Gifts From Forgetfulness

Years ago in the Sri Lankan highlands, Michael Ondaatje’s Aunt Christie, only 25 years old, volunteered to have “a total stranger in the circus profession” shoot an apple off her head. “That night,” Ondaatje writes in his sometimes fictionalized memoir Running in the Family (1982), a man named “T. W. Roberts was bitten in the leg by a dog while he danced with her. Later the dog was discovered to be rabid, but as T.W. had left for England nobody bothered to tell him. Most assume he survived.”