Running in the Family: The Passions of Lalla Summary & Analysis

Ondaatje’s maternal grandmother, Lalla, “could read thunder” and claimed she was born outdoors. Ondaatje knows nothing of her childhood up until she is 20, living in Colombo, where she is engaged to a selfish man who leaves her for a richer woman. Lalla, heartbroken, goes into a fit of rage and then immediately marries Willie Gratiaen “on the rebound.” Willie is a broker, but together they buy a house in Colombo and start a dairy farm. However, Willie falls ill within a few years and dies, leaving Lalla to raise their two children alone.

Lalla befriends her neighbor Rene de Saram, whose husband went mad and committed suicide, also leaving her to raise her children alone. Both women, coming from wealth and “high living,” fall on hard times. Both have several affairs with married men, but neither marry ever again. Rene owns a dairy farm as well, and the two look out for each other by legal or illegal means. When one of Lalla’s employees stabs a foreigner to death for harassing a young woman, Lalla hides him in another one of her neighbor’s houses for two days. When Lala is called to court to testify, she knows the judge and charms her way out of it. On top of all of this, Lalla frequently attends parties and gatherings in addition to raising her children.

Lalla constantly has a score of children around her, since she makes a very oblivious chaperone and allows them to get away with nearly anything. She constantly gives gifts and takes people out for meals until restaurants begin turning her away for never paying her bills. When Doris is a teenager, Lalla designs elaborate costume dresses for her to wear, though they are so elaborate it is often difficult for Doris to dance or find suitors. Although Lalla was vivacious, Ondaatje notes that her eccentricity was not always welcome. Doris never spoke of her mother, and Lalla always wanted a crowd around her but hated feeling “pinned down” or “contained” by others’ needs—even by breastfeeding her children, since it delayed her going to parties.

After her children are grown and leave the house, Lalla turns her attention to her brother Vere. Although Vere intends to remain a bachelor his whole life, Lalla engineers his marriage to an ugly woman with a large dowry—a priest’s sister. Lalla and Vere have “expensive drinking sessions” and need the money this union would provide. But after Vere spurns his new bride, the priest refuses Lalla mass, and she in turn refuses church for the rest of her life. Lalla and Vere drink together constantly, but Vere never finds a stable career for himself. Lalla occasionally sends whatever money she can to her other brother Evan—now, no one in the family remembers where Evan went or what he did.

By the mid-1930s, both Lalla and Rene’s dairies shut down. When Lalla’s poverty forces her to sell her property and possessions, she hits her prime, floating transiently around the country to visit and scheme and party, living out of a suitcase. Lalla loves flowers but can't be bothered to grow them, so wherever she goes she steals them, pulling them up by their roots, gazing at them or gifting them to friends, and then casting them aside. She does the same with any property, especially toys, which she loves to steal from the market and give to children—a “lyrical socialist.” She drinks heavily, sees “old flames” constantly, and often loses her foam breast after she becomes the “first woman in Ceylon to have a mastectomy.”

Ondaatje knows that some of Lalla’s children despised her brash behavior, particularly her son Noel. Even so, Lalla was proud of her children, even if she was never content to “be just a mother.” Ondaatje doesn’t know what Doris thought of her, but imagines that his mother inherited some of her theatricality from Lalla. Lalla was always the center of whatever places she inhabited, an “overbearing charmed flower” who was freest after her husband’s death.

As Lalla grows older, she continues traveling around but feels ready to die. In 1947, when she is 68, she comes into a small amount of money, so she and Vere drive up to Nuwara Eliya on his motorcycle. They move into an abandoned boarding house and spend the next several days eating, drinking, and playing cards. A storm gathers and Lalla thinks that she will die soon. She and Vere spend more days together, drinking and speaking about their lives more intimately than they ever have.

In the middle of the night, while Vere sleeps on the couch, Lalla drunkenly stumbles out of the building and directly into a flash flood. The flood carries her away down the hillside, slamming her into objects and carrying her through town. Lalla, drunk, observes it all but doesn't think she is in any danger. She rides the flood all the way to the ocean and dies when she reaches it.