A strange friendship between reader and writer over thirty-odd years is cause for celebration by Julie Banerjee Mehta who raises a glass to Michael Ondaatje on his 80th birthday this September. It does not matter that we have never met, she writes. “He walked by my side during some of my toughest times when I felt the pain of separation from my family when I came to live in Canada.”
In the blistering light of an August noon
In the cooler glow of a red Harvest moon
I see the infant you were.
Cut loose
On choppy waters without your dancing shoes
Aboard a ship of strangers.
In a world now seventy-five years older
Than when your mother had abandoned you
Out of fear and necessity
To be caretaken by your brilliant but broken
Father.
As thousands more infants find themselves searching
For a home that they were wrested from.
Forcibly airflown like prime cuts of beef
To be presented on white linen
All the way from Syria and the Ukraine,
Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.
In the luminous pools of blue
That are your eyes, like robin’s eggs,
I see an ocean of faces
Desperately willing
Desperately wishing
To be engulfed by
Your mother’s smell
The fragrance of her love
In the gnawing pangs of absence.
-Julie Mehta, August 4, 2023.
In the exciting course of thirty-eight years as a literary reviewer and interviewer, and twenty years as an academic who taught full-year courses on the Sri Lankan-Canadian poet and novelist, Michael Ondaatje, I have had the uncommon privilege of exploring several outstanding writers. Fiction being my preferred genre, I have interviewed storytellers and reviewed stories of some of the greatest writers of our times including Mario Vargas Llosa, Ben Okri, Norman Mailer, Romesh Gunesekera, Arundhati Roy, Gita Mehta, Joy Kogawa, Christopher Koch, Pico Iyer, Meira Chand, Alex Miller, the brothers Cyrus and Rohinton Mistry, and Tim Page, and others, when I was a regular literary reviewer for The Straits Times in Singapore and Bangkok Post in Thailand in the 1980s and 1990s.
On my first hours of study as an academic at the University of Toronto, I was introduced to a slim volcano of a memoir titled Running in the Family. My doctoral supervisor, renowned South Asian scholar, the late Professor Chelva Kanaganayakam, introduced me to the book and made it mandatory for me to read it in the very first week of class. It was a gentle seduction from the first sentence. And an abiding one. The Sri Lankan-Canadian writer of that innocuous volume with an unassuming front cover grabbed my heart as soon as I cracked open the spine.
In Running in the Family I found myself, even as I read how he had found himself, dreaming of Asia in frozen Toronto, and while teaching at university spent a sabbatical in Sri Lanka in 1978. “I’d lost my childhood, so I had to reinvent it. Going to places starts you remembering things,” Ondaatje says.[1] “In my mid-30s I realised I had slipped past a childhood I had ignored and not understood.” He remembers, “It wasn’t so much ignoring as having to survive in the west. You were learning so much at age 11, and having to adapt very fast to a different way of life. And I literally couldn’t afford to go to Sri Lanka; it was something very present but far away.”
As I backtracked through my life before coming to Toronto, I realized more and more that when I left India at twenty, first for Australia and then Singapore, Bangkok, Cambodia, and Toronto, I too had lost my moorings. As a new entrant to Toronto from tropical Bangkok where the weekends jostled for a toehold in the multitudinous invitations to soirees and parties, the theatre, dinners and lunches, I suddenly felt a growing hollow in my heart as I realized the social interaction was quieter and less clamoring than Asia. I suddenly felt unhoused, rejected, and overwhelmed by the freezing landscape within and without, trying to forge new friendships in a newly adopted home where I had no history.
Michael Ondaatje speaking at the Tulane Great Writer Series presented by the Creative Writing Fund of the Department of English, Dixon Hall, October 25, 2010. Source: Tulane Public Relations. Image in the public domain by Wikipedia under licence: File:Michael_Ondaatje_at_Tulane_2010.jpg licensed with Cc-by-2.0. File:Michael Ondaatje redux.jpg
The immediate connect I felt with the writer of that memoir helped me negotiate the eddies as I walked with an unseen friend. It was as if I could hear the heartbeat of his fractured self in a wracked ribcage, and I began to better understand my impulse that was like an untrained pup, to return “home.”
