The Juggler's Children

  It may be that the mighty who ruled in their shadow found nothing to tempt them, no riches to mine or towns to plunder. It could be that the jungle that fans out for miles from their base, full of tusks and claws, kept the curious away. For centuries, how to cross the hills and how to keep others from crossing them was all that mattered. No one paid the hills themselves much attention—not the tubby Hindu kings who pledged the highest peak to their goddess of wealth; not the Tippu Sultan, a.k.a. “the Tiger of Mysore,” who used them as a lookout and finally surrendered them to the British in 1799; and, for a long time, not even the British.

  When I ask about the circumstances that drew John Abraham to the Nilgiris, or how he lived while he was there, invariably my mother says, “What could we know? They were hill people.” My father, when he describes the challenges his father, Albert, faced adjusting to life in Cochin, and later to the crowds and noise of Bombay, says, “Cities were a new world to him. You see, he came from the hills.” The hills, the remote, inscrutable hills. Where people lived into their hundreds—or vanished.

  Gladwyn had recommended a driver named Joseph, a tall, dark Keralan in his forties. He picked us up on a Monday morning in a polished white Ambassador. He wore a crisp white shirt and sported a thick black moustache that gave him the look of a seventies soap opera star, though he didn’t much act like one. Quiet and shy, he kept a wooden rosary in his hip pocket that he rolled between his fingers whenever we stopped for gas.

  Stephen, whose long legs were not built for Indian buses or back seats, sat up front with Joseph. They formed an easy bond, unfolding maps, studying the route north from Kochi. Joseph spoke Malayalam and a little English, but how little we couldn’t be sure. Stephen inquired about mileage, diesel engines, and the peculiar honking protocol of Indian roadways (two for passing, one for changing lanes? for going too fast, too slow?). Joseph mostly nodded his replies and laughed.

  We reached the jungle not long after the mountains materialized. The light changed instantly, reaching through the leafy canopy with golden fingers, scattering sun and shadows. We stopped to buy young coconuts from a lonesome roadside stall and drank from them by the car. The whole region, by decree of the United Nations, is one of the world’s protected zones, home to tigers and the last remaining wild elephant population in Asia. Ours was the only vehicle in sight that afternoon. It was eerily quiet, except for invisible creatures that cawed and chattered near enough that I ignored the urge to pee. “You’re a big funk, Carolyn,” my mother said before she marched into the bush.

  On the narrow road up to Coonoor, large signs warn of the hairpin bends—fourteen switchbacks my dad calls the “bloody bends” ever since he shoved his car around them in 1958. From a car you tend to miss the spectacular sights en route, the vertical forests and plunging gorges. But really, the only things crucial to see while driving up the mountains are the things coming down—a barrelling truck delivering labourers home to the plains, a maniac racing to reincarnation on a motorbike. In kilometres, the trip up is nothing. On the clock (and with a bladder full of coconut juice), it spans a Homeric age. But the train takes even longer. It’s a steam-engine line the British dreamed up, confident that 2,100 metres of steep rock couldn’t best their engineering prowess. They spent thirty-seven years debating technical proposals and another seventeen years building it. Just in time, perhaps, for it to become my great-grandfather’s getaway train.

  I couldn’t be sure exactly when John Abraham left the Nilgiris, or when he arrived, just that when he did, the only way up was the bridle paths the Brits had cleared for their bullock carts, hauling velvet settees and ottomans, bone china and French champagne. The tropics were killing them—sudden fevers, malaria, typhoid, cholera outbreaks. Along with the subcontinent’s freakish hazards, snakebites, tiger attacks, fatal falls from elephants, it was all enough to drive the British to madness and to drink, and never more so than in the summers, when it was hot enough to toast crumpets on a clothesline. Indian rulers often summered in cooler highland settlements, and the practice spread among the British like an epidemic. They set up more than sixty hill stations, from the Himalayas in the north to the Nilgiris in the south—the Hamptons of the Raj.

