s fainted. Look—Craig is pulling her up.”

  “No, darling, leave them alone.”

  It seems that most of my relatives at some time were attracted to somebody they shouldn’t have been. Love affairs rainbowed over marriages and lasted forever—so it often seemed that marriage was the greater infidelity. From the twenties until the war nobody really had to grow up. They remained wild and spoiled. It was only during the second half of my parents’ generation that they suddenly turned to the real world. Years later, for instance, my uncle Noel would return to Ceylon as a Q.C. to argue for the lives of friends from his youth who had tried to overthrow the government.

  But earlier, during their
flaming youth, this energy formed complex relationships, though I still cannot break the code of how “interested in” or “attracted” they were to each other. Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships. There are stones of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds, and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other’s presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character—the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides. It was almost impossible for a couple to do anything without rumour leaving their shoulders like a flock of messenger pigeons.

  Where is the intimate and truthful in all this? Teenager and Uncle. Husband and lover. A lost father in his solace. And why do I want to know of this privacy? After the cups of tea, coffee, public conversations … I want to sit down with someone and talk with utter directness, want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover.

  KEGALLE (i)

  My paternal grandfather—Philip—was a strict, aloof man. Most people preferred his brother Aelian who was good-natured and helpful to everyone. Both were lawyers but my grandfather went on to make huge sums of money in land deals and retired as he said he would at the age of forty. He built the family home, “Rock Hill,” on a prime spot of land right in the centre of the town of Kegalle.

  “Your great uncle Aelian was a very generous man,” says Stanley Suraweera. “I wanted to learn Latin and he offered to tutor me from four until five every morning. I’d go to his house by cart every day and he would be up, waiting for me.” In later years Aelian was to have several heart attacks. In one hospital he was given so much morphine that he became addicted to it.

  My grandfather lived at Rock Hill for most of his life and ignored everybody in Kegalle social circles. He was immensely wealthy. Most people considered him a snob, but with his family he was a very loving man. The whole family kissed each other goodnight and good morning, a constant tradition in the house—no matter what chaos my father was causing at the time. Family arguments were buried before bedtime and buried once more first thing in the morning.

  So here was “Bampa,” as we called him, determined to be a good father and patriarch, spreading a protective wing over his more popular brother Aelian, and living in his empire—acres of choice land in the heart of Kegalle. He was dark and his wife was very white, and a rival for my grandmother’s hand remarked that he hoped the children would be striped. The whole family lived in terror of him. Even his strong-willed wife could not blossom till after his death. Like some other Ondaatjes, Bampa had a weakness for pretending to be “English” and, in his starched collars and grey suits, was determined in his customs. My brother, who was only four years old then, still remembers painfully strict meals at Rock Hill with Bampa grinding his teeth at one end of the table—as if his carefully built ceremonies were being evaded by a weak-willed family. It was only in the afternoons when, dressed in sarong and vest, he went out for walks over his property (part of a mysterious treatment for diabetes), that he seemed to become a real part of the landscape around him.

  Every two years he would visit England, buy crystal, and learn the latest dances. He was a perfect dancer. Numerous aunts remember him inviting them out in London and taking great pleasure in performing the most recent dance steps with a natural ease. Back home there was enough to worry about. There was Aelian, who was continually giving his money away to ecclesiastical causes, the cousin who was mauled to death by his underfed racehorse, and four star-crossed sisters who were secret drinkers. Most Ondaatjes liked liquor, sometimes to excess. Most of them were hot tempered—though they blamed diabetes for this whenever possible. And most were genetically attracted to a family called Prins and had to be talked out of marriage—for the Prins brought bad luck wherever they went.

  My grandfather died before the war and his funeral was spoken about with outrage and envy for months afterwards. He thought he had organized it well. All the women wore long black dresses and imported champagne was drunk surreptitiously from teacups. But his hope of departing with decorum collapsed before he was put into the ground. His four sisters and my recently liberated grandmother got into a loud argument over whether to pay the men two or three rupees to carry the coffin up the steep slopes to the cemetery. Awkward mourners who had come from Colombo waited as silent as my supine grandfather while the argument blazed from room to room and down the halls of Rock Hill. My grandmother peeled off her long black gloves in fury and refused to proceed with the ceremony, then slid them on with the aid of a daughter when it seemed the body would never leave the house. My father, who was overseeing the cooling of the champagne, was nowhere in sight. My mother and Uncle Aelian retired in a fit of giggles to the garden under the mangosteen tree. All this occurred on the afternoon of September 12, 1938. Aelian died of his liver problems in April of 1942.

