Running in the Family

by Michael Ondaatje

  Riding back on August 13, 1947, they heard the wild thunder and she knew someone was going to die. Death, however, not to be read out there. She gazed and listened but there seemed to be no victim or parabola end beyond her. It rained hard during the last mile to the house and they went indoors to drink for the rest of the evening. The next day the rains continued and she refused Vere’s offer of a ride knowing there would be death soon. “Cannot wreck this perfect body, Vere. The police will spend hours searching for my breast thinking it was lost in the crash.” So they played two-handed Ajoutha and drank. But now she could not sleep at all, and they talked as they never had about husbands, lovers, his various possible marriages. She did not mention her readings of the thunder to Vere, who was now almost comatose on the bluebird print sofa. But she could not keep her eyes closed like him and at 5 A.M. on August 15, 1947, she wanted fresh air, needed to walk, a walk to Moon Plains, no motorcycle, no danger, and she stepped out towards the still dark night of almost dawn and straight into the floods.

  For two days and nights they had been oblivious to the amount of destruction outside their home. The whole country was mauled by the rains that year. Ratmalana, Bentota, Chilaw, Anuradhapura, were all under water. The forty-foot-high Peradeniya Bridge had been swept away. In Nuwara Eliya, Galways’s Land Bird Sanctuary and the Golf Course were ten feet under water. Snakes and fish from the lake swam into the windows of the Golf Club, into the bar, and around the indoor badminton court. Fish were found captured in the badminton nets when the flood receded a week later. Lalla took one step off the front porch and was immediately hauled away by an arm of water, her handbag bursting open. 208 cards moved ahead of her like a disturbed nest as she was thrown downhill still comfortable and drunk, snagged for a few moments on the railings of the Good Shepherd Convent and then lifted away towards the town of Nuwara Eliya.

  It was her last perfect journey. The new river in the street moved her right across the race course and park towards the bus station. As the light came up slowly she was being swirled fast, “floating” (as ever confident of surviving this too) alongside branches and leaves, the dawn starting to hit flamboyant trees as she slipped past them like a dark log, shoes lost, false breast lost. She was free as a fish, travelling faster than she had in years, fast as Vere’s motorcycle, only now there was this roar around her. She overtook Jesus lizards that swam and ran in bursts over the water, she was surrounded by tired half-drowned fly-catchers screaming tack tack tack tack, frogmouths, nightjars forced to keep awake, brain-fever birds and their irritating ascending scales, snake eagles, scimitar-babblers, they rode the air around Lalla wishing to perch on her unable to alight on anything except what was moving.

  What was moving was rushing flood. In the park she floated over the intricate fir tree hedges of the maze—which would always continue to terrify her grandchildren—its secret spread out naked as a skeleton for her. The symmetrical flower beds also began to receive the day’s light and Lalla gazed down at them with wonder, moving as lazily as that long dark scarf which trailed off her neck brushing the branches and never catching. She would always wear silk, as she showed us, her grandchildren, would pull the scarf like a fluid through the ring removed from her finger, pulled sleepily through, as she moved now, awake to the new angle of her favourite trees, the Syzygium, the Araucaria Pine, over the now unnecessary iron gates of the park, and through the town of Nuwara Eliya itself and its shops and stalls where she had haggled for guavas, now six feet under water, windows smashed in by the weight of all this collected rain.

  Drifting slower she tried to hold onto things. A bicycle hit her across the knees. She saw the dead body of a human. She began to see the drowned dogs of the town. Cattle. She saw men on roofs fighting with each other, looting, almost surprised by the quick dawn in the mountains revealing them, not even watching her magic ride, the alcohol still in her—serene and relaxed.

  Below the main street of Nuwara Eliya the land drops suddenly and Lalla fell into deeper waters, past the houses of “Cranleigh” and “Ferncliff.” They were homes she knew well, where she had played and argued over cards. The water here was rougher and she went under for longer and longer moments coming up with a gasp and then pulled down like bait, pulled under by something not comfortable any more, and then there was the great blue ahead of her, like a sheaf of blue wheat, like a large eye that peered towards her, and she hit it and was dead.

