We fixated instead on the fraction that bolstered old suspicions: 9 percent sub-Saharan African. As soon as I read the figure out loud, my mother said, without a trace of doubt, “That’s the Captain.”
Even before we had her DNA results, or mine, there were clues to betray what’s buried in our genes: my mother’s full lips, cousins with variations of an afro. Her brother Basil’s youngest daughter, Simone, has tresses like Diana Ross. I’d recently run into her at a bridal shower, where she told me she was dead keen to finally know the Crooks story. She pulled at a fistful of her spiralling hair: “Like, where did this come from?” she said. My mother’s father had once asked the same question, telling her that when he was young, he could never even pull a comb through his hair.
Maybe it was the freedom of being so far from home, or simply having the luxury of a lazy morning, but my mother told me then, in more detail than she ever had, how my grandfather had abandoned his efforts to find out more about the father he never knew. It began in those bloody months of 1947 after partition tore India apart, violence breaking out between Muslim and Hindu, killing hundreds of thousands, leaving millions homeless and millions to migrate across the new border the British had drawn around Pakistan before their departure. Anglo-Indians were among them—600,000 scattered across the country—wondering if they should stay at all and, if they left, where they should go. Postwar England extended no carrot to the population it had fathered. Australia was refusing to accept non-white immigrants. There was a proposal, which never panned out, to resettle them in the Andaman Islands, a storied archipelago in the Bay of Bengal that the British had used as a penal colony. Anglo-Indians met in homes all over the country to discuss their options. My father joined a group that gathered at the local undertaker’s. But my mother’s father never attended any such meetings. He had his own relocation plan. He was going to pack up Nana Gladys and their seven children and sail to Jamaica.
Before independence, my grandfather had contacted the Registrar General’s office in Spanish Town looking for information about the Captain. My mother said the search led him to believe there were Crooks relatives in Kingston, so he wrote to the pastor of an Anglican church there for help in making introductions. He was so convinced that his father’s relations would welcome him with open arms, he had his family’s passports stamped in anticipation of the voyage to the Caribbean and sold every stick of furniture in their living room to pay for the trip. “The velvet curtains, the brass jardinières, the settees—everything went,” my mother said. “It was bare.”
A reply finally arrived from Jamaica several months later. My mother never read that letter herself, but she heard enough from later conversations around the house to know what it said. The writer had insisted that the Crooks family had no Indian relatives. The letter accused my grandfather of being an imposter and warned, rather ominously, from what my mother gathered, against any future contact, assuring him that he would be most unwelcome, particularly—and this my mother remembered clearly—if his wife was white. “They must have been black,” my mother said. “What else could you think?”
Australia was out of the question because my grandfather was brown-skinned. His alleged relatives in Jamaica, which was then a British colony, would tolerate no white skin, which would exclude my grandmother. Papa crumpled the letter and threw it away. He never spoke again of sailing to Jamaica.
Some months after that stark rejection, another letter arrived. This one was from New York, written by a man who shared my grandfather’s name, Frederick Crooks. He introduced himself as a Jamaican relative—a cousin, my mother thought. He wrote that he had seen my grandfather’s letter while in Jamaica, and he knew that the Captain did in fact have children in India. He had no children of his own, and he hoped that he and Papa might write to one another. My grandfather said he was no longer interested. But I think he must have harboured some hope of future contact, because he passed the letter on to my mother. Having just begun her long, land-to-sea courtship with my father, she had become an avid letter writer. She was likely to take up the invitation to correspond extended by Frederick Crooks of New York, and my grandfather would have known that.
For the next three years my mother corresponded with the mysterious “Uncle Freddie” in New York. She wishes now that she’d pressed him for details of the Jamaican family story. But she was only seventeen then, and too caught up in her own affairs to be curious about a grandfather she’d never met. She filled her letters with small talk about the latest Bombay fashions and her boyfriend at sea. The New York uncle wrote to her about his wife, who had just graduated from university, and fascinated her with descriptions of the pencil skirts women were wearing in Manhattan.
