The other Ondaatje
Given his dramatic exploits, the brother of the man who wrote "The English Patient" and "Anil's Ghost" could have walked right out of a novel.

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By Nick Ryan

May 26, 2000 | Christopher Ondaatje was raised in one of Sri Lanka's most powerful colonial families. And though his family later fell into poverty, he went on to create a billion-dollar empire in Canada. Along the way Ondaatje, 66, became an Olympic sportsman, then turned his hand to writing and achieved bestseller status as a biographer. He has also carved a reputation as an accomplished explorer, wildlife photographer, philanthropist and international art collector.

"In the early 1970s, I was steeped in the world of North American finance," he says in a precise, clipped voice. "Then I read a book, called 'The Devil Drives,' by Fawn Brody, and it changed my life."

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Tall and elegant, the older brother of poet-novelist Michael Ondaatje looks at the pictures on the walls around us as he talks. "'The Devil Drives' is a biography of Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton," he says, with a faint colonial twang to his words. "I was hacking my way through the jungles of finance, and I suddenly realized his was the life I would have preferred to have led. For over a quarter of a century, I have been fascinated with Burton. And I was obsessed by his search for the source of the Nile with John Hanning Speke over 150 years ago, which contributed to his being the best-known traveler of the 19th century.

"I was obsessed, obsessed, by the source of the Nile for over 20 years. It was on my brain 99.9 percent of the time."

Ondaatje's fascination with Burton, Speke and the Nile River has indeed changed his life. It led him to give up his business and embark on a series of perilous journeys into the heart of equatorial Africa to find the true source of that mighty river.

Ondaatje might at first seem an unlikely explorer. In his adopted country of Canada he is a national name, recognized as an extraordinarily successful financier who has given millions to galleries and public institutions. On the international stage, his Sri Lankan art collection is the largest of its kind in the world, and the six books he has written, including the semiautobiographical "The Man-Eater of Punani," about his rediscovery of his native Sri Lanka, and the recently published "Journey to the Source of the Nile," about following in the footsteps of the famous Victorian explorers in eastern and central Africa, have been bestsellers.

However, in the U.K., where he now lives, he remains something of a mystery. He is the philanthropist behind the annual 10,000-pound (about $14,740) Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture, offered each summer by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. And he is recognized as a prominent council member of the Royal Geographical Society. Yet despite the apparent generosity of his Ondaatje Foundation to various British causes, his is scarcely a name on everyone's lips.

That could soon change. On May 4, Ondaatje was revealed as the man behind the new $23.4 million expansion of the National Portrait Gallery in London. According to director Charles Saumarez Smith, Ondaatje's "incredibly generous" gift of almost $4 million allowed lottery funding to be secured and the project to go ahead. "The NPG has for some time been my favorite gallery in England, if not the world," says Ondaatje. "It's one of the very few galleries in the world that is devoted to portrait painting."

His role as a philanthropist and explorer seems a world away from his beginnings in what was then Ceylon, muses Ondaatje, as we sit and sip strong black coffee in the opulent surroundings of his Sloane Square apartment. "I must have been a strange boy," he recalls. "Tall, slim and angular. Always alone. Always thinking."

His father, Mervyn, was a plantation owner, part of a prominent line descended from Dutch burghers, who arrived on the island in the 17th century. One ancestor produced the first translation of the Bible into Tamil, and the young Ondaatje's uncle on his mother's side was Ceylon's attorney general.

Mervyn emerges as a sort of lovable maverick in "Running in the Family," Michael Ondaatje's fictionalized account of the children's upbringing. A major in the Ceylon Light Infantry, Mervyn was "a big man with sandy hair and blue eyes, bigger than his own father, and he was incredibly charismatic; he could sell anybody anything," remembers the older Ondaatje brother.

Mervyn spoke Sinhalese and Tamil fluently and managed various estates. "Unfortunately, he never got out of the habit of drink. For most of the time I knew him, he was sober, but occasionally he went on a binge." The binges would start as soon as he got up in the morning. "No one could predict what he would do," Ondaatje says. At these times, his father was feared by both the family and the estate workers.

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