Running in the Family

by Michael Ondaatje

  FINAL DAYS / FATHER TONGUE

  Jennifer:

  The poultry farm was very big then. He had thousands of chickens. He had dual-purpose breeds—those that laid eggs but could also be eaten. The Light Sussex, the Rhode Island Reds, the Plymouth Rocks. And he was also the Visiting Agent for the region, inspecting estates and writing up reports on how they were run … I think he was one of the first Ceylonese to become a V.A. But the chickens took up most of his time. I designed a poster for the poultry farm and he got them printed up grandly. And we would dream up these advertisements together for the newspapers. Many were not allowed by the Daily News such as “Rock Hill Farms Will Teach your Grandmother to Suck Eggs!” He kept us all busy. I did the correspondence and Susan collected the eggs. It would have been easy to be cut off at Kegalle but he built a world for us there—all those books and radio programmes. We would listen to “20 Questions”—my god we heard that every week and he loved it and I hated it.

  During the day he would invent jobs for which he would pay us. Now and then he would announce “Beetle Week.” We had to catch black coconut beetles, which he then fed to his fowls. Ten cents for the large ones, five cents for the small ones, and we would spend hours sorting them out and deciding if they were large or small. The whole day would be organized like this, with these games. For instance, cats. He loved most animals but was aloof from cats. However they always followed him. So if he went into town we would take bets on how many cats would come up to him. And although he disliked them I think he was quite proud of this trait in himself. Cats would cross the street if they saw him coming. When we got into the car he would have to get in first and we would then have to start throwing them out, have to stop them crawling back under his seat.

  He loved our gullibility, our innocence, and his tricks on us would last for years. When he picked Suzie and me up from boarding school for a day he would take us to Elephant House and order cakes and cream buns and Lanka Colas. He had at one time said, “the more you eat the less I’ll have to pay,” and we believed him and for his sake ate as much as we could. It was only when Maureen came with him once and was appalled by our greed that we discovered the truth and we were almost slapped for our stupidity.

  He could make children behave because he kept them interested. You, apparently, were a saint when Daddy was around but if he left the house you were hell. He missed you all terribly, he longed for you, but with us—his second family—he was just as loving. I wasn’t his real daughter but I was probably closest to him in his last years. He brought me up like a princess and would defend me against everyone, even my strictest teachers. There was a Miss Kaula—a battleaxe. She was charmed by Daddy. She preened herself before he arrived and allowed him to upset all the visiting hours. He was amazingly protective. He would never let me stay with friends over the weekend, they would have to come and stay with us. And if there wasn’t enough food to go around he would announce these signals such as “F.H.B.” which meant “Family Hold Back.” We loved all those codes. The only time I saw him totally lost was when I begged him to take me to a movie. It was a “twist” movie. Joey D. and the Starlighters in Peppermint Twist. He was horrified by it. It was the future.

  He could always laugh at himself. He was so big in the end, so large. He donated 313 rupees to the Rotary Club and when he was asked why it was that amount, he said because that was his weight. I think it was a glandular problem but he just didn’t bother about it. When he took us for our first dance, it surprised me how light he was on his feet. He remembered all those waltzes and foxtrots from a long time ago. As we danced I saw our reflection in a mirror and he smiled and said, “Now you look like my tie.” I was sixteen and tiny beside him. At my seventeenth birthday party we had to water the gin.

  When he began drinking I would just get lost, that was easy to do at Rock Hill. He’d be insensible; and then, when he was getting better, he was like an angel and would do anything for you.… There was a song he used to sing when he was drunk, over and over. He had made it up and he sang it only when he was really drunk. Partly English and partly Sinhalese, a bit like a baila as it used brand names and street names and gibberish. It made no sense to anyone but it wasn’t gibberish to him because he always sang exactly the same words each time.