In 1952 my mother wrote to tell him that she and my father were getting married, and in response he sent a bridal catalogue from New York. With it he sent money for her to order the wedding gown of her choice or, if she preferred, to buy one in Bombay. It was the first inkling my mother had of his wealth, though she never did spend his money on a dress. “How could I?” she said. “We had no settee in the front room, nothing to sit on. I gave the money to Nana and Papa to buy furniture.”
Their correspondence trickled to an end after my mother got married. The move to England and motherhood left her little time to write. She regretted it, knowing that this New York uncle had no children of his own and seemed eager to maintain ties to her branch of the Crooks family. So she passed on his address to her younger brother Dennis, who, my mother understood, became his new pen pal.
It was Dennis I was to ask for DNA. My mother had five brothers who in turn had seven sons, which meant there were several potential men to provide a sample of the Captain’s Y chromosome. But having fully evolved from reluctant donor to Director of DNA Collection Protocols, my mother believed it was only proper that Dennis, the eldest of the three surviving males in her family, should be the one to contribute. His Y could tell us what my mother’s DNA could not: whether the Captain’s paternal line could actually be traced back to Africa, whether his male ancestors—and ours—had arrived in Jamaica in chains.
We fell into our Kochi routine over the next few days, rising with the muezzin’s alarm to make the most of the mornings before the sun drove us indoors. This was less of a problem for my father and me. We spent most of our days at the Santa Cruz Basilica, cooped up in a dark room the size of a closet. There are more magnificent churches in India, and beside the cathedrals of Europe it has all the grandeur of a country chapel. But I loved its ornate twin spires, its windows like portholes, its lemon-washed walls, all freshly painted as though they were expecting company. A team of labourers was laying stones for a walkway as we approached, their bare backs glistening in the sun. All through its history the church has invariably been in the midst of transformation. The Portuguese built it in the sixteenth century, the Dutch stored their arms in it and the British demolished it, only to change their minds and rebuild it in the nineteenth century.
My father was baptized at Santa Cruz and his parents were married there. So there was a chance that in the marriage register something, anything, might have been written about John Abraham, the father of the groom. We hunched over practically illegible record books, sweating next to a moody fan and watched over by a chipped statue of Saint Anthony and the hardboiled gaze of Cochin’s last Portuguese bishop. Every ten minutes or so my father and I traded profound observations.
“Everyone here married their cousins.”
“Look how many people died of worms.”
“Worms and swelling.”
“Swelling—is that a disease?”
We found nothing about the juggler (neither of the groom’s parents were mentioned in the registry of Ena deCouto’s 1921 marriage to Albert Abraham), but we did discover records of the maternal side of my father’s family, dating back four generations. Swabbing may one day be to genealogy what the dishwasher was to domesticity—a sterile saviour of time and tedium. But taking the time to wash dishes by ha
nd is occasionally therapeutic. So it was at the basilica.
As we came across familiar names, my father supplied the stories. Some of them stemmed from the research of his cousin Ralph, who had traced the deCouto line in Cochin back to Ramon deCouto, born about 1840 to a family of Indo-Portuguese shipbuilders in Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then known. He was a light-eyed playboy who eventually fathered seventeen children with his wife, Joanna Fernandez. She was the daughter of a wealthy Indo-Portuguese family that owned fertile tracts of land near the old fort; the district still bears the name Fernandez Gardens. Joanna’s father, Johannes Fernandez, adored his verdant acreage, but apparently he loved the horse races even more, and eventually he lost most of the property to gambling debts.
The gambling addiction ran in the family, as several studies have concluded that addictions do. My father said his mother’s older brother, Edward deCouto, great-grandson of the track-loving Fernandez, was so virulently afflicted that, while he had once been a rich bachelor in Bombay, a civil engineer who made a tidy fortune on a dam in northern India, he ended up homeless. The “cotton figures” brought him down—wagering on the opening and closing rates of wholesale cotton in the Bombay exchange. When my father was a boy, Uncle Eddie often turned up at his house and Nana Ena would feed him, even when there was hardly enough money for my grandmother to feed her own children. She once pawned her jewellery to help cover living expenses and later gave Uncle Eddie the money to reedem it for her, but he never did. She lost it all, my father said, even her wedding ring.