  In those days it took ten hours to make it up to the Nilgiris’ largest town of Ootacamund (now known as Udhagamandalam). Ooty, as everyone still calls it for short, is the second-highest peak in the range, and initially Coonoor was just a rest stop, a pretty perch at which to catch your breath. After the British introduced tea to its slopes, the population grew with it. We saw the legacy of that growth as we drifted into town: crowded layers of little pastel-coloured dwellings clinging to the hillside as if they’d been glued there as part of a grade-school diorama.

  My father had us booked at the guesthouse where he and my mother stayed in 1997. We arrived to find that we had the whole two-storey building to ourselves. Sam, a bone-thin old man who minded the place, let us in. It felt as though it had been empty a long time. It certainly smelled like it had—a stinging combination of mothballs and insect repellent. We opened windows and rushed to pull sweaters from our suitcases, imagining how the homesick British must have shivered with glee up here.

  My father went to call the only relative left in the hills, a distant cousin that he’d met back in 1997 when Aunty Flo was still alive. I heard him explaining our plans to meet up with Father Francis and, hopefully, find out more about John Abraham. Then for a long time he said nothing at all. Finally, he said, “Yes, yes, okay … I understand.” Then he hung up a few moments later.

  The relative, my father said, was expecting us that evening and had prepared a dinner.

  “But she doesn’t want any discussion about the family. She wants no talk of Chinese grandfathers or Indian mothers, or anything at all about ancestry.”

  “No questions?” I asked.

  “No, no questions. She says she has standing in the community.”

  In this small Indian tea town the Abrahams had considered themselves mostly Anglo, and no good would come if any talk spread that they were otherwise, she had told my father.

  “I suppose a DNA test would be out, then.” I said.

  “Oh golly,” my father said. “I didn’t ask her that.”

  I was half joking. DNA wasn’t nearly as important on this trip as the memories people might share. But then all the relatives had told my father back in 1997 that there was nothing to tell, that they knew nothing. It was Julie’s grandson Ron, visiting from Chennai, who had told my father, alone on that evening walk, that John Abraham had been a fugitive.

  “I agreed that we’d say nothing about it,” my father said. “We may as well keep the peace.”

  As Joseph drove us over to dinner that evening, through the hill town the British had built from scratch, it struck me that its social sensibilities might be stuck in the same century as its architecture, every Victorian brick an anachronism. It was no wonder that so few details about the juggler ever made it out of these hills. If this same inclination to deny even the possibility of having Chinese or Indian grandparents still prevailed in the twenty-first century, what was life like for a Chinese migrant to these hills a hundred years ago?

  We passed a polite evening over a fine south Indian meal that first night in the hills, but we left as we came, in the dark. And before the night was over, it grew even darker.

  Sam was waiting outside the guesthouse when we returned, posted at the front door like a stone-faced sentinel. He beckoned my father aside as soon as we climbed out of the car and whispered more words than he’d uttered since we’d arrived in Coonoor. As my father explained it, Sam had notified his boss that we were allowing Joseph, the driver, to stay in one of the empty rooms. Sam said his boss was unhappy about that, and he wanted my father to telephone him immediately.

  My parents knew the owner from a previous visit. But their acquaintance made it only more galling to the proprietor that my father would put him in such an awkward position. He ran a respectable business,
he shouted over the phone; he had a good reputation, and many friends, and all of it would be destroyed if he permitted a member of the servant class—even a Christian like himself—to sleep under his roof, in “the very same bed where very important executives slept!”

  My father said he was shocked to hear such nonsense in this day and age. Joseph was a fine, decent fellow, he argued, and asked how the owner could even call himself a Christian with views like that. I doubted the owner heard any of it over his own roars. Fine, my father said, if Joseph couldn’t stay, neither could we.

  I don’t know that Joseph understood everything said that night. But he absorbed enough to tell us that he had found a hotel in town while we were at dinner and that he preferred to stay there anyway. We told him that was ridiculous, that he would stay wherever we stayed. But he shook his head no, certain, I think, that we’d only encounter more of the same—certain because it was hardly the first time he had encountered it. We told him we were sorry. “It’s okay,” he said, and shrugged.

