Running in the Family

by Michael Ondaatje

  The most comfortable hours are from 4 A.M. until about nine in the morning; the rest of the day heat walks the house as an animal hugging everybody. No one moves too far from the circumference of the fan. Rich Sinhalese families go up-country during April. Most of the events in the erotic literature of Asia, one suspects, must take place in the mountains, for sex is almost impossible in Colombo except in the early morning hours, and very few have been conceived during this month for the last hundred years.

  This is the heat that drove Englishmen crazy. D.H. Lawrence was in Ceylon for six weeks in 1922 as a guest of the Brewsters who lived in Kandy. Even though Kandy is several degrees cooler than Colombo, his cantankerous nature rose to the surface like sweat. He found the Sinhalese far too casual and complained about “the papaw-stinking buddhists.” On his first day the Brewsters took him for a walk around Kandy Lake. Achsah and Earl Brewster describe how Lawrence pulled out his silver watch and noticed that it had stopped. He went into a rage, heaving and pulling to break the chain, and threw the watch into the lake. The silver time-piece floated down and joined more significant unrecovered treasure buried by Kandyan kings.

  Heat disgraces foreigners. Yesterday, on the road from Kandy to Colombo we passed New Year’s festivities in every village—grease pole climbing, bicycle races with roadside crowds heaving buckets of water over the cyclists as they passed—everyone joining in the ceremonies during the blazing noon. But my kids, as we drove towards lowland heat, growing belligerent and yelling at each other to shut up, shut up, shut up.

  Two miles away from Buller’s Road lived another foreigner. Pablo Neruda. For two years during the thirties, he lived in Wellawatte while working for the Chilean Embassy. He had just escaped from Burma and Josie Bliss of “The widower’s tango” and in his Memoirs writes mostly about his pet mongoose. An aunt of mine remembers his coming to dinner and continually breaking into song, but many of his dark claustrophobic pieces in Residence on Earth were written here, poems that saw this landscape governed by a crowded surrealism—full of vegetable oppressiveness.

  Ceylon always did have too many foreigners … the “Karapothas” as my niece calls them—the beetles with white spots who never grew ancient here, who stepped in and admired the landscape, disliked the “inquisitive natives” and left. They came originally and overpowered the land obsessive for something as delicate as the smell of cinnamon. Becoming wealthy with spices. When ships were still approaching, ten miles out at sea, captains would spill cinnamon onto the deck and invite passengers on board to smell Ceylon before the island even came into view.

  “From Seyllan to Paradise is forty miles,” says a legend, “the sound of the fountains of Paradise is heard there.” But when Robert Knox was held captive on the island in the 17th century he remembered his time this way: “Thus was I left Desolate, Sick and in Captivity, having no earthly comforter, none but only He who looks down from Heaven to hear the groaning of the prisoners.”

  The leap from one imagination to the other can hardly be made; no more than Desdemona could understand truly the Moor’s military exploits. We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders. Othello’s talent was a decorated sleeve she was charmed by. This island was a paradise to be sacked. Every conceivable thing was collected and shipped back to Europe: cardamons, pepper, silk, ginger, sandalwood, mustard oil, palmyra root, tamarind, wild indigo, deers’ horns, elephant tusks, hog lard, calamander, coral, seven kinds of cinnamon, pearl and cochineal. A perfumed sea.

  And if this was paradise, it had a darker side. My ancestor, William Charles Ondaatje, knew of at least fifty-five species of poisons easily available to his countrymen, none of it, it seems, used against the invaders. Varieties of arsenic, juices from the centipede, scorpion, toad and glow-worm, jackal and “mungoose,” ground blue peacock stones—these could stun a man into death in minutes. “Croton seeds are used as a means to facilitate theft and other criminal intentions,” he wrote in his biological notebooks. In his most lyrical moment, in footnote 28 of his report on the Royal Botanic Gardens, William Charles steps away from the formal paper, out of the latinized garden, and, with the passion of a snail or bird, gifts us his heart.

  Here are majestic palms with their towering stems and graceful foliage, the shoe flower, the eatable passion flower. Here the water lily swims the rivers with expanded leaves—a prince of aquatic plants! The Aga-mula-naeti-wala, creeper without beginning or end, twines around trees and hangs in large festoons … and curious indeed these are from having neither leaves nor roots. Here is the winged thunbergia, the large snouted justicia, the mustard tree of Scripture with its succulent leaves and infinitesimal berries. The busy acacia with its sweet fragrance perfumes the dreary plains while other sad and un-named flowers sweeten the night with their blossoms which are shed in the dark.

  The journals delight in the beauty and the poisons, he invents “paper” out of indigenous vegetables, he tests local medicines and poisons on dogs and rats. “A man at Jaffna committed suicide by eating the neagala root.… A concoction of the plumbago is given to produce abortion.” Casually he lists the possible weapons around him. The karapothas crawled over them and admired their beauty.

