Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje Page A

with her closest friends, calling them “damn thieves,” “bloody rogues.” She only played cards formoney and if faced with a difficult contract would throw down her hand, gather the others up, and proclaim “the rest are mine.” Everyone knew she was lying but it didn’t matter. Once when my brother and two sisters who were very young were playing a game of “beggar-my-neighbour” on the porch, Lalla came to watch. She walked up and down beside them, seemingly very irritated. After ten minutes she could stand it no longer, opened her purse, gave them each two rupees, and said, “Never,
never
play cards for love.”
    She was in her prime. During the war she opened up a boarding house in Nuwara Eliya with Muriel Potger, a chain smoker who did all the work while Lalla breezed through the rooms saying, “Muriel, for godsake, we can’t breathe in this place!”—being more of a pest than a help. If she had to go out she would say, “I’ll just freshen up” and disappear into her room for a stiff drink. If there was none she took a quick swig of eau de cologne to snap her awake. Old flames visited her constantly throughout her life. She refused to lose friends; even her first beau, Shelton de Saram, would arrive after breakfast to escort her for walks. His unfortunate wife, Frieda, would always telephone Lalla first and would spend most afternoons riding in her trap through the Cinnamon Gardens or the park searching for them.
    Lalla’s great claim to fame was that she was the first woman in Ceylon to have a mastectomy. It turned out to be unnecessary but she always claimed to support modern science, throwing herself into new causes. (Even in death her generosity exceeded the physically possible for she had donated her body to six hospitals.) The false breast would never be still for long. She was an energetic person. It would crawl over to join its twin on the right hand side or sometimes appear on her back, “for dancing” she smirked. She called it her Wandering Jew and would yell at thegrandchildren in the middle of a formal dinner to fetch her tit as she had forgotten to put it on. She kept losing the contraption to servants who were mystified by it as well as to the dog, Chindit, who would be found gnawing at the foam as if it were tender chicken. She went through four breasts in her lifetime. One she left on a branch of a tree in Hakgalle Gardens to dry out after a rainstorm, one flew off when she was riding behind Vere on his motorbike, and the third she was very mysterious about, almost embarrassed though Lalla was never embarrassed. Most believed it had been forgotten after a romantic assignation in Trincomalee with a man who may or may not have been in the Cabinet.
    * * *
    Children tell little more than animals, said Kipling. When Lalla came to Bishop’s College Girls School on Parents’ Day and pissed behind bushes—or when in Nuwara Eliya she simply stood with her legs apart and urinated—my sisters were so embarrassed and ashamed they did not admit or speak of this to each other for over fifteen years. Lalla’s son Noel was most appalled by her. She, however, was immensely proud of his success, and my Aunt Nedra recalls seeing Lalla sitting on a sack of rice in the fish market surrounded by workers and fishermen, with whom she was having one of her long daily chats, pointing to a picture of a bewigged judge in
The Daily News
and saying in Sinhalese that
this
was
her
son. But Lalla could never be just a mother; that seemed to be only one muscle in her chameleon nature, which had too many other things to reflect. And I am not sure what my mother’s relationship was to her. Maybe they were too similar to even recognize much of a problem, both having huge compassionate hearts that never even considered revenge or small-mindedness, bothhowling and wheezing with laughter over the frailest joke, both carrying their own theatre on their backs. Lalla remained the centre of the world she moved through.