There was one positive point; his mother came to stay in England and the two were reunited. Then, in 1956, instead of taking up a job offer as the assistant manager of a bank back in Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital, he "realized the colonial game was up." "I made a key decision in my life to go west. So I started a financial and banking career in Canada," he says.

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His aim, he says, was "to rebuild the family's fortunes." With just $13 in his pocket when he arrived, and surviving for a time on a diet of toast and coffee, he worked his way up through the world of banking before establishing a hugely successful network of companies in the publishing and corporate finance sectors.

In 1970, he helped found Canada's first institutional brokerage, Loewen, Ondaatje, McCutcheon & Co. And Pagurian Press, which he created in 1967 with a $3,000 budget, eventually grew into the Pagurian Corp., worth $500 million and controlling assets of $1.2 billion. It was his understanding of "paper," he says enigmatically, that helped him achieve his success.

At the same time, Ondaatje indulged his keen interest in sport, representing Canada in the bobsledding competition at the World Championships in 1960 and at the Olympic Games in '64, when the country won a gold medal. He also wrote and financed the publication of the first of his bestselling books, "The Prime Ministers of Canada: 1867-1967," in 1967. It eventually sold 600,000 copies.

It was during this period that Ondaatje married his Latvian wife, Valda -- someone who "understood the devils" in him, as he writes in the dedication of "Journey to the Source of the Nile" -- and brought his younger brother, Michael, to the country.

"When he was 18, I pulled him out to Canada to go to university. He immediately latched onto the literary set," Ondaatje says, "where he set about developing his budding flair for drama and writing." It was a chance for the brothers to reacquaint themselves: "He's 10 years younger than me and we didn't really have a chance to get to know one another in earlier life. I was in England and he stayed behind with the family in Ceylon."

Are they close now? "Oh, sure!" Ondaatje exclaims. He talks of watching Michael's writing develop and mature, calling his brother a "literary purist in the truest sense of the word."

"So what kind of person is he?" I ask.

"He's a nice guy," replies Ondaatje, clearing his throat in the warm, constant air of the apartment. "But I think he's more laid-back, more literary than me. The literary world is his all-consuming passion. He's a poet, really. He's earned his success; he worked hard for it. I don't think my brother wanted to do anything else [but write]. And despite my success in finance, I felt that way too. I always have."

As his business life prospered, this feeling intensified. Something was missing -- the kind of life and adventure he had read about in books about the famous Victorian explorers, particularly Burton (of whom he owns several original Victorian-era paintings). "I wanted to write an adventure story. More than that, I wanted to actually have the experience myself," he says.

He pauses for a moment. "Being kicked out of my house and my family in 1947 forced me to become worldly-wise and to be able to think for myself and make decisions very early on. But 'making it' [in the business world] is a selfish business."

So he sold his business interests in 1988, "fed up with the world of financeand greed, and the uncertainty of the economic clouds. I was worried too that I wouldn't have enough time to do all I wanted with my life. I didn't want to die with 'financier' written on my gravestone." Ondaatje promptly resigned all his directorships and moved back to England to "be close to the Royal Geographical Society and to spend my life on adventure and writing."

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