  There’s always been debate as to how the British managed to control India for so long when they were so dramatically outnumbered by the Indians. Some chalk it up to military might, others to the yoke of bureaucracy. But most agree that, with India’s population so deeply divided by caste, by class and by creed, one group was always willing to side with foreigners to put another group down—Cochin’s Rajah against Calicut’s Zamorin, Hindu against Muslim, low caste against high caste. The Indian writer Khushwant Singh summed it up bluntly: “The English conquered India with the help of the Indians.”

  Even now, more than half a century after India’s first constitution made it a crime to persecute people on the basis of caste and class, and when members of the lowest caste—the “untouchables”—have risen to become doctors, lawyers and even prime minister, discrimination still flows through the country like the Ganges. It irrigates villages where people can be sold like slaves or stoned for loving above their station. It trickles into the guesthouse of a mountain town to oust a workingman from his bed and make family history a taboo subject. It leaks into everything, even biology. Many Indians—and not just Hindus—see social status as a dictate of bloodlines, encoded not just in ancient scriptures but in their DNA. And the awkward truth is that thousands of years of social segregation have left a subtle and, some warn, dangerous imprint on the genomes of India.

  A 2009 study by scientists at Harvard and the University of Hyderabad, the most thorough of the relatively few on India’s genomes to date, concludes that all Indians alive today, regardless of caste, descend from a melding of two ancient peoples. One group, which the researchers called “ancestral north Indian,” was a blend genetically close to Europeans, Middle Easterners and Central Asians. The other, which the scientists dubbed the “ancestral south Indian” line, was unique to the subcontinent. Those of high caste tended to have a higher proportion of the northern Eurasian lineage. People of low caste and the country’s tribal peoples were genetically indistinguishable and both had a higher proportion of the distinct ancestral south Indian lineage. Researchers noted that there are towns and villages where the same families have lived for thousands of years without exchanging genes with one another because of the strictly enforced rules about marrying within caste. The work essentially describes India as a vast collection of small genetic caste-driven communities that sprang thousands of years ago from two tiny founding groups.

  This social divide seems to show up dramatically in the Y chromosome. Other research has found that high-caste males are more likely to carry a Y-chromosome type common in Europe, particularly in eastern Europe but also found all the way north into Scandinavia. Known as the R1a haplogroup (one of many subgroups of haplogroup R), this Y was found in as many as two-thirds of the priestly Brahmins in certain regions of India, according to a 2005 study. It’s unclear whether this chromosome was carried in by a Caucasian forefather or evolved in India and was carried out. But either way, Y-chromosome testing has taken off among Indians. Some eagerly seek a Brahmin lurking in their genes; others hope to confirm a high-caste marriage prospect. Like the priestly caste of Jewish kohanim, whose Y chromosomes can be traced back to the brother of Moses, Brahmins also believe that an unbroken line of male descent—the gotra system—links them to eight ancient sages from whom all Brahmin families descend.

  In online chat groups, male Brahmins have embraced the Y chromosome as evidence of their supremacy over both women and all other castes. One man, identifying himself as a scholar, wrote that the inability of the Y chromosome to recombine with another chromosome was not a weakness but a strength, in comparison to the mercurial X, which mixes it up with every passing generation, “diluting the chances for super-intelligence.” Another, posting to a different genetic ancestry forum, seemed to share this view:

  I am a Hindu Brahmin from South India [the “highest” caste in the Hindu system]. I belong to the R1a1 haplogroup. The genographic project traced my origin to Central Asia (Ukraine or thereabouts). I am surprised to see so many Slavs and Ashkenazi Levite folks also to be of the same group. I assume our ancestors were Central Asians who went separate ways and religions. I would be interested in knowing if anybody has more information along this line.… I read that Ashkenazi Levites have the highest average IQ in the world. It is a given fact that Brahmins have the highest IQ in India (though this group has not be [sic] tested on an average basis to compare to worldwide statistics) and Brahmins also do well in academics in India, USA etc. Do you think this is something to do with the R1a1 haplogroup?