  THE PRODIGAL

  HARBOUR

  I arrived in a plane but love the harbour. Dusk. And the turning on of electricity in ships, portholes of moon, the blue glide of a tug, the harbour road and its ship chandlers, soap makers, ice on bicycles, the hidden anonymous barber shops behind the pink dirt walls of Reclamation Street.

  One frail memory dragged up out of the past—going to the harbour to say goodbye to a sister or mother, dusk. For years I loved the song, “Harbour lights,” and later in my teens danced disgracefully with girls, humming “Sea of Heartbreak.”

  There is nothing wise about a harbour, but it is real life. It is as sincere as a Singapore cassette. Infinite waters cohabit with flotsam on this side of the breakwater and the luxury liners and Maldive fishing vessels steam out to erase calm sea. Who was I saying goodbye to? Automatically as I travel on the tug with my brother-in-law, a pilot in the harbour, I sing “the lights in the harbour don’t shine for me …” but I love it here, skimming out into the night anonymous among the lazy commerce, my nieces dancing on the breakwater as they wait, the lovely swallowing of thick night air as it carves around my brain, blunt, cleaning itself with nothing but this anonymity, with the magic words. Harbour. Lost ship. Chandler. Estuary.

  MONSOON NOTEBOOK (ii)

  The bars across the windows did not always work. When bats would invade the house at dusk, the beautiful long-haired girls would rush to the corner of rooms and hide their heads under dresses. The bats suddenly drifting like dark squadrons through the house—for never more than two minutes—arcing into the halls over the uncleared dining room table and out along the verandah where the parents would be sitting trying to capture the cricket scores on the BBC with a shortwave radio.

  Wildlife stormed or crept into homes this way. The snake either entered through the bathroom drain for remnants of water or, finding the porch doors open, came in like a king and moved in a straight line through the living room, dining room, the kitchen and servant’s quarters, and out the back, as if taking the most civilized short cut to another street in town. Others moved in permanently; birds nested above the fans, the silverfish slid into steamer trunks and photograph albums—eating their way through portraits and wedding pictures. What images of family life they consumed in their minute jaws and took into their bodies no thicker than the pages they ate.

  And the animals also on the periphery of rooms and porches, their sounds forever in your ear. During our visit to the jungle, while we slept on the verandah at 3 A.M., night would be suddenly alive with disturbed peacocks. A casual movement from one of them roosting in the trees would waken them all and, so fussing, sounding like branches full of cats, they would weep weep loud into the night.

  One evening I kept the tape recorder beside my bed and wakened by them once more out of a deep sleep automatically pressed the machine on to record them. Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them—inaudible then because they were always there like breath. In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge, fluorescent light) there are these frogs loud as river, gruntings, the whistle of other birds brash and sleepy, but in that night so modest behind the peacocks they were unfocussed by the brain—nothing more than darkness, all those sweet loud younger brothers of the night.

  HOW I WAS BATHED

  We are having a formal dinner. String hoppers, meat curry, egg rulang, papadams, potato curry. Alice’s date chutney, seeni sambol, mallung and brinjals and iced water. All the dishes are
on the table and a good part of the meal is spent passing them around to each other. It is my favourite meal—anything that has string hoppers and egg rulang I eat with a lascivious hunger. For dessert there is buffalo curd and jaggery sauce—a sweet honey made from the coconut, like maple syrup but with a smoky taste.

  In this formal setting Gillian begins to describe to everyone present how I used to be bathed when I was five. She had heard the story in detail from Yasmine Gooneratne, who was a prefect with her at Bishop’s College for Girls. I listen intently, making sure I get a good portion of the egg rulang.

