Free Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje Page B

unapproachable. Who knows, this may have been Lalla’s ulterior motive. For years my mother tended to be admired from a distance. On the ballroom floor she stood out in her animal or shell fish beauty but claws and caterpillar bulges tended to deflect suitors from thoughts of seduction. When couples paired off to walk along Galle Face Green under the moonlight it would, after all, be embarrassing to be seen escorting a lobster.
    When my mother eventually announced her engagement to my father, Lalla turned to friends and said, “What do you
think
, darling, she’s going to marry an Ondaatje … she’s going to marry a
Tamil!”
Years later, when I sent my mother my first book of poems, she met my sister at the door with a shocked face andin exactly the same tone and phrasing said, “What do you
think
, Janet” (her hand holding her cheek to emphasize the tragedy), “Michael has become a
poet!”
Lalla continued to stress the Tamil element in my father’s background, which pleased him enormously. For the wedding ceremony she had two marriage chairs decorated in a Hindu style and laughed all through the ceremony. The incident was, however, the beginning of a war with my father.
    Eccentrics can be the most irritating people to live with. My mother, for instance, strangely,
never
spoke of Lalla to me. Lalla was loved most by people who saw her arriving from the distance like a storm. She did love children, or at least loved company of any kind—cows, adults, babies, dogs. She always had to be surrounded. But being “grabbed” or “contained” by anyone drove her mad. She would be compassionate to the character of children but tended to avoid holding them on her lap. And she could not abide having grandchildren hold her hands when she took them for walks. She would quickly divert them into the entrance of the frightening maze in the Nuwara Eliya Park and leave them there, lost, while she went off to steal flowers. She was always determined to be physically selfish. Into her sixties she would still complain of how she used to be “pinned down” to breast feed her son before she could leave for dances.
    With children grown up and out of the way, Lalla busied herself with her sisters and brothers. “Dickie” seemed to be marrying constantly; after David Grenier drowned she married a de Vos, a Wombeck, and then an Englishman. Lalla’s brother Vere attempted to remain a bachelor all his life. When she was flirting with Catholicism she decided that Vere should marry her priest’ssister—a woman who
had
planned on becoming a nun. The sister also had a dowry of thirty thousand rupees, and both Lalla and Vere were short of money at the time, for both enjoyed expensive drinking sessions. Lalla masterminded the marriage, even though the woman wasn’t good-looking and Vere liked good-looking women. On the wedding night the bride prayed for half an hour beside the bed and then started singing hymns, so Vere departed, forgoing nuptial bliss, and for the rest of her life the poor woman had a sign above her door which read “Unloved. Unloved. Unloved.” Lalla went to mass the following week, having eaten a huge meal. When refused mass she said, “Then I’ll resign,” and avoided the church for the rest of her life.
    A good many of my relatives from this generation seem to have tormented the church sexually. Italian monks who became enamoured of certain aunts would return to Italy to discard their robes and return to find the women already married. Jesuit fathers too were falling out of the church and into love with the de Sarams with the regularity of mangoes thudding onto dry lawns during a drought. Vere also became the concern of various religious groups that tried to save him. And during the last months of his life he was “held captive” by a group of Roman Catholic nuns in Galle so that no one knew where he was until the announcement of his death.
    Vere was known as “a sweet drunk” and he and Lalla always