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

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. OnlyRobert 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 andforms 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