  The first school I went to was a girls’ school in Colombo which accepted young boys of five or six for a couple of years. The nurse or ayah in charge of our cleanliness was a small, muscular and vicious woman named Maratina. I roamed with my pack of school friends, usually filthy from morning to night, and every second evening we were given a bath. The bathroom was a sparse empty stone room with open drains in the floor and a tap to one side. We were marched in by Maratina and ordered to strip. She collected our clothes, threw them out of the room, and locked the door. The eight of us were herded terrified into one corner.

  Maratina filled a bucket with water and flung the contents towards our cowering screaming bodies. Another bucket was filled and hurled towards us hard as a police hose. Then she strode forward, grabbed a child by the hair, pulled him over to the centre, scrubbed him violently with carbolic soap and threw him towards the opposite side of the room. She plucked another and repeated the soaping. Totally in control of the squirming bodies, she eventually scrubbed us all, then returned to the bucket and thrashed water over our soapy nakedness. Bleary-eyed, our bodies tingling and reeling, our hair curved back from the force of the throw, we stood there shining. She approached with a towel, dried us fast and brutally, and threw us out one by one to get into our sarongs and go to bed.

  The guests, the children, everyone is laughing and Gillian is no doubt exaggerating Yasmine’s account in her usual style, her long arms miming the capture and scrub of five-year-olds. I am dreaming and wondering why this was never to be traumatically remembered. It is the kind of event that should have surfaced as the first chapter of an anguished autobiographical novel. I am thinking also of Yasmine Gooneratne, now teaching at a university in Australia, whom I met just last year at an International Writers’ Conference in New Delhi. We talked then mostly about Gillian who had also been at university with her. Why did she not tell me the story—this demure woman in a sari who was once “bath prefect” at Bishop’s College Girl’s School, who officiated over the cleansing of my lean five-year-old nakedness?

  WILPATTU

  April 8th

  From Anuradhapura we drive towards the Wilpattu Jungle, through the small town of Nochiyagama. “That’s it,” I tell my daughter, “that’ll be a good name for a child of yours.” Nochi. Once we reach Wilpattu a tracker-guide is assigned to us. He will live with us during the next few days and be with us whenever we take treks out in the jeep to look for animals. We now have an hour’s journey to the middle of the jungle. It is a slow ten-mile-an-hour drive on bad roads of red clay and sand.

  5 P.M. Manikappolu Utu. A large wooden house on stilts, and fresh “elephant droppings” around the place, which turn out to be buffalo shit. We empty the jeep of all the food we have brought and begin to change out of sweat-soaked clothes. On the porch is a muted light and long cane chairs. A delicate rain begins pattering on the tin roof then suddenly veers into a thunder shower which whitens the landscape. To the left of the house is a huge pond, almost a lake, where water lilies float closed at this hour, now being pounded bouncing under the rain. The girls are out there in their dresses getting wet and suddenly the rest of us decide this is the only chance for a bath that we will have here and walk out into the storm. Nine of us holding up our arms for all the rain we can reach.

  We are slightly drunk with this place—the beautiful house, the animals which are appearing now, and this tough cold rain turning the hard-baked earth into red mud. All of us are in our solitude. Not really concerned about the others, just revelling in a private pleasure. It is like communal sleep. The storm falters then starts up again, wilder than ever. The bungalow’s cook and the tracker watch from the doorways of the house not quite believing what is happening to this strange mixture of people—Sinhalese, Canadian, and one quiet French girl—who are now soaping themselves with a bar of soap and throwing it around like a foaming elixir so everyone is suddenly white, as if in a petticoat, and now trying even harder to catch the rain everywhere, bending over to let it land on our backs and shoulders. Some move under the warmer rain of the trees, some sit as if it was Sunday afternoon on a bench by the pond of water lilies and crocodiles, and the others wade ankle-deep in swirling mud by the jeep. On the other side of the pond there are about thirty deer—as if in a dry universe. And storks on the bank whose reflections are being shattered.

