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COMING BACK TO THE LAND HE LOVES
He looked east to his much-loved Ceylon from which he had been “wrenched” out as a boy and then looked west towards Canada and made a simple decision. That decision taken in London, as a callow youth yet with an incisive mind, was the turning point in his life.

More than half a century later, this multi-millionaire financial wizard now retired from the corporate world, and indulging in his passion for travelling, adventure and writing, sees it as a “good economic decision”.

Who is this enigma, who prefers coconut arrack to palmyrah arrack, considers rice, curry and tilapi “a first-class dinner”, enjoys a hot wild boar curry; is equally comfortable being knighted by the Queen of England as he is gazing at the myriad stars over the ancient city of Anuradhapura or gingerly stepping across heavily-mined areas to photograph the scarred shells of buildings or island-hopping off Jaffna; or tracking a sleek leopard at Yala? What has made him what he is today?

This is what we attempted to find out when we set out, albeit with some trepidation, to meet Christopher Ondaatje, whose brother Michael, author and Booker Prize winner, is more familiar to Sri Lankans with the award of the annual Gratiaen Prize in memory of their mother.

Before the interview a frantic search on the net gives only a sketchy description about Christopher Ondaatje…….born in colonial Ceylon, educated in England, made his money in Canada from banking, finance and publishing, retired from the corporate world in 1995 and now travelling the world. A few clippings from local newspapers in the 1990s focused on him briefly when he bought Forbes and Walker through the Ondaatje Corporation.

An insight into what is closest to his heart, however, comes out in Ondaatje’s latest book: ‘Woolf in Ceylon -- An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf 1904-1911’ where he retraces the footsteps of Woolf, 100 years after him to his haunts in Jaffna, Kandy (even Bogambara prison where after the visit Ondaatje is advised to wash his hands with carbolic soap to ward off scabies) and Hambantota. Through its pages, the reader also gets a chance to look into Ondaatje’s own life and love for this land.

Ondaatje, who turns 73 on February 22, himself sets the tone for our interview when we meet him at his sister’s elegant home in Nawala last Monday. He is in Sri Lanka for the ‘celebration’ tomorrow of his book on Woolf, well-acclaimed both here and abroad.

With a warm handshake and an enigmatic smile, he puts us at ease, in his own suave manner while taking time to pat his sister’s dog, Hector. Ondaatje’s own life seems to be the stuff stories are made of. The eldest son of a wealthy family of Dutch origin, his early childhood was idyllic. Born in Kandy, he lived his early life on his father’s tea estate at Pelmadulla, schooled at St. Thomas College, Gurutalawa and briefly at Breeks Memorial School up in the Nilgiri Hills in India. Most of all what is etched in his memory are the many journeys made to different parts of the country, including stays at Taprobane (earlier known as Count de Mauny’s island), the tiny isle off Weligama in the south and also forays into Yala, nurturing his fascination of leopards.

“I love leopards, most people do,” he laughs when we query whether this love is linked to him being dubbed one of “Toronto’s most aggressive and predatory businessmen”. His explanation is…..“in business there are only winners and losers, no halfway. Those who are selfish and unselfish…..if you go for what you want then you are considered to be selfish”.

“As a young boy, life was wonderful and wild…….sketching birds, collecting birds’ eggs,” he recalls. It was not to last, however, and reality struck all too soon, when he had to leave the land, the life and the people he loved. Didn’t he have an option? “You do what your father tells you,” he says.

The heartbreak comes out in his book when he writes: “I am thrilled by Yala partly because I connect it with happy memories from my early years. When I was still a boy my father took me on a trip around Ceylon for a fortnight by car. The year was 1946 and I was twelve. It was probably the highlight of my life until then, and it was certainly the last thing my father and I did together, just before we were separated for ever.” He never saw his father, Mervyn, again.

Ondaatje was off to public school in England and a completely different life. “You had to learn to be an Englishman……….new school, new rules and new lessons. Thank God there was cricket, a passion with me.” He sees cricket as the redeeming factor, helping him an “outsider” to integrate into this environment at Blundell’s School in Tiverton, Devon. Later in Canada he would be part of the bob-sledding team sent to the Winter Olympics of 1964.
More trauma dogged his youth, money and family troubles far away in Ceylon that would have a permanent bearing on his life, for his father had a drinking problem. Penury stared them in the face, the family, which had wined and dined at such places as the Queen’s Hotel in Kandy during those colonial days, was destitute. Ondaatje without a means of completing school, started work in the city of London at the National Bank of India, expecting to come back to Colombo as an Assistant Manager.

By this time his mother, Doris, too had come over to England, making a break with his father. “Mother was an incredible woman. When things collapsed for us she had made the decision to leave my father and come out to England with no money but just to be with her children. She took a job in a boarding house, running the place in exchange for a room in the basement she shared with my sister Janet and a tiny little triangular room in the attic which was my room. We were poor but my mother would explain to us that although we were living in Chelsea with the Bohemians we were the real Bohemians. We were the people who had lost or given up everything and we were living the Bohemian life in London. She gave us incredible confidence. When we walked out of the house onto the street we considered ourselves aristocrats and princes. It is her confidence, stamina and sense of drama that stuck with us. Somehow we survived and somehow we lived and learnt and wrote about it particularly Michael,” he says. His other siblings are sisters Janet and Gillian in between himself and Michael and Susan.

A tinge of sadness creeps into his voice as he speaks of his father who loved him dearly and whom he loved deeply. “He had a drinking problem and he was a tyrant. His world collapsed when I left for England and my mother divorced him. His family was his life and he was left a broken man. He had quite a sad death in Kegalle.”