  His last days were very quiet. He would allow himself one cigarette a day. After dinner he would go out onto the verandah and sit for about an hour by himself or with me before his radio programmes came on. He would have his cigarette then. If I wanted permission to do something such as go for a dance I would ask him then, for at that moment he was most content with things. I remember there was quite a ceremony of course. I would bring him the round tin of cigarettes and the matches and he would light one and smoke it slowly. That would be around 8 o’clock in the evening.

  V. C. de Silva:

  He was brilliant at selling chickens. I don’t know how he did it, but he would put on this official air and that helped. If I could get 15 rupees for a pullet, he would get 27.50. But there was a certain amount of gullibility in his dealings with adults and some abused his generosity. When he had money he would spend it.

  I was considered one of his closest friends. I was also his medical adviser, and we talked poultry and dogs. After your mother left in 1947, I lived with your father for a month. I was the go-between, taking flowers to your mother in Colombo. Then in 1950 I was practicing in Kandy and he came to see me because he was vomiting blood. Then he and I and Archer Jayawardene became close friends. We would meet once a week at the Daily News bookshop in Kandy.

  We never drank with him. If Archer and I arrived at Rock Hill he would give us a large glass of ice-cold milk. He would always be reading my medical books, my dog and poultry books; he would brood on these things. When he had the D.T.’s I would give him half a grain of morphine to sedate him for 12 hours and he would come out of it ok. Before he died there was a second bout of haemorrhaging—stomach this time. But death was due to a cerebral haemorrhage.

  There were just two or three of us who were very close to him. As for Maureen, I think she knew I was too close a friend for her to like me. God, I learned a great deal from him. There was nothing about poultry he didn’t know. Or dogs. He used to have a lot of faith in me so I loved him too.

  * * *

  Archer Jayawardene:

  He was a founder of the Cactus and Succulent Society. We had a hundred members and once a year we would have lunch and tea at the Kandy Garden Club.

  He loved organizing us. He suddenly decided to get us to dance in our old age. I think Maureen wanted to go to a New Year’s Dance and he suggested that we all take dancing lessons. He hired a teacher and we had to take lessons twice a week. He was wonderful at planning these things—picnics, trips to the Perahera. He loved the Perahera and always got into trouble during them. Once he ran over a policeman’s foot. At the police station he fell asleep on the Inspector’s desk and it took several men to move him.

  But he spent most of his spare time reading or listening to that huge wireless on the front porch. He lived in another world I think. He was not interested in politics. Usually he never spoke about the past. But when the coup case was on he went down to Colombo to visit his old friends, Derek and Royce, in jail.

  A year before he died he went into that terrible depression. V.C. de Silva and I would go there and he wouldn’t speak to us. We were his closest friends and he ignored us. Just sat there completely still as if caught against something so he couldn’t move. A cousin of mine was a psychiatrist and I drove him up from Colombo and I introduced him and before I had even stepped off the porch he was having a hell of a chat with that doctor.

  His funeral was a tragi-comedy sort of business. First of all the coffin they brought was too small so they had to build a new one in the house. Then they couldn’t get it out so they had to break the doors down. And the day of the funeral was a rainy day. He had bought this plot of land right at the top of a hill. We made that steep climb, carrying the c
offin, slipping and falling to our knees on a thin muddy road.

  He had not been well during that last year after the depression. He was content though. I think that both of us were impatient men. But the cactus and the gardening—you know—we had taught ourselves something. Now my wife and I have moved to this small house and the furniture still hasn’t arrived, but I don’t really care. The Buddhists say if you have things you only worry about them. I go cycling at three in the morning when the streets are empty … I’m really enjoying myself. I keep telling my wife we should get ready for the other life, the flying.

  Two days before he died we were together. We were alone in the house. I can’t remember what we said but we sat there for three hours. I too don’t talk much. You know it is a most relaxed thing when you sit with a best friend and you know there is nothing you have to tell him, to empty your mind. We just stayed there together, silent in the dusk like this, and we were quite happy.