In Running in the Family, Ondaatje returns to Sri Lanka for the first time in almost twenty-five years and sifts through the legends of his family’s tumultuous history. At the age of five, Ondaatje’s parents separated and, the following year, his mother, Doris, moved to England with his brother Christopher and sister Janet. He and his sister Gillian stayed in Ceylon with aunts and uncles. Ondaatje joined his mother in the UK at the age of eleven. Ondaatje’s mother kept her young family afloat in the UK by working in hotels.
The scholar Sam Solecki explains the Ondaatje mind in these words: “The great hurt of everything is also at the heart of Ondaatje’s vision, though we can often narrow it down to the essential underlying donnée, which is the breakup of his parents’ marriage, the divorce, and his subsequent childhood exile from Ceylon in 1954, an exile that also included a permanent separation from his father […]”[2]
One seismic image that Michael bears is of his father, Mervyn Ondaatje, waiting for his mother, Doris, to come to him at the terrace overlooking the sea at the Mount Lavinia Hotel in Colombo, where she was with guests in the hotel lobby. He waited all afternoon, drinking beer in the sunlight, hoping she would come and speak to him truthfully. He had to speak to her. She never came.[3]
Ondaatje says when he moved to England he became preoccupied in this very new country and, in a sense, forgot about his childhood in Sri Lanka. Ondaatje’s brilliant father, Mervyn, who could recite verses from Shakespeare extempore died of a brain haemorrhage after the writer left Sri Lanka as a young boy. “My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult,” he lamented in interviews. And this one single event rises above all others, in Ondaatje’s life.
In Running in the Family he recalls with immense power his father’s death:
The bottle was half empty beside him. He arose and lit the kerosene lamp. He wanted to look at his face, though the mirror was stained. … In the bathroom ants had attacked the novel [that Mervyn was reading] thrown on the floor by the commode. A whole battalion was carrying one page away from its source, carrying the intimate print as if rolling a tablet away from him. He knelt down on the red tile, slowly, not wishing to disturb their work. It was page 189. He had not got that far in the book yet but he surrendered it to them. […] The white rectangle moved with the busy arduous ants. Duty, he thought. But that was just a fragment gazed at by the bottom of his eye. He drank. There. He saw the midnight rat (160-161).[4]
In his Booker Prize winning novel, The English Patient, Ondaatje remembers his own father when he writes about the Canadian nurse Hana’s father dying alone in a dove cote. Ondaatje said in an interview that his father was “a sad and mercurial figure. There was a lot I didn’t know about him, and that was recurring in my books: trying to find the central character. It became a habit. In all my books there are mysteries that are not fully told.”[5] Yet another reiterative image that is a palimpsest on my own history of a diasporic Asian, leaving my father to die alone in Calcutta while I met my commitments in the Canadian academy, unattended in his last struggle to breathe, abandoned in an excellent intensive care unit with complete strangers, with no familiar touch of my hand.
Mervyn Ondaatje got into Cambridge but preferred to drink champagne instead of attending class. His parents discovered firsthand the errant genius of their child. I had been reading “Letters and Other Worlds” from Rat Jelly & Other Poems 1963-1978, and the following words sang a persistent tune for nine long years, at the end of which I began work on editing a volume on the poet-novelist: he writes that his father’s body was “a globe of fear.” In the poem, Ondaatje compares his father’s body to an unfamiliar town, recollecting his final moments when he shut himself in a room with two bottles of gin, and then death came to him.
Our forthcoming book on the fiction of Ondaatje, edited by myself and by my partner, the historian Harish Mehta, is a celebration of an uncommon writer, one of the finest living storytellers who touches the wounds of those buried emotions that reside deep in the recesses of the readers’ mind. Our collection of essays by scholars of Ondaatje’s fiction examines the extraordinary dimensions of how a living writer of our times is a literary compass who breaks through separation and pain, guiding readers with an abiding message of hope and kindness in a fractured world, excavating obscured emotions in their, and his characters,’ memory bank, an archive he mines frequently and with inventiveness in his story-telling. A self-professed “mongrel, a nomad, a person of several countries”—a “Burgher,” a mixed-race Eurasian from Sri Lanka, and a diasporic South-Asian Canadian—he employs “self-writing,” inserting himself into his text, using his lived experience of separation, at a very early age, from his father and fatherland.
