Running in the Family (8 page)

On my brother’s wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The result of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations—by Ptolemy, Mercator, François Valentyn, Mortier, and Heydt—growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. Amoeba, then stout rectangle, and then the island as we know it now, a pendant off the ear of India. Around it, a blue-combed ocean busy with dolphin and sea-horse, cherub and compass. Ceylon floats on the Indian Ocean and holds its naive mountains, drawings of cassowary and boar who leap without perspective across imagined “desertum” and plain.

At the edge of the maps the scrolled mantling depicts ferocious slipper-footed elephants, a white queen offering a necklace to natives who carry tusks and a conch, a Moorish king who stands amidst the power of books and armour. On the south-west corner
of some charts are satyrs, hoof deep in foam, listening to the sound of the island, their tails writhing in the waves.

The maps reveal rumours of topography, the routes for invasion and trade, and the dark mad mind of travellers’ tales appears throughout Arab and Chinese and medieval records. The island seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as its shape—Serendip, Ratnapida (“island of gems”), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon—the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language.

This pendant, once its shape stood still, became a mirror. It pretended to reflect each European power till newer ships arrived and spilled their nationalities, some of whom stayed and intermarried—my own ancestor arriving in 1600, a doctor who cured the residing governor’s daughter with a strange herb and was rewarded with land, a foreign wife, and a new name which was a Dutch spelling of his own. Ondaatje. A parody of the ruling language. And when his Dutch wife died, marrying a Sinhalese woman, having nine children, and remaining. Here. At the centre of the rumour. At this point on the map.

In Colombo a church faces west into the sea. We drive along Reclamation Street through markets and boutiques. The church ahead of us is painted a pale dirty blue. Below us, an oil-tanker dwarfs the harbour and the shops. We get out, followed by the children. A path about twelve feet wide bordered by plantain trees. The gothic doors give a sense, as all church doors do, of being wheeled open. Inside are wooden pews and their geometrical shadows and stone floors that whisper against the children’s bare feet. We spread out.

After all these generations the coming darkness makes it necessary to move fast in order to read the brass plaques on the walls. The first ones are too recent, 19th century. Then, by the communion rail, I see it—cut across the stone floor. To kneel on the floors of a church built in 1650 and see your name chiseled in large letters so that it stretches from your fingertips to your elbow
in some strange way removes vanity, eliminates the personal. It makes your own story a lyric. So the sound which came immediately out of my mouth as I half-gasped and called my sister spoke all that excitement of smallness, of being overpowered by stone.

What saved me was the lack of clarity. The slab was five feet long, three feet wide, a good portion of it had worn away. We remained on our knees in that fading light, asked the children to move their shadows, and peered sideways to try to catch the faint ridge of letters worn away by the traffic of feet. The light leaned into the chiseled area like frail sand. To the right of that slab was another; we had been standing on it totally unaware, as if in someone’s rifle sight. Gillian wrote on a brown envelope as I read

She was fifteen! That can’t be right. Must be. Fifteen when she married and twenty-five when she died. Perhaps that was the first wife—before he married Jacoba de Melho? Probably another branch of the family.

We carry six ledgers out of the church into the last of the sunlight and sit on the vicarage steps to begin reading. Lifting the ancient pages and turning them over like old, skeletal leaves. The black script must have turned brown over a hundred years ago. The thick pages foxed and showing the destruction caused by silverfish, scars among the immaculate recordings of local history and formal signatures. We had not expected to find more than one Ondaatje here but the stones and pages are full of them. We had been looking for the Reverend Jurgen Ondaatje—a translator and eventual chaplain in Colombo from 1835 until 1847. It seems, however, as if every Ondaatje for miles around flocked here
to be baptised and married. When Jurgen died his son Simon took his place and was the last Tamil Colonial Chaplain of Ceylon.

Simon was the oldest of four brothers. Every Sunday morning they came to this church in carriages with their wives and children and after the service retired to the vicarage for drinks and lunch. Just before the meal, talk would erupt into a violent argument and each brother would demand to have his carriage brought round, climb into it with his hungry family and ride off to his own home, each in a different direction.

For years they tried but were never able to have a meal together. Each of them was prominent in his own field and was obviously too didactic and temperamental to agree with his brothers on any subject of discussion. There was nothing one could speak about that would not infringe on another’s area of interest. If the subject was something as innocent as flowers, then Dr. William Charles Ondaatje, who was the Ceylonese Director of the Botanical Gardens, would throw scorn on any opinion and put the others in their place. He had introduced the olive to Ceylon. Finance or military talk was Matthew Ondaatje’s area, and law or scholarship exercised Philip de Melho Jurgen’s acid tongue. The only one who had full freedom was the Reverend Simon who said whatever he felt like during the sermon, knowing his brothers could not interrupt him. No doubt he caught hell as soon as he entered the vicarage next door for what he hoped would be a peaceful lunch. Whenever a funeral or baptism occurred, however, all the brothers would be there. The church records show Simon’s name witnessing them all in a signature very like my father’s.

We stand outside the church in twilight. The building has stood here for over three hundred years, in the palm of monsoons, through seasonal droughts and invasions from other countries. Its
grounds were once beautiful. Lights begin to come on slowly below us in the harbour. As we are about to get into the Volks, my niece points to a grave and I start walking through the brush in my sandals. “Watch out for snakes!” God. I make a quick leap backwards and get into the car. Night falls quickly during the five minute drive back to the house. Sit down in my room and transcribe names and dates from the various envelopes into a notebook. When I finish there will be that eerie moment when I wash my hands and see very clearly the deep grey colour of old paper dust going down the drain.