They were all there in the records: my soft-touch grandmother; my Great-Uncle Eddie; the marriage of Nana Ena’s parents; her father, John deCouto, one of Ramon’s seventeen children and once the personal physician to Cochin’s maharaja, before he left to care for the poor in exchange for chickens and whisky. There was the doctor’s bride, Isabella Vaz—best known as the iron matriarch Nana Bella—and her mother, Maria Leonora Snalleckz, whose family is said to have come from the Polish-Russian border. For all the stories those ledgers couldn’t tell, they became more alluring with every find, a tangible paper trail of my ancestors, all in one cramped and jumbled closet of a file room.
One night the four of us set out to find Fernandez Gardens to see my father’s cousin. “It’s not really a garden anymore, but it used to be a beautiful one,” my father said. “The pepper vines grew thick, right up to the entrance, curling around the trees, full of berries.” We found our way there in the dark, walking along a busy thoroughfare until my father recognized a walled compound. We slipped in through a narrow entrance and followed a winding path where the prickly arms of shrubs and trees reached out in the pitch black, until light spilled from an open doorway up ahead. And there was Gladwyn deCouto, waving us in out of the night. “Uncle!” he shouted.
After so many days sifting through the lives of the dead, here at last was a living relative, and one who made his home on a parcel of land that had belonged to the family for three generations. I expected him to be much older, as if any relative still living here could only be from my father’s time, but Gladwyn was in his early fifties. He was a second cousin, a grandson of Dr. John deCouto’s brother. My father had first met him on shore leave in the 1950s, when Gladwyn was a child, and he’d called my dad “Uncle” ever since. They’d kept in touch through the years, both Gladwyn and his brother Dean, who also lived with his family in the old gardens.
Gladwyn has the same slim build as my father and is also an engineer. He had worked on the tugboats in Dubai, like many Cochinites, before an accident sent him home to a desk job. He ushered us into the small bungalow where he lives with his wife, Noella, a schoolteacher, their two teenaged daughters, Angel and Triana, and his wife’s sister Yolanda. We sat on loveseats in their living room, drank orange juice, talked about our families and traded photographs.
Stephen noticed Gladwyn’s large stack of country music albums near the stereo—Buck Owens and the Buckaroos and Vince Gill. Stephen grew up on classic country in Alberta, but it was the last thing he’d expected to hear that night in Fort Kochi. He and Gladwyn shared a good laugh, abandoned their juice for English beer and asked whatever happened to Hee Haw.
Eventually we discussed the reasons for our trip, why I was looking into the family’s history and heading to the Nilgiris. I talked to them about DNA testing and wondered out loud if the deCouto Y chromosome might reveal more about our Portuguese heritage. Gladwyn said he’d be willing to contribute his DNA to find out. His only reservation was how I would get it: “Will you take my blood, give me a needle?”
“Oh no, just a swab of your inner cheek,” I said.
Gladwyn smiled. “For sure, okay. Next time!”
Living where their ancestors had lived for centuries, Gladwyn and his family had never thought about delving into their heritage in detail, although they knew it was strikingly different from the majority of Malayali speakers in Kochi. Yolanda said her grandparents actually spoke Portuguese, and many of the songs they sang—that she still sings—are Portuguese songs. Angel and Triana, who both have long, dark hair and milky complexions, said that at their school, where they learn Hindi and Urdu and most of the students are Indian, they often face questions about their ancestry because of their colour.
“Your colour?” I said.
“Because we’re fair,” said Angel. “People ask, ‘What are you?’ ”
We met them all again a few days later, after a Sunday evening Mass at the basilica. I’d never been to a service like it. It was March, but the Christmas lights were on, strung around pillars. The church was packed. The congregation spilled outside onto the newly finished walkway. The sermon of an invisible priest blasted over the audio system, crackling through the vastness of the historic old church as though it were being beamed from Heaven itself, competing with parishioners who prayed out loud with palms turned upward and outward.