  The island hid its knowledge. Intricate arts and customs and religious ceremonies moved inland away from the new cities. Only Robert Knox, held captive by a Kandyan king for twenty years, wrote of the island well, learning its traditions. His memoir, An Historical Relation, was used by Defoe as a psychological source for the ever inquisitive Robinson Crusoe. “If you peer into the features of Crusoe you will see something of the man who was not the lonely inhabitant of a desert island but who lived in an alien land among strangers, cut away from his own countrymen … and striving hard not only to return but also to employ profitably the single talent that had been given him.”

  Apart from Knox, and later Leonard Woolf in his novel, A Village in the Jungle, very few foreigners truly knew where they were.

  * * *

  I still believe the most beautiful alphabet was created by the Sinhalese. The insect of ink curves into a shape that is almost sickle, spoon, eyelid. The letters are washed blunt glass which betray no jaggedness. Sanskrit was governed by verticals, but its sharp grid features were not possible in Ceylon. Here the Ola leaves which people wrote on were too brittle. A straight line would cut apart the leaf and so a curling alphabet was derived from its Indian cousin. Moon coconut. The bones of a lover’s spine.

  When I was five—the only time in my life when my handwriting was meticulous—I sat in the tropical classrooms and learned the letters , and , repeating them page after page. How to write. The self-portrait of language. Lid on a cooking utensil that takes the shape of fire. Years later, looking into a biology textbook, I came across a whole page depicting the small bones in the body and recognized, delighted, the shapes and forms of the first alphabet I ever copied from Kumarodaya’s first grade reader.

  At St. Thomas’ College Boy School I had written “lines” as punishment. A hundred and fifty times. . I must not throw coconuts off the roof of Copplestone House. . We must not urinate again on Father Barnabus’ tires. A communal protest this time, the first of my socialist tendencies. The idiot phrases moved east across the page as if searching for longitude and story, some meaning or grace that would occur blazing after so much writing. For years I thought literature was punishment, simply a parade ground. The only freedom writing brought was as the author of rude expressions on walls and desks.

  In the 5th Century B.C. graffiti poems were scratched onto the rock face of Sigiriya—the rock fortress of a despot king. Short verses to the painted women in the frescoes which spoke of love in all its confusions and brokenness. Poems to mythological women who consumed and overcame mundane lives. The phrases saw breasts as perfect swans; eyes were long and clean as horizons. The anonymous poets returned again and again to the same metaphors. Beautiful false compare. These were the first folk poems of the country.

  When the government ro
unded up thousands of suspects during the Insurgency of 1971, the Vidyalankara campus of the University of Ceylon was turned into a prison camp. The police weeded out the guilty, trying to break their spirit. When the university opened again the returning students found hundreds of poems written on walls, ceilings, and in hidden corners of the campus. Quatrains and free verse about the struggle, tortures, the unbroken spirit, love of friends who had died for the cause. The students went around for days transcribing them into their notebooks before they were covered with whitewash and lye.

  * * *

  I spend hours talking with Ian Goonetileke, who runs the library at Peradeniya, about writers in Ceylon. He shows me a book he put together on the Insurgency. Because of censorship it had to be published in Switzerland. At the back of the book are ten photographs of charcoal drawings done by an insurgent on the walls of one of the houses he hid in. The average age of the insurgents was seventeen and thousands were killed by police and army. While the Kelani and Mahaveli rivers moved to the sea, heavy with bodies, these drawings were destroyed so that the book is now the only record of them. The artist is anonymous. The works seem as great as the Sigiriya frescoes. They too need to be eternal.

  He also shows me the poetry of Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, one of his close friends who drowned recently at Mount Lavinia. A powerful and angry poet. Lakdasa was two years ahead of me at St. Thomas’ College and though I never knew him we had studied in the same classrooms and with the same teachers.

  As I leave his house, Ian returns to the beautiful George Keyt drawings which fill his study and the books he has to publish in other countries in order to keep the facts straight, the legends uncovered. He is a man who knows history is always present, is the last hour of his friend Lakdasa blacking out in the blue sea at Mount Lavinia where the tourists go to sunbathe, is the burned down wall that held those charcoal drawings whose passionate conscience should have been cut into rock. The voices I didn’t know. The visions which are anonymous. And secret.

  This morning in the house on Buller’s Road I read the poetry of Lakdasa Wikkramasinha.

  Don’t talk to me about Matisse …

  the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio

  where the nude woman reclines forever

  on a sheet of blood

  Talk to me instead of the culture generally —

  how the murderers were sustained

  by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote

  villages the painters came, and our white-washed

  mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.

  HIGH FLOWERS

  The slow moving of her cotton

  in the heat.

  Hard shell of foot.

  She chops the yellow coconut

  the colour of Anuradhapura stone.