Throughout this turbulent period in his life Asia was also in transition. The British Empire was on the wane. Looking east Ondaatje saw the business of the bank he was working for and other eastern banks, the wealthiest in the world, “disintegrating right under my eyes”. From 1962-1987 were the fastest growing years in North America and Toronto was the fastest growing city there and his gamble to head west in 1956 paid off although in later life after he had achieved his aim of making money, this hard-nosed tycoon urged the west in the 1990s to look east towards Southeast Asia for new economic frontiers.

His youth was dedicated to working hard, his sights set on breaking into investment particularly stock-broking to “rebuild my family fortune by hacking my way into corporate finance”. This was also the time, in 1959, he married Valda, his Latvian wife. They have three children and 12 grandchildren, says Ondaatje, very much the family man. Son David is in California, daughter Sarah in Connecticut and youngest daughter Jans in England where he and his wife also live. Is Valda with him on this trip to Sri Lanka? “No,” he smiles, “she is enjoying a rest back home.”

1961 was the year he read Woolf’s autobiographies published in five volumes, the second of which was ‘Growing’. In those “unputdownable” pages, he was reading about the Ceylon that he knew and loved. “Imagine my surprise,” he says and with it came the resolve to write about this man (Woolf) and about Ceylon much more than he had done, for he had left out such integral areas of the country as Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Dambulla, Sigiriya. “He hardly talks even about Colombo…..Not the caste system……Inadequately dealing with Kataragama and does not use the word mudaliyar.”

With humility, Ondaatje explains he had to “learn to write”, adding, “in Sri Lanka we are taught very well. English is taught well”. The task before him was to learn to write, complete the research and to get credibility not with just one book but with several. And like in all of his other ventures, he says that’s what he has done. The seven books he wrote before Woolf include ‘Olympic Victory’, ‘Journey to the Source of the Nile’, ‘Hemingway in Africa’, ‘Leopard in the Afternoon’ and ‘Man-eater of Punanai’ which he says sells even now.
If he had his life to live over again, any changes he would wish for?
“Not gone into finance to make money in selfish business. If we had the money and kept the money, I would have started earlier…I’ve been writing and exploring only for 16 years…but then I would have started earlier. First I would have liked to go to Cambridge and then later done real exploration for the Royal Geographical Society….as opposed to writing about my heroes one of whom is Leonard Woolf, a remarkable man.”

He first gave in to the lure of Sri Lanka only in 1990. Though the corporate burdens were still heavy, he came back and picked up the pieces of his childhood which resulted in the book about the man-eater. Since then the country of his birth has seen him pay at least one or two visits every year. A holder of British and Canadian passports, with many an honour bestowed on him in both of these adopted countries, and indulging in the pursuits of the rich such as golfing, sailing, travelling and photography, he says, “I keep coming back because this is my country and I am very much at home here. What I’m doing is living the life I led before I left Ceylon. Within a day or two of being here, I am off in a jeep with a driver into the jungle. Ask anybody, any expatriate, it is the thing they miss most……that and cricket.”
How many get a second chance like this, he muses. “Dabbling in corporate finance was fine but this is fantastic,” is how he describes what “chucking up business” has done to him. “I feel 10 years younger. It is immensely satisfying and enjoyable.”

Tentatively we query what he has done for this country. Yes, we’ve read about all the philanthropy, the National Portrait Gallery in the UK naming a wing after him over his contributions, Ondaatje becoming part of the exclusive club of the Labour Party’s ‘million plus’ and the Ondaatje Fund which fosters the development of learning and international understanding.

“No, I do not want to award a literary prize because I don’t want to step on Michael’s toes, he is my brother. There is an Ondaatje Bungalow that I built in Yala to help reduce the poaching and for better policing of a certain area which seemed unprotected. This is to do with my great love,” smiles Ondaatje.
His fondness for the country is evident in the quote that sears our very being as Ondaatje concedes: “You can take the boy out of Ceylon but it is not easy to take Ceylon out of the boy.”

Ondaatje on Woolf and Jaffna
Christopher Ondaatje has used Leonard Woolf as a shadow behind which to make a social commentary of a hundred years of Ceylon’s and Sri Lanka’s history. “It’s not just a biography, it is also a travelogue and involves literary criticism and a social commentary not just of the present day or Woolf but about independence, post-independence, 1972 name change and about the escalation of tensions between the Sinhalese and the Tamils.” “Frankly the metamorphosis from Ceylon to Sri Lanka has been a turbulent journey,” explains Ondaatje.

“I worked hard at it and used two props……the travelogue or safari and photos, 60 in all.” The super photos in the book include some which he himself clicked braving mines and all and others he found rummaging through boxes and boxes at the archives of the Royal Geographical Society in England. “These photos were taken during Woolf’s time in Ceylon and have never been seen before.”

Leafing through the book he picks out two “fantastic” pictures – ‘Street scene, Colombo, around 1905’ and ‘Village crowd, Ceylon, 1910’.
When asked for a comment on Jaffna, which he visited in March 2004 in the footsteps of Woolf who was posted there in 1904, this is what Ondaatje says, “The world has a different view of Jaffna than it actually exists. In fact, Jaffna is very much a part of Sri Lanka and when you travel in Sri Lanka researching the book, if you can ignore the checkpoints and the military and the militant attitudes of the people paid to be militant, the people of Jaffna and the people of the south, basically the Tamils and the Sinhalese are very much the same islanders who are fed up with the war which is disturbing the normal way of life.

“Everybody talked about it in Jaffna. People were incredibly kind and friendly but it was impossible to ignore the devastation I witnessed around me: Elephant Pass fort no longer in existence, the churches, almost rubble, the kachcheri where Woolf worked just a ruin now and the magnificent old Jaffna fort merely a shadow of its former glory with only its scarred perimeter still standing.”

Another book in the offing? Though Ondaatje has vowed that Woolf will be the last and he will cry halt, only time will tell.

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