  * * *

  He would swing wildly, in those last years—not so much from sobriety to drink but from calmness to depression. But he was shy, he didn’t want anyone else to be troubled by it, so he would be quiet most of the time. That was his only defense. To keep it within so the fear would not hurt others.

  I keep thinking of the lines from Goethe … “Oh, who will heal the sufferings / Of the man whose balm turned poison?” I can only clarify this range in him by focussing on this metamorphosis. At the end he moved courteous among his few friends so they never realized, or could only guess at, his torn state, and by then he had already gone too far, was on the cliff. And how could his children know when he would write them his strange quirky notes, such as, “Dear Jenny—I am in the quite well. I hope you are in the same well. Love Daddy xxx”?

  His fantasies were awful. Paranoia took over during his downward swings. He personally shattered three hundred eggs. Dug a pit and threw them in beating them to pieces with a large staff so nothing would survive—all because he knew someone was trying to poison the family. This he did secretly so no one would worry.

  When he could no longer hold all the information, the awareness of what was happening, he would turn to drink. Or, in the last year before he died, he broke down completely. Ceremonies darkened around him. His two closest friends were saddened, not just for what had happened to him but because it seemed he no longer trusted them. He was in the well of total silence. Sat on the verandah looking out onto coconut trees, the suspect chickens. He cooked himself an omelette and a cup of soup. At this point he did not drink. He sat catatonic, his eyes drifting over the lawn. It was too late to act secure, polite.

  They found a doctor he would talk to and he was taken to a nursing home in Colombo. When the children came to visit him he was distant with them because he thought they were imitations. He longed to hold his children in his arms. You must understand all this was happening while his first family was in England or Canada or Colombo totally unaware of what was happening to him. That would always be the curse on us, the guilt we would be left with.

  He came home after two weeks cheerful and positive. Years earlier, Archer and Doreen Jayawardene had mentioned to him that Rock Hill was a “see devi” place, meaning a home of contentment and peace. Now when he saw them again he said, “Isn’t this a see devi place once more?” And for the first time he explained to his friends the state of his darkness:

  When I saw you come (my father said), I saw poisonous gas around you. You walked across the lawn to me and you were wading through green gas as if you were crossing a river by foot and you were not aware of it. And I thought if I speak, if I point it out it will destroy you instantly. I was immune. It would not kill me but if I revealed this world to you you would suffer for you had no knowledge, no defenses against it.…

  About a year later he delivered some eggs to the railway station and on the way back decided to visit his cousin Phyllis in Kandy. She remembers him driving in while she sat on the porch and she stood up. He waved but kept on going round the circle of driveway and left, still waving. An hour later she received a phone call from him. He said, “You must have thought me quite mad, but I realized as I was slowing down that I was getting a flat tire so I felt I should get home quickly.” They laughed cheerfully at the incident and those were the last words they spoke to each other.

  There is so much to know and we can only guess. Guess around him. To know him from these stray actions I am told about by those who loved him. And yet, he is still one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut. We are still unwise. It is not that he became too complicated but that he had reduced himself to a few things around him and he gave them immense meaning and significance. The behaviour of certain creatures he could theorize on for hours with V.C. de Silva. He kept journals about every one of the four hundred varieties of cactus and succulents—some of which he had never seen, others of which he had smuggled into the country via a friend. Important days were those when certain waterplants arrived from islands in the Pacific. He had come to love the specific variety of growing things and the information he was taught by them. There were the invented games with his children. There was the relearning of old songs from the past to delight them. They could be charmed by the silliness of lyrics from the thirties which had always moved him.

  Courtesy. A modesty. In spite of the excess of his gestures earlier in his life he was in the end a miniaturist pleased by small things, the decent gestures among a small circle of family and friends. He made up lovely songs about every dog he had owned—each of them had a different tune and in the verses he celebrated their natures.

  “You must get this book right,” my brother tells me, “You can only write it once.” But the book again is incomplete. In the end all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. Not that we ever thought we would be able to fully understand you. Love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things. Whatever brought you solace we would have applauded. Whatever controlled the fear we all share we would have embraced. That could only be dealt with one day at a time—with that song we cannot translate, or the dusty green of the cactus you touch and turn carefully like a wounded child towards the sun, or the cigarettes you light.