  * * *

  For the next decade Rock Hill was seldom used by my family and my father was not to return to it for some years. By that time my parents were divorced and my father had lost various jobs. Bampa had willed the land to his grandchildren but my father, whenever he needed to, would sell or give away sections of land so that houses were gradually built up along the perimeter of the estate. My father returned alone to Kegalle in the late forties and took up farming. He lived quite simply at that time, separate from the earlier circle of friends, and my sister Gillian and I spent most of our holidays with him. By 1950 he had married again and was living with his wife and his two children from his second marriage, Jennifer and Susan.

  He ended up, in those later years, concentrating on chickens. His dipsomania would recur every two months or so. Between bouts he would not touch a drink. Then he would be offered one, take it, and would not or could not stop drinking for three or four days. During that time he could do nothing but drink. Humorous and gentle when sober, he changed utterly and would do anything to get alcohol. He couldn’t eat, had to have a bottle on him at all times. If his new wife Maureen had hidden a bottle, he would bring out his rifle and threaten to kill her. He knew, even when sober, that he would need to drink again, and so buried bottles all around the estate. In the heart of his drunkenness he would remember where the bottles were. He would go into the fowl run, dig under chicken straw, and pull out a half bottle. The cement niches on the side of the house held so many bottles that from the side the building resembled a wine cellar.

  He talked to no one on those days, although he recognized friends, was aware of everything that was going on. He had to be at the peak of his intelligence in order to remember exactly where the bottles were so he could outwit his wife and family. Nobody could stop him. If Maureen managed to destroy the bottles of gin he had hidden he would drink methylated spirits. He drank until he collapsed and passed out. Then he would waken and drink again. Still no food. Sleep. Get up and have one more shot and then he was finished. He would not drink again for about two months, not until the next bout.

  The day my father died, Stanley Suraweera, now a Proctor at Kegalle, was in Court when a messenger brought him the note:

  Mervyn has dropped dead. What shall I do? Maureen.

  * * *

  We had spent three days in Upcot in beautiful tea country with my half-sister Susan. On the way back to Colombo we drove through the Kadugannawa Pass and stopped at Kegalle. The old wooden bridge that only my father drove over without fear (“God loves a drunk” he would say to anyone who sat by him white with terror) had been replaced with a concrete one.

  What to us had been a lovely spacious house was now small and dark, fading into the landscape. A Sinhalese family occupied Rock Hill. Only the mangosteen tree, which I practically lived in as a child during its season of fruit, was full and strong. At the back, the kitul tree still leaned against the kitchen—tall, with tiny yellow berries which the polecat used to love. Onc
e a week it would climb up and spend the morning eating the berries and come down drunk, would stagger over the lawn pulling up flowers or come into the house to up-end drawers of cutlery and serviettes. Me and my polecat, my father said after one occasion when their drunks coincided, my father lapsing into his songs—baila or heartbreaking Rodgers and Hart or his own version of “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean”—

  My whiskey comes over the ocean

  My brandy comes over the sea

  But my beer comes from F.X. Pereira

  So F.X. Pereira for me.

  F.X.… F.X.…

  F.X. Pereira for me, for me.…

  He emerged out of his bedroom to damn whoever it was that was playing the piano—to find the house empty—Maureen and the kids having left, and the polecat walking up and down over the keys breaking the silence of the house, oblivious to his human audience; and my father wishing to celebrate this companionship, discovering all the bottles gone, unable to find anything, finally walking up to the kerosene lamp hanging in the centre of the room at head level, and draining that liquid into his mouth. He and his polecat.

  Gillian remembered some of the places where he hid bottles. Here she said, and here. Her family and my family walked around the house, through the depressed garden of guava trees, plantains, old forgotten flowerbeds. Whatever “empire” my grandfather had fought for had to all purposes disappeared.

  DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT MATISSE