My family landed in Toronto on a November night in 1972, six of us in matching sheepskin coats, bought in fear of arctic winters and the threat of hypothermia. Canada was a year into its grand multicultural experiment at the time, and federal policies not only welcomed immigrants of colour, they set targets to encourage it. Federal politicians—Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in particular, whom my mother referred to as “that lovely man”—pushed programmes to support cultural diversity, and the philosophy trickled down to the towns and schools.
Bring a traditional dish from your homeland to share with the class, the teacher would say. Bring a flag. Wear your native costume.
I felt sick. “We don’t have a native costume. Do we have a native costume? What am I supposed to take, a curry?”
“No, don’t take curry. It will be too spicy for the children,” Mum said. “What about Yorkshire pudding?”
“We hardly ever eat that.”
“Okay, I’ll just make stew.”
How I envied my Ukrainian classmate, who turned up with her golden hair braided into pendulous loops, a folk-embroidered dress and a plate of perogies. I wore a velour tracksuit and stood in front of the class, in front of a map, wildly waving a pointer over the eastern hemisphere. “So we are kind of a mix of a lot of countries … maybe forty.” I much preferred hot dog days, when a buck fifty bought everyone a wiener and a can of pop.
In the summer of 1978 I flew back to England with my parents for a visit. One afternoon we gathered at the home of my Aunty Zia and Uncle Douglas in Wembley. Zia is the eldest of nine in my father’s family, a pint-sized and energetic woman who had invited the whole Abraham clan to lunch. Everyone clogged the front hall when we arrived—my parents, my father’s brothers, their wives and children—greeting one another in a chaotic huddle of long hugs and kisses. At some point, jostled between hips and legs, I caught a glimpse of my grandfather sitting in the living room. It is the earliest memory I have of him.
Papa Albert was too frail to join the welcoming mob at the door. He was seated in a plump chair by the front window, tiny and delicate as a bird. He had a head of white stubble and a golden complexion. He wore a tie, a woollen vest and a herringbone jacket that gave him a distinguished air. Suddenly he looked up at me and grinned, as though he knew I’d been staring, and I saw something instantly familiar and yet utterly foreign in his face, in the gentle slant of his eyes. He looked Chinese. I was dumbstruck. My grandfather was Chinese? We were Chinese? On top of all the quasi-Indian, English, Portuguese, Dutch business, we were Chinese?
“Dad,” I said, “are we Chinks?”
I don’t believe anyone answered.
Most of that day I spent with my grandfather. He’d had a stroke a few years before and he didn’t speak much, although my father says he never had. I probably spoke enough for both of us. While I prattled on Papa Albert pulled funny faces, pretending his ears controlled his tongue, tugging them left and right, making me laugh. He went upstairs early that evening. I followed, waiting in the hall while my grandmother helped him with his pyjamas. I sat on the edge of his bed after she tucked him in. At some point my parents came in, and we all kissed him goodnight and said goodbye.
My parents were quiet as we drove away that evening. I cried in the back seat. We would never see my grandfather again and we all knew it.
I had a million questions after that trip. Why did Papa Albert look Chinese? Was his mother Chinese, or his father? How did we end up with a name like Abraham?
My father didn’t have many answers. His father didn’t either, or if he did he had never shared them. All I could gather from my parents was that many years ago in India, Papa Albert’s father was somehow given the name John Abraham. Other than that, only three things were known about him, and none with certainty: he was Chinese, he was a juggler and he had disappeared.
If we had something to hide about our heritage, John Abraham stood out as the thing that was hidden. A secret Chinese patriarch, a juggler, a lost culture, a lost name—all discovered just when the Abraham name was causing me a schoolyard-full of grief (to prepubescent boys, my prepubescent chest was the Plains of Abraham).
The mystery of my great-grandfather marinated in my imagination. Somewhere in my parents’ basement crawl space is a school essay I concocted about the great-grandfather who abandoned the circus for love. I was eleven or twelve when I wrote it, and at that age it’s hard to envision anyone leaving the circus for anything, so I made him out to be a terribly romantic figure. Although Great-Grandfather had predated Mao Zedong by several decades, I featured a cold Communist Party official surveying local birth records in a small Chinese village and assigning each new baby a future occupation: farmer, cook, tailor, juggler.…
Weng Lin (the name I invented for him) was soon snatched from his peasant parents and forced into the austere life of the circus. He ate nothing but rice, slept in sheds on burlap sacks and tossed things in the air constantly—fruit, balls, knives, rings, flaming sticks, anything he could lay his hands upon. He was brilliant, single-minded in his art, until he spotted her, my great-grandmother (about whom we knew exactly nothing). She was a beautiful face in the circus crowd, a demure young woman from Burma, which according to my atlas was wedged south of China near India, and seemed a plausible choice. She smiled at Weng Lin and he was a goner. But the circus ringleaders frowned on desertion, so Weng Lin fled in the middle of the night. He changed his Chinese name to one he had read in the Bible and became Catholic to marry his Burmese sweetheart (whether the Burmese were staunch Catholics, I had no idea). It was an epic, entirely fabricated, yet as I would one day learn, not entirely off base.
