Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje Read Free Book Online Page A

liquid the tumbler leaves, checking it for sugar. We are back within the heat of Colombo, in the hottest month of the year. It is delicious heat. Sweat runs with its own tangible life down a body as if a giant egg has been broken onto our shoulders.
    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,