Until then Skorecki’s genetic research had been focused on kidney disease. But after that day at the synagogue, he began looking into research on the Y to see if anyone had used it to trace male ancestry. As Skorecki told me on the phone one afternoon from the Ramban Medical Hospital in Haifa, Israel, where he had moved in 1995, “Most of the early papers were fairly ho-hum.” But eventually he came across the work of Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona.
Hammer was among a small cabal of pioneers who were charting new territory for the Y in the nineties, collecting samples of the chromosome from men all over the world and comparing their codes. His studies revealed that the Y harbours all sorts of unusual mutations, not just the single-letter typos known as SNPS but also unique blips where stretches of code are mysteriously duplicated or completely missing. Like SNPS, however, these mutations emerged once in one man in history and were then passed down through the ages to his male descendants for eons to come.
In one striking example, Hammer found that some men have three hundred extra nucleotides, or letters, on their Y chromosomes, a mutation he called a YAP. His research suggested that the YAP had originally sprung up in a man in sub-Saharan Africa, where it is most common. But that man’s male descendants had since spread to various corners of the world, taking the YAP with them to northern Africa, Europe, Oceania and Asia. Using the Y, Hammer reconstructed the peopling of Japan and also took an early stab at pinpointing the existence of a genetic Adam—the forefather of every man alive today. Thought to have lived about 59,000 years ago, this Adam (unlike the biblical Adam) is not cast as the first man on Earth but rather as the one man whose male descendants survived to populate the rest of the planet.
In 1995 Skorecki called Hammer out of the blue and asked if he’d be willing to investigate whether there was a common marker on the Y chromosomes of kohen men. Hammer agreed it was worth a try. They worked together with researchers at London’s University College, gathering DNA from 188 unrelated Jewish men in three countries. And just as Skorecki suspected, they found that Jews who identified themselves as kohanim did indeed carry a specific set of mutations on their Y chromosomes. The markers, a combination of the YAP along with one other unique hiccup of code where nucleotides were repeated, were found in kohen men regardless of geographic origin. The finding jibed with religious beliefs that the family roots of the kohanim predated the split of the world’s Jews a thousand years ago into its two major ethnic groups, the Ashkenazi Jews from central and eastern Europe and the Sephardic Jews from southern Europe.
After the British medical journal Nature published the paper in 1997, a flood of people called the researchers to ask if they could have their Y chromosomes tested for kohanim markers. It was one of the first reports to raise the possibility that a genetic test could answer personal questions of ancestry.
As it happens, the paper appeared the same year that my father’s interest in his paternal ancestry became a mission. After receiving news that his 103-year-old Aunty Flo, the juggler’s daughter, was still alive in south India’s Nilgiri Hills, my father set out to find her. He and my mother flew there in January that year with high hopes of learning more about his mysterious grandfather and our possible bloodline connection to China. He had no inkling then that his own biology might provide the answer. If the little we knew about the juggler was true, my father would have an identifiable link to China wound through nearly every cell in his body. But as it was, in 1997 the Y was just a letter to my father (and to me), and he planned to investigate John Abraham the old-fashioned way, by scouring records and asking questions of his Aunty Flo, questions he had never thought to ask the first time he met her.
In the red tartan bag of old family photographs there is a handful of black-and-white pictures from the only trip my father made to the Nilgiri Hills when he lived in India. It was 1958, a few months before my parents left the country for good. I say “for good” because they left India twice. The first time was in 1953, just a few weeks after the wedding they had narrowly pulled off.
Work on the oil tankers kept my father away at sea for months at a time. Wedding invitations had already been sent when he discovered that he would still be in the Far East on the day they planned to marry. Finding an engineering officer to relieve him in time was impossible, but a shipmate told my father he knew a Calcutta doctor who could give him an injection to make him ill enough to qualify for sick leave. On a tanker where a hundred men lived in close quarters, a sudden, violent malady seemed like a sure ticket to shore.