Some women were done up in bright satin like disco queens; others were enveloped in jewel-toned saris. The men wore dress pants, some John Travolta-tight. After the sermon, from somewhere over our heads, a band began to play. I half expected a Bee Gees version of “How Great Thou Art,” but the first bar screeched out of an electric guitar—a hardcore hillbilly twang that drifted down from the balcony as if the whole church had been lifted off its sandy south Indian base and set down in Nashville.
The congregation swayed and picked up the rhythm. Feet, theirs and mine, tapped in the pews. I’ve never been a big country fan, but something moved me, something amazing, perhaps spiritual, in that mishmash of a yellow church where my ancestors had howled as babies over the christening font, exchanged marriage vows and buried their dead. I felt blessed—I was knee to knee with pew upon pew of brown and beige people of Indo-Portuguese-Anglo-Dutch extraction. And I didn’t even know yet that the lead guitarist was Alistair deCouto—another cousin.
We stood in the courtyard after Mass in the gentle embrace of the evening sun, chatting with Alistair, his wife, Anita, and Gladwyn’s family about their plucky church band. Then we took off on motorbikes and rickshaws to the Shop ’n’ Save near the fort to send emails from its Internet café and look for souvenirs. I bought Jade an India Barbie, a black-haired beauty in a royal blue sari with all the same physics-defying proportions as her Malibu cousin. Then we were off again, back to Fernandez Gardens, where Noella, her sister and the girls had spent the day preparing a feast of Indo-Portuguese specialties, with hand-ground fresh spices and fish hoisted straight out of the harbour: a pomfret fry with coconut and ginger, spicy noodles, a stinging vindaloo. I had a DNA kit with me to take Gladwyn’s sample, but a buccal swab would have drained the soul out of the evening. Gladwyn played more honky-tonk and we drank more English beer and tried to coax Yolanda to sing to us in Portuguese.
I fell into a sweet sleep back at the Abad that night—the kind of easy slumber that comes when you finally make peace with a place.
7
INTO THE MIST
They appear out of nowhere, abrup
tly, like nature’s own sleight of hand. One moment we were speeding along the plains of Tamil Nadu, and then suddenly they seemed to fill the sky, like a pod of humpback whales breaching to kiss the clouds.
It’s true what they say about the Nilgiri Hills: the blue haze never leaves their sides. Nila-giri means “blue mountain” in Sanskrit, and legend has it that the haze inspired their name. But legends, like family lore, have different versions. Another says they were named for the rare blue kurinji plant that blooms on their slopes only once every twelve years. There’s a tribe in the region whose members calculate their age by the appearances of its trumpet-shaped blossoms, and Tamil poems, two thousand years old, that say the bees that feed on their nectar produce a honey sweeter than any other. The bees are massive in the Nilgiris, the largest honeybees in the world. Rock bees, they’re called; their hives hang down like giant tongues from the undersides of cliffs, hundreds of metres off the ground. Collecting honey from them is not a job for people who fear death. I don’t know that my great-grandfather was a person like that, but he did do unusual things to survive—blowing glass, juggling. Perhaps an innate dexterity made him a natural at gathering honey in midair, from those busy bees that work even by moonlight, pollinating flowers.
The kurinji flowered in 1886, the year the juggler became John Abraham. It so happened that they were set to bloom again in 2006, when we went to follow the trail he had left beyond the reach of science, and the year that honey became yet another question about him. But we were five months too early that spring, so we saw only pictures of the periwinkle cloak they throw over the hills.
Of course, the Nilgiris are no more hills than the Atlantic is a pond. Crammed into a corner of south India where the Eastern Ghats meet the Western Ghats, the Nilgiris are a mountain range in their own right, more than two dozen peaks rising two thousand metres above the sea. Still, most people call them “the hills,” as if they were as quaint and familiar as a nursery rhyme. But most of their history—and ours—they have been neither of those things.
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