Eight winters ago in India I fled the manila-folder-bound desiccation of Delhi for the south and Kerala. The backwaters there have a sensuality that slides about you as you enter, moving you away from the frantic buzz of life, separating you from a sense of time and place. The slowness starts to seep into your skin, spreading itself over you, drinking you in.

I took with me a novel that was making a lot of noise at the time, an overripe Booker prizewinner that, being in my impressionable twenties and passionate about my adopted subcontinent, I felt duty-bound to read. That took a day, and then I found myself with nothing else except decades’ worth of back copies of The Reader’s Digest piled up in the sitting-room of the houseboat on which I drifted.

Except there was something else, buried at the bottom of my suitcase and momentarily forgotten – a small and beautifully produced Bloomsbury Classics hardback edition of Michael Ondaatje’sRunning in the Family. My sister had sent it to me as a Christmas present. The problem was that it was set in Sri Lanka, to which I was travelling on from Kerala. I like to read books in situ, and I had been trying to save it up, at least until I hit the tarmac in Colombo. But in the end, unable to resist the feel of it, I opened it and began to read.

Running in the Family is Ondaatje’s memoir of his birthplace, of his Dutch-Sinhalese family and the characters who peopled the first eleven years of his life. His father, Mervyn Ondaatje – part Errol Flynn, part South Asian aristocrat – had taken a boat to England in the late 1920s, where, having managed to convince his parents that he had passed the Oxbridge entrance exam, he proceeded to live in elegant style in Cambridge without ever darkening the doors of the university. At his parents’ expense, Mervyn boated, had numerous love affairs, including one with a Russian countess, and even, at one point, donned a uniform to fight the rebels in Ireland.

Eventually he was rumbled and dragged home, where he quickly announced his engagement to Doris Gratiaan, a Dutch-Sinhalese beauty whose brother Noel, Mervyn had caroused with in England. Noel too had returned home. He had been sent down from Oxford for setting fire to his rooms – a not entirely unusual occurrence then but one which was made unpardonable when he threw the flaming furniture out of the window and dragged it to the river, where it sank three of the Oxford rowing crews’ boats. Mervyn had lost his heart to Noel’s exotic sister when he saw her and a pal, got up in a swimsuits and gold paint, giving their version of Isadora Duncan’s wild new interpretation of dance. So the union was made in 1932 that produced the author and his three siblings.

Running in the Family winds its way between past and present, gathering memories rather as the family were gathered into cars as the hot season crushed Colombo. Children were taken out of school, and amid a mélêe of books, sweaters, golf clubs, rifles and dogs, the Ondaatjes transplanted themselves to the heights of Nuwara Eliya, 6,000 feet up, a place of parties, ‘serious golf’ and the All Ceylon Tennis Tournament.

Within the confines of an island everything that happens is connected and everyone is related to everyone else; Sinhalese with Tamil, Dutch with British. But within these limits the Ondaatjes spread themselves, leaving behind them, over the years, a trail of broken marriages – love drowned and numbed in gin, to the clinking of ice in the glass.

To Ondaatje Sri Lanka is an island of allegorical earth and air, a place of both Caliban and Ariel, where the sea fuses with the sky, and the past co-exists with the present. His parents, Mervyn, sometime tea and rubber plantation superintendent, and full-time alcoholic, a