I’ve always thought that it says as much about my father’s fierce pragmatism as it does about his romantic inclinations that he took his shipmate’s advice. He left his ship anchored at the Calcutta port town of Budge Budge, and took two rickshaws and a train deep into the city, where he gave a back-alley doctor 100 rupees for a dose of “amoebic dysentery.” My father got what he paid for—a wretched, shivering fever that swelled his hands and turned his stomach. But the more unfortunate thing was that he woke up on his ship the next morning feeling fine. The wedding was cancelled. When he finally made it back to Bombay in February 1953, my parents had just enough time to plan a reception on a tennis court before they sailed for England in March.
They lived in Liverpool. My father completed his degree at the College of Marine Engineering while my mother, who was twenty at the time, tried to become a good housewife. Having grown up with servants who did the cooking and cleaning, she found housework to be as foreign as England. She had to buy eggs and butter with postwar ration cards and feed a coin-operated coal heater to stay warm. She still hears the clink-clink of shillings dropping when she thinks of those days.
They rented a second-floor flat in the home of a kind Irish lady by the name of Mrs. O’Donnell, who had two bad knees and a husband on the third floor. Mrs. O’Donnell gave her newlywed tenants a set of blackout curtains she had used to hide from the Germans—“Take these,” she said with a wink. My mother was pregnant within a month. Nausea came in waves, and in between, all she craved was home cooking. But home was very far away and my mother had no idea how to cook. She made tea with the same water she boiled eggs in. My father came home to dinners of store-bought biscuits arranged in fancy patterns on a plate, sometimes augmented with cubes of cheese. At the supermarket, looking for lentils, she used the Indian word and asked for dal. “Oh, love, you’re in the wrong shop,” the store clerk told her. “You’ll want the toy shop to buy a doll.”
Mum and Dad as newlyweds in Sefton Park, Liverpool, 1953.
In July my father put my skinny, pregnant mother on a boat back to India. “Legs like hairpins she had.” My father followed after graduating in December, arriving a week before my brother Conrad was born. Then came their good days. Returning to India with an English education launched my father into the executive tier of the Malabar Group, where he became the engineering superintendant of a fifteen-ship fleet. My brother Kevin was born in 1956 and they all lived in a swank Bombay apartment, with a cook and a nanny, a swivelling bar in the living room, a chauffeur for their Italian car, and rupees to burn.
But the dust of anxiety covered it all. India was nearing the end of its first decade of independence. Prime Minister Nehru’s socialist government was chasing a bold plan to nationalize India’s economic base and turn the country into an industrial powerhouse. Anglo-Indians had once dominated the civil service, with preferential treatment from the British, but that advantage was disappearing. No longer would English be the only language taught in schools. Urdu and Hindi were coming to the classroom, and Indians were coming to the cities by the millions—refugees of partition, migrants from the villages—all of them eager to join what historians called India’s “revolution of rising expectations.” Anglos, Anglo-Indians, anyone with a European heritage, and many Indians too began leaving the country by the thousands.
My mother’s parents left for England in May of 1958, and my mother longed to go too. She always regretted that pregnancy had forced her to leave t
he country prematurely. She was certain the family’s future would be brighter in England—even a weary postwar England—than in a poor country finding its way. My mother found ways to make this point to my father every day (this was the usual course of things, my mother convincing my father to take a leap into the unknown). She banged around the kitchen to convince him. She read out loud the letters her parents sent: “Look at this. They’ve already bought their own house! See how quickly anyone in England can buy a house.” Acquiring property in Bombay was out of reach for all but the very rich or the very lucky.
But my father was not convinced life would be better in England, particularly when life in India was still so very good. Unlike my mother, who had grown up in the insulated world of Anglo-Indian railway colonies, my father had had more contact with Indians. From the age of seventeen when he’d started his maritime training, he had worked alongside them on the tankers. His own parents had no plans to leave, and wouldn’t for a dozen years. So when I ask why my parents decided to immigrate to England in the fall of 1958, there are two answers: “More opportunities,” my mother says. My father says, “Marital peace.”