On a bright April morning in 2002, a year before Jade was born, I was sharing a loveseat with the American scientist J. Craig Venter in the lobby of a Toronto hotel. Venter’s company had mapped a private version of the human genome the year before, and the biologist-cum-businessman was in town to pick up one of Canada’s Gairdner Awards. People often call the Gairdners “baby Nobels,” because a third of scientists who receive one go on to win the big Swedish prize.
Venter was fifty-five at the time and he looked like he’d stepped off the cover of Forbes—fit, bald and well-tanned, with electric-blue eyes that seemed to burn with the wattage of a brain working overtime. He wore a dark suit and the irrepressible grin of a man who knew he’d made history.
Mapping the genome was hailed as the moon landing of the twenty-first century. When the first draft was in hand in June 2000, U.S. president Bill Clinton stood on the White House steps and compared it to “learning the language in which God created life.” Researchers were barely at the “See Dick run” stage of understanding the language then, but the mere prospect of being able to read it made even the most conservative types fantasize. We’d cure diseases with genetic tweaks, prevent illnesses before they started, improve our species and possibly outwit death itself. Clinton mused that genetic manipulation might allow us all to live to 150.
Yet for all the razzle-dazzle, there was nothing glamorous about decoding DNA. It’s drier than a phonebook and at least two hundred times longer. Deoxyribonucleic acid may be the world’s most boring script. It has only four chemical letters in it—A, C, G and T—and they are repeated over and over, in different orders, six billion times.
The letters stand for adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine, chemical units called nucleotides. All of them are connected to one another along a structure that looks like a spiralling ladder of three billion rungs. Each rung forms what’s known as a base pair, with an A at the end of one rung connecting to a T at the other end, and a C to a G. The ladder is wound so tightly that two metres of it fits inside a human cell, and the average cell is so small that ten thousand can fit on the head of a pin.
But, unlike most things in life, the way DNA looks is nearly as important as what it does, which, in the case of the genome, is pretty much everything. DNA is like the chief executive officer. It sits all coiled up in its cellular head office, dic
tating operations in every division of you—the texture of your ear wax, how your heart beats and your brain is wired. It looks a bit scattered under a microscope, with its code broken up into forty-six chromosomes, twenty-three passed down from each parent. Yet add it all up and it’s been said it would take a person typing sixty words a minute for eight hours a day fifty years to transcribe.
Computers hummed in eighteen countries on behalf of the public effort to spell out the alphabet of the human genome, with initial predictions that it would take fifteen years to finish. But Venter, who used to hop on his bike and race planes on airport runways when he was a kid, bet he could do it faster. In the end, Celera Genomics, the company he founded in Rockville, Maryland, completed its draft map in two and a half years, pushing the public project to keep pace. The public genome was a compilation of DNA from more than seven hundred people, and everyone had assumed that Celera’s private map was a similar amalgam. But as Venter gazed out over the suits and high heels marching through the hotel lobby where we sat, he let something slip.
He was musing about babies having their genomes decoded at birth, and everybody carrying their DNA encoded on something like a credit card, when he said he knew better than anyone the potential of knowing your own code. The Celera genome, after all, was his own. The news would turn out to rile Venter’s many critics. They would call it audacious and vain, an unethical stunt to hijack biology’s big moment for personal publicity and commercial gain. But that morning, sitting with his legs stretched out on a sea of polished marble, Venter cast his decision to become the first human to have his genome decoded as a reasonable one, noble even. For the science to progress, to understand what is normal in a genome and what is not, researchers will have to recruit all sorts of people to have their DNA sequenced, he said. The more genomes that could be read, the more easily researchers could one day understand what those nucleotides spell out.
Already he’d discovered he carries genes linked to a higher risk of heart disease and, possibly, Alzheimer’s. But then, he said, the genome holds the same sort of information that doctors can collect by learning the medical history of a patient’s family. As I scribbled away in my notepad, he added that people could learn a lot about their ancestry from their DNA. He described the genome as a compilation of a person’s ancestral parts, since the chromosomes a person inherits from each parent are recombined versions of the chromosomes the parents inherited from their parents, and that they inherited from theirs, and back it goes. His own code had provided evidence of his British ancestry. He likened it to an archive that would reveal the past in a way no paper record ever could.
I stopped listening. Venter had mapped himself. From his genome he had learned things about his own ancestry, not human ancestry in general. Not further proof of our evolution from apelike forebears or primitive creatures, but his personal history, where his ancestors were from, as in a place. I suddenly imagined the human genome map as an actual map, capable of leading a person back through her foggy history, pointing the way to foreign lands and forgotten stories.
When my attention snapped back, Venter was describing his next project: sailing his yacht around the world in search of new energy sources in the genomes of ocean creatures. It hit me then that reading one’s own genomic map for clues to ancestry was probably the exclusive purview of people with ninety-five-foot-sloops and sea-deep pockets. The Celera map of Venter’s genome had cost more than $100 million. The public effort devoured close to three billion dollars. I filed the idea away under “Things to Do If I Win the Lottery.”