  LAST MORNING

  Half an hour before light I am woken by the sound of rain. Rain on wall, coconut, and petal. This sound above the noise of the fan. The world already awake in the darkness beyond the barred windows as I get up and stand here, waiting for the last morning.

  My body must remember everything, this brief insect bite, smell of wet fruit, the slow snail light, rain, rain, and underneath the hint of colours a sound of furious wet birds whose range of mimicry includes what one imagines to be large beasts, trains, burning electricity. Dark trees, the mildewed garden wall, the slow air pinned down by rain. Above me the fan’s continual dazzling of its hand. When I turn on the light, the bulb on the long three-foot cord will sway to the electrical breeze making my shadow move back and forth on the wall.

  But I do not turn on the light yet. I want this emptiness of a dark room where I listen and wait. There is nothing in this view that could not be a hundred years old, that might not have been here when I left Ceylon at the age of eleven. My mother looks out of her Colombo window thinking of divorce, my father wakes after three days of alcohol, his body hardly able to move from the stiffness in muscles he cannot remember exerting. It is a morning scenery well known to my sister and her children who leave for swimming practice before dawn crossing the empty city in the Volks, passing the pockets of open shops and their lightbulb light that sell newspapers and food. I stood like this in the long mornings of my childhood unable to bear the wait till full daylight when I could go and visit the Peiris family down the road in Boralesgamuwa; the wonderful, long days I spent there with Paul and Lionel and Aunt Peggy who would casually object to my climbing all over her bookcases in my naked and dirty feet. Bookcases I stood under again this week which were full of signed first editions of poems by Neruda and
Lawrence and George Keyt. All this was here before I dreamed of getting married, having children, wanting to write.

  Here where some ants as small as microdots bite and feel themselves being lifted by the swelling five times as large as their bodies. Rising on their own poison. Here where the cassette now starts up in the next room. During the monsoon, on my last morning, all this Beethoven and rain.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A literary work is a communal act. And this book could not have been imagined, let alone conceived, without the help of many people.

  The book is a composite of two return journeys to Sri Lanka, in 1978 and 1980. On each occasion I stayed for several months, travelling alone and then joined by my wife and children. My sister, Gillian, took many of the journeys of research with me all over the island. She, and my other sister, Janet, and my brother, Christopher, were central in helping me recreate the era of my parents. This is their book as much as mine. My own family too had to put up with compulsive questioning of everyone we met, hearing again and again long lists of confused genealogies and rumour.

  Raw material came from many sources; and I would like to thank a larger group of relatives, friends and colleagues who helped me in my inquisitiveness: Alwin Ratnayake, Phyllis and Ned Sansoni, Ernest and Nalini McIntyre, Zillah Gratiaen, Pam Fernando, Wendy Partridge, Dolly van Langenberg, Susan and Sunil Perera, Jennifer Saravanamuttu, Archer and Doreen Jayawardene, V.C. de Silva, Peggy and Harold Peiris, Sylvia Fernando, Stanley Suraweera, Hamish and Gill Sproule, Dhama Jagoda, Ian Goonetileke, Yasmine Gooneratne, Wimal Dissanayake, Jilska Vanderwall, Rex and Bertha Daniels, Irene Vanderwall, Rohan and Kamini de Soysa, Erica Perera, Clarence de Fonseka, Nesta Brohier, Nedra de Saram, Sam Kadirgamar, Dorothy Lowman, John Kotelawala, Irangenie “Chandi” Meedeniya, Barbara Sansoni, Trevor de Saram, Thea Wickramasuriya, Jenny Fonseka, Yolande Ilangakoon, Babe Jonklaas, Verna and Mary Vangeyzel, Audrey de Vos … and Shaan, Eggily, and Hetti Corea.