In the midst of preparing to move the family from one part of the world to another, my father made the remarkable decision to pack everyone up and drive to the Nilgiri Hills, a four-day road trip from Bombay. He saw it as his last chance to meet his father’s sisters, to see where his father had been born—and the Abraham name as well. My grandfather Albert never had much contact with his sisters after he left the Nilgiris, not with Florence or Julie, the eldest, who had raised him after his mother died and his father left. It was my grandmother Ena who kept in regular touch, with Christmas cards and letters. Albert’s family had never visited the hills, and the aunts never left them.
My father cursed on that trip, back when he apparently did curse. His prized Fiat Millicento buckled on the ascent, sputtering under the weight of passengers and luggage. Everyone had to get out, unload the suitcases and push it up and around every switchback. Coonoor seemed like heaven when they finally reached the hilltop tea town and the aunts threw their arms around my father as if they’d waited an eternity for his arrival.
There’s a small photograph of all of them, smartly dressed, standing in front of the temperamental Fiat: my parents, my brothers in matching wool V-necks, and my father’s younger brother Mark, who had joined the road trip. Aunty Julie stands in the middle of the group, a striking woman with her hair pulled back in a bun, accentuating high cheekbones and eyes that look Asian even without close study. Florence didn’t join them in the photo. She was like her brother Albert in that way, my father says—quiet, content to keep to herself. She did needlework for the local churches and never married.
I used to wonder why my father didn’t ask his aunts about John Abraham in 1958, when he had the chance. He told me it was the future that preoccupied him then. “My mind,” he said, “was in a different place.” They were about to leave India, a life of comfort, of luxury—and for what? At thirty-three he felt as if he had everything, yet he was about to move his young family to a country where they might have nothing at all. Fearing that the emigrating masses would empty the banks, the Indian government imposed strict regulations, limiting the amount of money émigrés could take out of the country to the equivalent of just three pounds per person. Even in the 1950s three pounds couldn’t buy a family a week’s worth of groceries. How would life in England be with a wife, two small boys, no money and no job?
Instead, it was my mother who asked the questions about John Abraham on that trip. She and Aunty Julie were in the backyard of her hillside bungalow, a little yellow house they called Sunnyside. It had white shutters and French doors that opened to a garden of flowers and fruit trees. They were sitting on the patio when Julie told my mother that her father had come to town in a travelling circus. She said that he had settled in Coonoor after he married; then, she said, he did many different things to make a living, such as drying and selling his own condiments and candied peel made from local fruit, and blowing and selling his own glassware. But after her mother died at a young age, her father went away—back to China, she suspected. Florence and Albert were just children at the time, so Julie and her husband took them in. She seemed to hold no grudge against her father for leaving them all. Julie felt there was little else he could do under the circumstances, but she stopped short of telling my mother what those circumstances were.
My mother must have shown a keen interest in John Abraham that day. At the end of the visit, Aunty Julie gave her some of his possessions: a yard of silk and a set of glasses he had hand-blown.
“I don’t know where that cloth has gone,” my mother told me when she recounted the conversation. “The glasses I still have.”
“What sort of glasses?” I asked her.
“Drinking glasses,” she said. “Tumblers, a set of four.… Now, where did I put them?”
Tumblers. Of course—what other sort would a circus juggler make?
5
TRICKS OF JOHN CHINESE
Whenever my mother speaks of her grandfather, she often calls him “the Captain.” But my father rarely, if ever, refers to his grandfather as “the juggler.” He told me once that he felt it reduced the man to a caricature. It is not the lowliness of the profession that bothers my father. Having pulled himself up and out of a tiny Bombay flat crowded with eight siblings, parents and assorted aunts, my father tends to view humble roots as incentive. I suspect that puts him—us—in a league that includes most souls in North America. If your ancestors weren’t of modest means—fleeing poverty, natural disaster, disease or persecution—they would never have come. The New World celebrates the lowly start, the goat-herding forefather, the potato farmer, the labourer who stepped off the boat without a word of English and the sum total of his savings jangling in a pocket. The more disadvantaged the ancestor, the greater the glory of eventually making good. No, it was something else that irked my father about a grandpa who had juggled for a living.