  Then a new burst of energy. A val oora—a large filthy black wild boar has appeared majestically out of the trees with tusks that turn his quiet face into hair-lipped deformity. He watches, making us aware of each other half-soaped, happy and ridiculous, dresses heavy with rain, sarongs above the knees. All of us—the lilies, the trees with their wind drunk hair, this magnificent val oora who is now the centre of the storm—celebrating the elimination of heat. He moves straight-thighed, stiff, but with a lunging walk, keeping his polite distance.

  Wild black pig in a white rainstorm, concerned about this invasion, this metamorphosis of soap, this dented Volkswagen, this jeep. He can take his pick, any one of us. If I am to die soon I would choose to die now under his wet alphabet of tusk, while I am cool and clean and in good company.

  * * *

  April 11th

  Last morning in Wilpattu. Everyone packing and arguing in the hushed early light. Where is the torch? My Leyden shirt? Whose towel is this? Last night, right off the porch, a leopard tracked and waited for a chance to pounce on one of the deer that stayed around the house. Our dinner was interrupted by screams from the deer, and we were soon all outside using the flashlights to pick out the red eye of the leopard, the green eyes of the deer and later the red eye of the crocodile who had come to watch. Everyone lasciviously waiting for a kill.

  Once, when there was nobody staying in this bungalow except the cook, a leopard paced up and down the porch. This is the porch onto which we have moved all the beds and slept these last three nights, telling each other ghost stories and feeling absolutely secure in the jungle heat. At one of the other bungalows guests have to sleep behind closed doors, for a bear comes regularly each night, climbs the stairs slowly as if exhausted, and sleeps on whatever free bed is available.

  On this last morning I leave the others and go downstairs to find my soap which I left on a railing after one of our rain baths. It has rained every day from five thirty until six, hard perfect thunderstorms. No sign of the soap. I ask the cook and the tracker and they both give the same answer. The wild pig has taken it. My wild pig. That repulsively exotic creature in his thick black body and the ridge of non-symmetrical hair running down his back. This thing has walked off with my bar of Pears Transparent Soap? Why not my copy of Rumi poetry? Or Merwin translations? That soap was aristocratic and kept me feeling good all through the filthy hotels of Africa, whenever I could find a shower. The tracker and cook keep giving me evidence that it is the pig. He constantly removes things after taking a small bite, once even took a handbag. As the pig comes to the back door for garbage daily I am beginning to believe them. What does this wild pig want soap for? Visions begin to form of the creature returning to his friends with Pears Transparent Soap and then all of them bathing and scrubbing their armpits in the rain in a foul parody of us. I can see their mouths open to catch drops of water on their tongues, washing their hooves, standing complacently under the drain spout, and then moving in Pears fragrance to a dinner of Manikappolu garbage.

  With me irritated at this loss we leave Wilpattu, the jeep
following the Volkswagen. My eyes are peeled for a last sight of the oora, my soap caught in his tusk and his mouth foaming.

  KUTTAPITIYA

  The last estate we lived on as children was called Kuttapitiya and was famous for its gardens. Walls of flowers—ochre, lavender, pink—would flourish and die within a month, followed by even more exaggerated and inbred colours. My father was superintendent of a tea and rubber plantation and each morning at 5 A.M. a drummer began his slow rhythmic beat, an alarm clock for all those who worked there. He played for half an hour and slowly and lazily we rose into the pale blue mornings. At breakfast we could watch the flamboyant tree and lavender-cotton catch fire. House and garden were perched high above the mist which filled the valley below like a mattress, cutting us off from the real world. My mother and father lived there for the longest period of their marriage.

  Looking down off the edge of the garden we could see the road to Pelmadulla wind and disappear like a lethargic dark yellow snake into overhanging foliage. Everything seemed green below us. Where we stood, the muted purple leaves of orchid fell at the gentlest breeze onto someone’s shadow. It was the perfect place for children who were allowed to go wild. My brother borrowing a pakispetti box, attaching wheels, and bumping down the steep slopes—a dangerous training for his future bobsledding. Having our hair cut on the front lawn by a travelling barber. And daily arguments over Monopoly, cricket, or marital issues that blazed and died on the privacy of this mountain.