Although he describes himself as a Canadian writer, he knows the ground beneath his feet: he has said that he is not solely a North American, and that he loves and feels a part of Sri Lanka. In his own way, he began giving back to his fatherland, putting his Booker Prize winnings into the creation of the Gratiaen Prize (named after his mother, Doris) for Sri Lankan writers based on the island: recent winners include a ‘lost classic’ by Tissa Abeysekara. His moving from Asia to the West, he believes, helped him learn twice as much, as it was like living three or four lives. For him, there is a parallel between a writer and a migrant: writers are immigrants, he says, if the writer is writing about a new place. For him, starting a new life in a new country, with a new language and practices, is “exciting and terrifying,” he said once in an interview. Though he describes himself as a Canadian writer, Ondaatje is clear: “I don't think I’m a north American solely; Sri Lanka is a place I love and feel very much part of” (Jaggi 2000).[6]
In my being a stranger to, and a native of, Calcutta that straddles perhaps the most complex and turbulent colonial and postcolonial histories of the planet, I see myself reflected in the thoughts of two of the last two centuries’ most deeply resonant voices. In The English Patient Ondaatje writes the following lines, and I recall learning them as if they were a daily mantra to be recited (and hearing in them an echo from Rilke’s Duino Elegies:
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up, as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed up to as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography—to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps (The English Patient, 261).[7]
In his enormous cache of poetry and fiction he proves again and again that vulnerability and acceptance are quotients of strength and intelligence. And that power is the effortless ability to inspire. Fear is the lock and laughter the key to feeling ten feet tall.
Michael Ondaatje is, above all else, a poet. The 1970s atmosphere of Toronto may have had something to do with his producing his first collections of poetry: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1970) won the Canadian Governor General’s Award; and then came The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems (1989), and Handwriting: Poems (1998).
The poet seems to have sought a different canvas, a new way of telling, and that brought him into the novel genre. His extraordinary first novel, Coming Through Slaughter (1976), a fictional portrait of the African-American jazz musician Charles “Buddy” Bolden, signaled his stepping into fiction. In 1982, he published his cathartic memoir, Running in the Family. And then came In the Skin of a Lion (1987), set in an early historical moment of his life in Toronto: the novel is a fictionalized microscopic look at the lives of immigrants who had helped build the city through their labor, but still remained on the margins of wealthy, white society. The English Patient (1992), located in Italy at the end of the Second World War, a joint winner of the Booker Prize for fiction, was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1996. Anil’s Ghost (2000), a story of a young female anthropologist investigating war crimes in Sri Lanka for an international human rights group won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. In Divisadero (2007) he creates a compelling novel about family as a unit before it splinters. The Cat’s Table (2011) chronicles an autobiographical voyage from Sri Lanka to England in the 1950s from the perspective of an eleven-year-old boy and his two comrades. In Warlight (2018) a teenage boy and his sister are left with two mysterious men when their parents move to Singapore after the Second World War, amid uncertainty fraught with risk and fear.
We’re now waiting for the next novel or book of poems. A million happies, Mr. Ondaatje, one fine friend whom I have never met.
Julie Banerjee Mehta holds MA and PhD degrees in English Literature and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught courses on the works of the Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist and poet, Michael Ondaatje. She conceptualized and taught the Chancellor Emerita Vivienne Poy-endowed course on Asian Literatures and Cultures in Canada at the Department of English, University of Toronto. Her translation of Tagore’s play Dak Ghar/Post Office was performed by Pleiades Theatre, Toronto, in 2010 to critical acclaim, and earned her the title of “One of Sixteen most Influential South Asians in Canada.” She is the author of Dance of Life: The Mythology, History, and Politics of Cambodian Culture, and co-author of a biography of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen. Her recent major publications are “Toronto’s Multicultured Tongues: Stories of South Asian Cuisines,” in Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History (University of Toronto Press, 2012). Her other book chapters are published in Narrating Race: Asia, (Trans)Nationalism, Social Change (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011); and in Writing Asia: The Literatures in Englishes, Volume 1: From the Inside (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2007), as well as in several other volumes.
[1] Maya Jaggi, “The Soul of a Migrant,” The Guardian, April 29, 2000. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/apr/29/fiction.features
[2] Sam Solecki, Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 6-7.
[3] Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 157.
[4] Ibid., 160-161.
[5] Jaggi, “The Soul of a Migrant,” The Guardian.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1993), 261.
Jaggi, Maya. 2000. “The Soul of a Migrant.” The Guardian. April 29. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/apr/29/fiction.features
Ondaatje, Michael. 1982. Running in the Family. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982.
____. The English Patient. 1993. Toronto: Vintage Canada.
Solecki, Sam. 2003. Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