  Whatever stories the Y tells, they make up only a slim chapter of any man’s genetic history. High-caste men may be more likely to carry a Y chromosome distinct from that of low-caste males, but most Indians, irrespective of caste, carry the mitochondrial DNA of a distinctly South Asian matriarch. Its presence is the genetic sword that strikes a fatal gash in the very heart of the caste system, proving that most Indians inherited their genes from both ends of their rigid social hierarchy.

  Mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, as it’s known for short, is an intriguing ring of genetic code that once belonged to bacteria. In the early stages of life on the planet, these bugs—along with their circular genomes—were engulfed by the cells that would evolve over eons to form humans. Now the genetic remnants of these bugs belong to us, repurposed as the machinery that human cells need to produce their power. Individual cells can carry thousands of copies of mitochondria, and unlike the double-helix genome that shuffles and recombines to make the next generation, the DNA within mitochondria doesn’t change much. People who have the same mutations in their mtDNA sequences are believed to have descended from the same woman at some point back in time, and generally people inherit mtDNA only from their mothers. This is the result of one of biology’s more bizarre quirks. Sperm carry mitochondria in their tails, and in the crash and bang of conception a sperm can lose its tail, and the father’s mitochondria with it. And if a man’s mtDNA survives, the egg destroys it. So it is egg, not sperm, that bequeaths mitochondria to the next generation.

  Long before science realized the Y’s potential, mitochondrial DNA was the first genetic thread to tie us conclusively into one human family—all the way back to the so-called mitochondrial Eve, who lived in Africa an estimated 200,000 years ago. She wasn’t, like the biblical Eve, the only woman alive at the time, but she was the one whose female descendants survived to fan out and populate the world through an unbroken line of daughters. One of her female descendants was the founder of Haplogroup M, the mitochondrial DNA signature of the great matriarch of India. She is believed to have left the east coast of Africa some seventy thousand years ago and to have had enough daughters, who in turn had enough daughters, to eventually spread her mtDNA to roughly two-thirds of India’s population. Hers is the legacy of generations of women who broke through social barriers to marry above their caste, however invisible that legacy remains.

  I woke early to a chill and the rare Indian sighting of my own br
eath. I lay there for a while slipping into rusty resentments about India. Just when I had felt a sense of belonging, one night in the hills had made me feel like an alien again. I threw on a jacket and went outside to see where we had ended up.

  It was a fine historic hotel, a former priory built a century ago, like so many buildings in Coonoor. The lobby was furnished with dark wood panelling and heavy doors; tapestries hung on the wall alongside the antlers of some unlucky beast. The guestrooms opened to a sprawling garden, and that morning its air was thick with the loamy smell of wet earth. There wasn’t a soul in sight and the flowerbeds had yet to bloom. I walked along the edge of the garden, which jutted out over a mossy ravine. Below I could see the woods shaking off the night, haze rising like smoke, encircling cedars and pines, flattering the silvery trunks of eucalyptus. Almost none of these trees are natives of the Nilgiris. The British razed the old forests to build their homes and cook their dinners. They imported foreign species to replace them: blue gums and blackwoods from Australia and, of course, English oaks. The mountains looked down on them all from a pale sky, appearing and disappearing behind their eternal veils of blue mist.

  If my great-grandfather had been on the run, the gossamer beauty of these hills must have given him every reason to stop running. What a wonderful place to hide. He had that much in common with the British, since they were fleeing too—the heat, yes, but also the Indian masses. Up here in the nearly uninhabited wilds, they could mix almost exclusively with their own kind. They could create a compelling forgery of the English countryside, importing sheep to graze uphill of the elephants, stocking mountain streams with fish eggs shipped from Wales, and even pulling off regular fox hunts (albeit with the native jackal standing in for the fox and the occasional maharaja squeezed into jodhpurs). They could almost fool themselves. As India’s viceroy Lord Robert Lytton once wrote to his wife, “I affirm it to be a paradise. The afternoon was rainy and the road muddy but such a beautiful English rain, such delicious English mud.”