  The woman my ancestors ignored

  sits at the doorway chopping coconut

  cleaning rice.

  Her husband moves

  in the air between trees.

  The curved knife at his hip.

  In high shadows

  of coconut palms

  he grasps a path of rope above his head

  and another below him with his naked foot.

  He drinks the first sweet mouthful

  from the cut flower, then drains it

  into a narrow-necked pot

  and steps out to the next tree.

  Above the small roads of Wattala,

  Kalutara, the toddy tapper walks

  collecting the white liquid for tavern vats.

  Down here the light

  storms through branches

  and boils the street.

  Villagers stand in the shadow and drink

  the fluid from a coned leaf.

  He works fast to reach his quota

  before the maniac monsoon.

  The shape of knife and pot

  do not vary from 18th Century museum prints.

  In the village,

  a woman shuffles rice

  in a cane mat.

  Grit and husk separate

  are thrown to the sun.

  From his darkness among high flowers

  to this room contained by mud walls

  everything that is important occurs in shadow —

  her discreet slow moving his dreams of walking

  from tree to tree without ropes.

  It is not vanity which allows him this freedom

  but skill and habit, the curved knife

  his father gave him, it is the coolness up there

  — for the ground’s heat has not yet risen —

  which makes him forget necessity.

  Kings. Fortresses. Traffic in open sun.

  Within a doorway the woman

  turns in the old pleasure of darkness.

  In the high trees above her

  shadows eliminate

  the path he moves along.

  TO COLOMBO

  Returning from Sigiriya hills

  in their high green the grey

  animal fortress rock claws of stone

  rumours of wild boar

  pass

  paddy terraces

  bullocks brown men

  who rise knee deep like the earth

  out of the earth

  Sunlight Sunlight

  stop for the cool kurumba

  scoop the half formed white

  into our mouths

  remove

  tarpaulin walls of the jeep

  to receive lowland air

  on a bench behind sunlight

  the woman the coconuts the knife

  WOMEN LIKE YOU

  (the communal poem—Sigiri Graffiti, 5th century)

  They do not stir

  these ladies of the mountain

  do not give us

  the twitch of eyelids.

  The king is dead.

  They answer no one

  take the hard

  rock as lover.

  Women like you

  make men pour out their hearts

  ‘Seeing you I want

  no other life’

  The golden skins have

  caught my mind’

  who came here

  out of the bleached land

  climbed this fortress

  to adore the rock

  and with the solitude of the air

  behind them

  carved an alphabet

  whose motive was perfect desire

  wanting these portraits of women

  to speak

  and caress.

  Hundreds of small verses

  by different hands

  became one

  habit of the unrequited.

  Seeing you

  I want no other life

  and turn around

  to the sky

  and everywhere below

  jungle, waves of heat

  secular love

  Holding the new flowers

  a circle of

  first finger and thumb

  which is a window

  to your breast

  pleasure of the skin

  earring earring

  curl

  of the belly

  and then

  stone mermaid

  stone heart

  dry as a flower

  on rock

  you long eyed women

  the golden

  drunk swan breasts

  lips

  the long long eyes

  we stand against the sky

  I bring you

  a flute

  from the throat

  of a loon

  so talk to me

  of the used heart

  THE CINNAMON PEELER

  If I were a cinnamon peeler

  I would ride your bed

  and leave the yellow bark dust

  on your pillow.

  Your breasts and shoulders would reek

  you could never walk through markets

 
without the profession of my fingers

  floating over you. The blind would

  stumble certain of whom they approached

  though you might bathe

  under rain gutters, monsoon.

  Here on the upper thigh

  at this smooth pasture

  neighbour to your hair

  or the crease

  that cuts your back. This ankle.

  You will be known among strangers

  as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

  I could hardly glance at you

  before marriage

  never touch you

  —your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.

  I buried my hands

  in saffron, disguised them

  over smoking tar,

  helped the honey gatherers …

  *

  When we swam once

  I touched you in water

  and our bodies remained free,

  you could hold me and be blind of smell.

  You climbed the bank and said

  this is how you touch other women

  the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.

  And you searched your arms

  for the missing perfume

  and knew

  what good is it

  to be the lime burner’s daughter

  left with no trace

  as if not spoken to in the act of love

  as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

  You touched

  your belly to my hands

  in the dry air and said

  I am the cinnamon

  peeler’s wife. Smell me.

  KEGALLE (ii)

  The family home of Rock Hill was littered with snakes, especially cobras. The immediate garden was not so dangerous, but one step further and you would see several. The chickens that my father kept in later years were an even greater magnet. The snakes came for the eggs. The only deterrent my father discovered was ping-pong balls. He had crates of ping-pong balls shipped to Rock Hill and distributed them among the eggs. The snake would swallow the ball whole and be unable to digest it. There are several paragraphs on this method of snake control in a pamphlet he wrote on poultry farming.