For me, the juggling made my great-grandfather irresistible. He was my trope while I was growing up, my party trick, the ancestor I invoked when I tossed things in the air—tennis balls, books, oranges, anything really—betting that the ghost of dexterity would rise from the gene pool before I incurred a concussion. But he was also more. He was my shield, the forefather I whipped out to deflect the “What are you?” question whenever it cropped up, as if to say, Look, if the Chinese juggler is the short answer, do you really want the long one?
Juggling was the iconic image that seared him into my childhood memory. And what could be more iconic than a Chinese juggler? The Chinese have been juggling since the Stone Age. All prehistoric hunters had their pastimes, most of them practical—boomerangs, slingshots, some variation of a javelin—but according to the twentieth-century scholar Fu Qifeng, Chinese hunters juggled. In his 1985 text Chinese Acrobatics Through the Ages, Fu writes that throwing sticks and spears (and presumably catching them) evolved into a pleasurable activity in and of itself—one that birthed a rich legacy, adds cultural historian Arthur Chandler.
In 480 BCE, during the Warring States period, when seven regions clustered around the Yellow Sea were battling for supremacy, jugglers were held in great esteem, and even at times revered. Fu tells the story of Yiliao, who, “in a battle between the states of Chu and Song … appeared in front of the Chu troops and calmly, in the face of the enemy’s axes and spears, juggled nine balls at the same time. His superb performance stupefied the officers and warriors. The Song troops fled helter-skelter without fighting and the Chu troops won a complete victory.” But it was during the Han Dynasty, around 200 BCE, in the golden age of acrobatics, that China’s jugglers blossomed. In a regular extravaganza known as the Hundred Entertainments, held in the courts of the ruling class, juggling had top billing, says Chandler. It was an art, a vocation, passed down through generations of a family.
Gifted children were sent to dedicated schools to master the ha
llmark feats of Chinese juggling—rolling heavy vases along their limbs, tossing swords, spinning plates on the tips of several poles simultaneously, twirling devil sticks, manipulating heavy props on the soles of their feet—tricks of balance and contortion that would enthrall the world. Centuries later, the Chinese juggler made his way into novels, films and, in the 1980s, one of the first video games, designed for the monochrome computer screens of the Commodore 64, was called The Chinese Juggler (the player had to control a figure spinning plates on pedestals without allowing any plates to fall).
In the West, jugglers never enjoyed much respect. Seventh-century clergy tried to ban them; writing in the edicts of the Sixth Council of Paris, they lumped them with whores and criminals: “The duties of the King are to prevent theft, to punish adultery and to refuse to maintain jongleurs.” Medieval observers saw them as crass buffoons tossing their balls and reciting bawdy verses. Shakespeare slammed them in at least eight different plays—“O me! you juggler! you canker-blossom!”
By the time my great-grandfather arrived in India in the nineteenth century, the Western view had spread. Even the Chinese juggler fell out of favour with aristocrats in his home country, he was the bewitching alien who dazzled and disturbed, a crook, villain and opium fiend in the dime novels of the day. Ancient words for juggling in Greek and Latin carry dual connotations, and even modern dictionaries still define the verb juggle in at least two ways: “to keep several objects … in motion in the air simultaneously” and also “to manipulate in order to deceive, as by trickery.”
It was this notion of chicanery that nagged at my father, that there was something to mistrust about a juggling man. He didn’t see it as a lowly station so much as an unsavoury one, and never more than after his second trip to the Nilgiri Hills, where he discovered that his grandfather had known something about deception. His life, it seemed, had imitated his art: becoming John Abraham was a cunning sleight of hand.
The Juggler's Children Page 7