Running in the Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

a couple to do anything without rumour leaving their shoulders like a flock of messenger pigeons.
    Where is the intimate and truthful in all this? Teenager and Uncle. Husband and lover. A lost father in his solace. And why do I want to know of this privacy? After the cups of tea, coffee, public conversations … I want to sit down with someone and talk with utter directness, want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover.

KEGALLE (i)

    My paternal grandfather—Philip—was a strict, aloof man. Most people preferred his brother Aelian who was good-natured and helpful to everyone. Both were lawyers but my grandfather went on to make huge sums of money in land deals and retired as he said he would at the age of forty. He built the family home, “Rock Hill,” on a prime spot of land right in the centre of the town of Kegalle.
    “Your great uncle Aelian was a very generous man,” says Stanley Suraweera. “I wanted to learn Latin and he offered to tutor me from four until five every morning. I’d go to his house by cart every day and he would be up, waiting for me.” In later years Aelian was to have several heart attacks. In one hospital he was given so much morphine that he became addicted to it.
    My grandfather lived at Rock Hill for most of his life and ignored everybody in Kegalle social circles. He was immenselywealthy. Most people considered him a snob, but with his family he was a very loving man. The whole family kissed each other goodnight and good morning, a constant tradition in the house—no matter what chaos my father was causing at the time. Family arguments were buried before bedtime and buried once more first thing in the morning.
    So here was “Bampa,” as we called him, determined to be a good father and patriarch, spreading a protective wing over his more popular brother Aelian, and living in his empire—acres of choice land in the heart of Kegalle. He was dark and his wife was very white, and a rival for my grandmother’s hand remarked that he hoped the children would be striped. The whole family lived in terror of him. Even his strong-willed wife could not blossom till after his death. Like some other Ondaatjes, Bampa had a weakness for pretending to be “English” and, in his starched collars and grey suits, was determined in his customs. My brother, who was only four years old then, still remembers painfully strict meals at Rock Hill with Bampa grinding his teeth at one end of the table—as if his carefully built ceremonies were being evaded by a weak-willed family. It was only in the afternoons when, dressed in sarong and vest, he went out for walks over his property (part of a mysterious treatment for diabetes), that he seemed to become a real part of the landscape around him.
    Every two years he would visit England, buy crystal, and learn the latest dances. He was a perfect dancer. Numerous aunts remember him inviting them out in London and taking great pleasure in performing the most recent dance steps with a natural ease. Back home there was enough to worry about. There was Aelian, who was continually giving his money away to ecclesiastical causes, the cousin who was mauled to death by his underfed racehorse, and four star-crossed sisters who were secret drinkers.Most Ondaatjes liked liquor, sometimes to excess. Most of them were hot tempered—though they blamed diabetes for this whenever possible. And most were genetically attracted to a family called Prins and had to be talked out of marriage—for the Prins brought bad luck wherever they went.
    My grandfather died before the war and his funeral was spoken about with outrage and envy for months afterwards. He thought he had organized it well. All the women wore long black dresses and imported champagne was drunk surreptitiously from teacups. But his hope of departing with decorum collapsed before he was put into the ground. His four sisters and my recently liberated grandmother got into a loud argument over whether