When we left St. Catharines in 1979, it was my sister’s turn to stay behind, to attend the nearby university. My father’s job had changed to include more travel, so we returned to Mississauga to be close to the airport. For the next seven years I was the only child in a quiet house, except for Sundays. On Sundays Nana Gladys came to visit.
Before she came to Canada, I had always thought of her as my very English Nana. She lived in a Victorian row house outside London and shopped on the high street, where the clerks called her “Glad” and she called them “love”—“Just some bread today, love.” I spent a few summers in England with Nana Gladys and she always let me sleep in her bedroom. It had been the dining room until my grandfather died in 1972. It had French doors that opened to a wild English garden, and a floor layered with Persian rugs. There were two single beds pushed together and three coat stands that had disappeared under the tarp of cardigans and nightdresses that weighed down their hooks. On the far wall was a fireplace, where perfumes were lined up on the mantel like chorus girls in their pretty glass bottles. I don’t know that Nana ever wore them. She always smelled the same—like Yardley’s lavender scent—most of all when she padded down the stairs after a bath, wearing only her petticoat.
The skin on her arms seemed as thin as cellophane, and so pale it was nearly translucent. Nana liked being white. She would go to her dressing table with its tall mirror and make herself whiter, patting her face with powder until it fell like snow on the carpet and her eyebrows disappeared. Then she’d pin the penny-sized medals of Saint Christopher and Our Lady of Vailankani to her bra strap, pencil in her eyebrows to match her Marmite-coloured hair, paint her lips bright fuchsia, puckering them together with a loud smack, and step into the puddle of one of her “going-out frocks,” a pleated chiffon or the red A-line with polka dots. “Zip it for me, my girl,” she’d say, her holy medals tinkling like a wind chime. Then she’d be off to the pub to play cards.
Nana might never have left that life, but she had a nasty fall from a bus in 1978, and that was it. She packed it all up—even my grandfather’s study, which she hadn’t touched since his death—sold the house and moved to Canada. Every Sunday we picked her up from her apartment for the twelve-o’clock Mass, and after lunch she and my mother would spend the rest of the day in our kitchen making dinner.
The smells and sounds of those afternoons would become a yardstick for every Sunday since: my mother at the back counter, chopping onions and garlic, grinding spices into a paste; sharp scents of cumin and coriander frying in a pan, the crackle of cardamom pods bursting in hot oil; my grandmother at the kitchen table, pouring cups of rice onto an orange melamine plate, sorting through the raw grains, picking out stones. All the while they talked, about places in India with names full of vowels—Poona and Dhoand and Jubalpore—and communities they called railway colonies, where it seemed they had always lived, in houses by this train station or that station—as had most of the people they talked about.
“What happened to the Bretagnes?” my mother would ask.
“They went to Australia.”
“What about the Correys?”
“Australia also. The Changers landed up in England, and the Orchards.”
Practically everyone they knew had gone somewhere, after India won its independence from Britain in 1947. None of the people they talked about had Indian names. The only Indians they mentioned were the ones who worked for them, their servants. There was the kind one who boiled rice in broth for their dogs Rover and Toby, the wretched one who spiked the vindaloo with sleeping tablets and ransacked the house while they slept, and the sweet boy who ran from Nana’s kitchen to the railway station every day to deliver a lunch of hot chili fries and chapattis to my grandfather.
“How many silver tiffin carriers he could stack on his head—and so small he was!” Nana would say.
They spoke of railway-colony dances, convents where they had gone to school, and picnics at Juhu Beach while I, pretending to read or finish homework, listened. It was my introduction to the in-between world of my ancestors, a small swatch of mixed-blood people known by various labels when Britain ruled the subcontinent, many of them pejorative—half-castes, chi-chis, bastards of the Raj.
The community’s official description, still entrenched in India’s constitution, is “Anglo-Indian.” It refers to citizens descended from a paternal line that originated in Britain or Europe. They were not to be confuse
d with English-born people who lived in India, who were called “domiciled Europeans.” There were also people of “Continental extraction,” which implied that something European ran somewhere in their veins. Then there is “Eurasian,” the all-encompassing term to which we usually subscribed. All that taxonomy works hard to stress the non-Indian fraction of a hybrid heritage, but never hard enough. Every syllable sags under the baggage of an uncomfortable maternal history, not that I knew it at the time.
As a child, my knowledge of Anglo-Indians came from watching my parents, our relatives, and their friends, usually at one house party or another, with the Johnnie Walker flowing and laughter erupting from the basement like machine-gun fire late into the night. There were rice-and-curry buffets and British pubsong singalongs, and if it was a good night, at least one booming verse of “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts.”
Everyone spoke perfect English, but their words rose and fell with the musicality of a unique subcontinental lilt. They came in all shades and wore Western clothes, except for their bangles of yellow gold that jangled like tambourines when they danced—and Anglo-Indians love to dance, the jive in particular. Even now, with my mother’s sciatica and my father’s titanium knees, turn up Glenn Miller and away they go. It made the front page of the Times of India in 1998 when a reporter discovered an attendee at an Anglo-Indian gathering in Bangalore who didn’t know how to jive.
The Juggler's Children Page 2