The Cat’s Table

A memoir and an autobiography

Name of the book: The Cat’s Table

Writer: Michael Ondaatje

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

No. of pages: 288

Price: Rs 499

Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships,” writes Michael Ondaatje in Running in the Family, his record of the eccentric lives of his ancestors. Growing out of “two return journeys” in 1978 and 1980 to Sri Lanka, the place where he was born, Running in the Family is a curious mix of autobiography, reminiscence, hearsay and history. Yet, in spite of the fusion of fact and fiction, it is a work that is firmly aware of its narrative destiny: “anecdotes and faint memories... dates and asides [interlock] as if assembling the hull of a ship.” Indeed, the final vision of the book that the reader has is one of completing a heady voyage, during which minds matured, hearts were put in peril, and lives came together or fell apart.

That image of a ship afloat in a sea of voices is what comes vividly to mind as one reads Ondaatje’s latest novel, which, he admits, “uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography”. There is a travelling circus, a rabid dog gone crazy, and a cast that is straight out of the world of Running in the Family. The plot literally involves a nautical expedition undertaken by the 11-year-old autobiographical narrator on the Oronsay, sailing from Ceylon to England in the 1950s. The young Michael is going to England to live with his mother after his parents’ divorce. He shares his humble cabin with Mr Hastie, a kennel keeper who reads mystical works, and takes his meals at “the cat’s table”, tucked farthest away from the coveted captain’s table. Keenly sensitive to the pulse of life on a ship presided over by a captain who “was not fond of his Asian cargo”, Michael begins to “distrust... the authority and prestige of all Head Tables” on this three-week journey — a habit that would gradually grow into his adult personality.

In the company of his peers, the “exuberant” Cassius and the “quiet” Ramadhin with his “tentative heart”, Michael learns “about adults simply by being in their midst”. He meets Larry Daniels, the botanist who is transporting a garden of exotic herbs to Europe; Mr Mazappa, “half Sicilian, half something else”, a “Homeric” character “with his list of feminine charms, as well as vices”; Miss Lasqueti, a voracious reader who threw books she disliked into the sea; Asuntha, a strange deaf girl; and Mr Fonseka, who aspired to teach Shakespeare to schoolchildren in England, but burned hemp in his cabin to inhale the familiar smells he had left behind. But the two most arresting members of the dramatis personae are Sir Hector de Silva, the philanthropist who is cursed by a monk and dies a freak death on board, and the prisoner who makes a devastating escape while being transported to an English jail.

This is also a story of the East’s encounter with the West, of odd characters who are “half something else” going in exile to the other end of the world.

For much of the novel, Ondaatje entertains us with a sprightly account of boyhood pranks. We are reminded of the delightful always-Sunday ambience of R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends. Time seems to have been arrested by the unshaken optimism of youth. But before long, the adult voice of Michael, the writer, intervenes, and moments of great tenderness and unalloyed intimacy from the past are lit by a pale melancholic glow. After an obscurely erotic encounter with his cousin, Emily, on the ship, the boy Michael feels “a mix of thrill and vertigo”. But the older Michael, looking back on the incident decades later, wonders: “was it a pleasure or a sadness, this life inside me?” Emily, the ethereal 17-year-old who had a not-so-clandestine thing going with Sunil, “The Hyderabad Mind”, retires to an island after a failed marriage and a lifetime’s struggle for security. Years later, when Michael spends a day with her at her cottage, she tells him coldly, yet with a hint of self-pity, “I don’t think you can love me into safety.”

What gives Ondaatje’s novel its power and intensity is this coming together of many kinds of time — not only past and present, but also of youth and middle age — until the stillness of history and the tumult of flowing life become intermingled. Episodes flash upon the imagination, perspectives become intertwined, as though the life that was, the one that is, and the one yet to come are sealed together into a single arc of memory. But memory, when entrusted solely to the vagaries of the human mind, often takes flight into fiction. “For us this was an era without the benefit of photography,” writes Ondaatje, “so the journey escaped any permanent memory.” Like an Impressionist painting, the image of this era is put together with patches of colour and hazy, indistinct shapes. This shifting, protean quality of the past is also mirrored in the adult self of the narrator, who has not quite evolved from the boy who once sailed to the far shores, “someone startled, half-formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet”.

This rootless and unformed quality, together with the capacity to surprise himself and be surprised by the world, remain with Michael, the story-teller, as they seldom do in adults, who “are always prepared for the gradual or sudden swerve in an oncoming story”. “As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than [the characters],” he admits with humility, “we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves.” There are, as a result, some seemingly inscrutable acts, such as Michael’s marriage to Ramadhin’s sister, Massi, and their eventual break-up.

This unfathomability is often tied to the child’s vision of things that are seen again in another light years later. “I realised only recently that Mr Mazappa and Miss Lasqueti were young,” writes Michael when he is long past his own youth. But such clarities — like Miss Lasqueti’s advice to Emily, “Despair young and never look back” — are necessarily ironic. They always come late, bearing the burden of missed chances and lost opportunities, when the moment for them is no longer ripe, but rotten to the core by the poison of life.

SOMAK GHOSHAL

Published on November 18, 2011

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1111118/jsp/northeast/story_14748583.jsp