Running in the Family

"Ondaatje grew up with a lot of Sri Lanka around him, as I grew up with a lot of Guyana around me. Even though I wasn’t there in situ, I was raised with all that diverse influence, from food to language to culture. Like Ondaatje, I also pieced together fragments and snatches of stories that were told to me as a child by elderly members of my family. There are a lot of blurred memories; such a fragmented portrayal has lots of inaccuracies too. That’s why fiction seemed to me to be a good receptacle for these thoughts and ideas, the gossip and hearsay. That said, I sometimes wonder if I should have done more with the style. Ondaatje mixed poetry and prose and reportage and memoir. Perhaps next time. It would be impossible for me to draw the lines of where Ondaatje transitions from fact to fiction. Maybe even for him it would be impossible. He himself says: “Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships.” As a journalist I know this well. We’re constantly trying to stay as close to fact and neutrality as we can, but it’s undoubtedly tough. Fiction, non-fiction. It’s not that one’s harder or easier. For me it depends on the day. What’s changing is that we’re increasingly finding a blend, or perhaps it’s just that we’re more comfortable now to admit how hard it is and a mixing is inevitable. I think, more than most, Ondaatje is very comfortable saying that above all this is natural, honest, authentic writing. That it’s almost impossible to do anything else."

"I suppose I’ve suggested it as the last book of the five for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s a thinly fictionalized novella. It’s quite a short, light read. You can read it in an afternoon or evening if you’re a fast reader (I’m not, I’m a very slow reader). Its tone is light, often hilarious, sometimes bittersweet. It evokes the generation of Michael Ondaatje’s parents and grandparents, particularly in the 1920s and 30s. Most people think of Michael Ondaatje as a world-famous Canadian novelist who won the Booker Prize for The English Patient , which became an Oscar-winning film. He made his reputation first as a distinguished poet. Most of his writing has little to do with Sri Lanka, at least directly. But he was born and spent the first ten years of his life in old Ceylon. He left in the early 1950s. He’s of mixed minority parentage. Ondaatje is not actually a Dutch name, but a Chetty one. The Chetties are a caste of Indian moneylenders from South India, who came over from Chettinad under the British in the 19th century. That’s his father’s side. On his mother’s side he is a Dutch Burgher. The Burghers are the mixed-race descendants of first the Portuguese and then the Dutch. His mother came from a prominent Dutch Burgher family. The Dutch Burghers, particularly the elite, did very well under the British and became very anglicized. English was their mother tongue and their cultural reference points were very much Old England. Many elite Burgher families had big tea or rubber or coconut estates. Michael Ondaatje’s grandparents and parents had this gilded upbringing, but a lot of this novella is about the squandering of family fortunes in a very carefree manner, hilarious along the way. It’s rather like the bright young things in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time . But there’s a twist to this tale because, of course, these tales never have a happy ending. Most of the characters ended up destitute. The males generally ended up as alcoholics, as did Michael’s father. That led to divorce and his mother had to take on menial jobs when she emigrated to the UK in order to put Michael and his elder brother Christopher through school. The brothers then emigrated to Canada. There’s a favorite ditty in Running in the Family that I reproduce in my book because it reminds me of some sweet drunks I came across in my childhood, who were also squandering family fortunes. Thankfully, I never saw how they behaved behind closed doors with their own families. A lot of those stories were very nasty, but what I saw in my father’s clubs were these well-off men drinking themselves slowly to death, and singing the odd ditty, rather like Michael Ondaatje’s father, who had his own take on My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. It goes like this: My whiskey comes over the ocean My brandy comes over the sea But my beer comes from F.X. Pereira So F.X. Pereira for me. F.X.… F.X.… F.X. Pereira for me, for me.… That kind of tone was very much part of my growing up in the 1970s, not with my own father, but with many of his friends and acquaintances. Reading that passage in Running in the Family reminded me of it. You can picture young Michael’s father sitting in a lounger on a very spacious estate bungalow veranda with a drink. I suppose I left the country at a slightly older age than he did and my reconnection with Sri Lanka has, I think, been more in-depth and prolonged. At least until the pandemic struck, he did go back once every few years. I think he has a sister still living in Sri Lanka, but his actual connection with the country has been more distant for a long time, whereas for me, it’s come back to the center: it’s part of my foreground and a preoccupation. I did that for about three years, not under the present government, but under its predecessor. I had a ringside seat because I was an advisor to the Prime Minister and to the Minister of Finance. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to the coalface of real-world politics, having been a student and teacher of politics and economics for quite a while. It was a dispiriting experience, I have to say. It showed me how dysfunctional Sri Lankan politics is and how far beyond repair the political class is. But that’s it: my involvement is in the past tense. I haven’t been for almost two years because of the pandemic, but when I do go back to Sri Lanka, it will be simply as a citizen, as a traveller, as an observer."