Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje Read Free Book Online

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 itsneck 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