The Juggler's Children

  The hills became a home. A Bombay army lieutenant, Richard Burton, convalescing here in 1851, described Nilgiri society as “extensive and varied … among the ladies we have elderlies who enjoy tea and delight in scandal … spinsters of every kind … from the little girl in bib and tucker to the full blown Anglo-Indian young lady, who discourses of her papa the colonel, and disdains to look at anything below the rank of a field officer … misanthropes and hermits who inhabit out-of-the-way abodes, civilians on the shelf, authors, linguists, oriental students, amateur divines … sportsmen, worshippers of Bacchus in numbers, juniors whose glory it is to escort fair dames during evening rides … clergymen, priests, missionaries, tavern-keepers, school-masters, and scholars, with précieux and précieuses ridicules of all descriptions.”

  Hillsides teeming with idle people, happy for any amusement to punctuate the day—it must have been the perfect destination for a travelling circus. That’s what Aunty Julie told my mother forty-six years ago, that her father had come to the Nilgiris in a travelling circus. “A travelling circus? You’re sure?” I’d asked my mother. “Not just an itinerant juggler going door to door?” To me it made a big difference in his story. Travelling entertainers, the lone-wolf sort who stopped at palaces and private homes, marched all over India, as they did in many Old World countries. But the travelling circus was a spectacle particular to the nineteenth century. The brainchild of British cavalryman Phillip Astley, it ballooned from modest horse shows with clowns and rope dancers into sprawling rosters of eclectic talent. There were troupes so large they travelled in their own rail cars, pushed and promoted by legendary lords of the rings—America’s Phineas T. Barnum and James Bailey—but not just them. In India, a raja’s horse master, Vishnupant Chatre, hit the road in 1880 with the first Great Indian Circus, featuring himself as the equestrian headliner and his wife on trapeze. They performed all over India for the British. The age of imperialism had whetted the public appetite for the exotic: Jumbo the African elephant, Japanese fire-eaters, Russian bareback riders, Afghan warriors.

  It was possible that a circus company hired my great-grandfather in China. With its rich acrobatic history, China was a recruiting hotspot, and perhaps for jugglers most of all. In 1843 Barnum was reputed to have paid his Chinese juggler Yan Zoo fifteen dollars a week, more than many people earned in a month in New York. Maybe my great-grandfather landed a deal like that, one that took him all the way to the hills of south India, where there were paying crowds and jungles to pilfer of their elephants, tigers and monkeys. Barnum himself once raided the Nilgiris. The route book of P.T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth and the Great London Circus for 1884—just two years before John Abraham was christened in Coonoor—includes a list of acts in Barnum’s “Ethnological Congress.” This was described as “the largest collection of living human curiosities ever gathered together”; along with a Burmese dwarf, other “Distinguished Lilliputians” and high- and low-caste “Hindoos” were “Todas Indians from the Nilgiri Mountains of Southern India.”

  I half expected the list would lead me straight to a Chinese juggler named Chu. But the only mention of a Chinese member of Barnum’s Ethnological Congress that year was a giant named Chang. I felt instinctively that this could not be him—the Abrahams are not tall people.

  But who knows? It was possible, as everything seemed to be, and never more than on that crisp morning when we visited St. Anthony’s, where the juggler had been reborn while the kurinji bloomed.

  After I took a morning walk in the mist and ran up a hefty phone bill for the tonic of Jade’s voice, Joseph drove us over to St. Anthony’s, a handsome white church with blue trim and a red roof. Like everything in Coonoor, it sits on a precipice that overlooks the precipice below. A dozen locals were lined up outside the adjacent office to see the parish priest. He was a young man in a plaid shirt with a typical south Indian name, so many letters and syllables long that we took to calling him Father Alphabet. He laughed loudly at that. Father Alphabet ushered us into his large office, where the walls were papered with oversized calendar pictures of Mary and Jesus and where, by the desk, Father Francis was waiting for us.

  He was built like a statue, sturdy and tall in his black shirt and clerical collar, with features that might well inspire a chisel: high cheekbones, full lips and a quiet, observant expression. He had been transferred to Ooty since meeting my father in 1997, but he had made the trip to see us here. My father had spoken of him so often over the years I felt as if I knew him. Father Francis knew about me too, and that I, like my father, had taken up the hunt for John Abraham. He understood why the mysteries of our ancestry would lure me here when my family had moved so far away from its roots. The distance alone would make anyone curious, he said. But it was not this way for hill people like himself, who had never left.

  Father Alphabet retrieved the church record books from the 1800s and we opened them on his desk, turning the pages to John Abraham’s baptism in 1886. My father had already recorded the details, but I wanted to see the entries for myself. I hovered over them, jotting details in my notepad while Father Francis explained how Christian missionaries had rained down like a monsoon on nineteenth-century India, giving Indians Christianity and Christian names.

  Christianity was an especially easy sell among India’s lowest castes. Missionaries often fed and sheltered them and taught them how to farm, and they often viewed conversion as relief from the heavy thumb of the Hindu caste system. The priest who christened my grandfather, Father Jacques-Denis Peyramale, was a member of the Paris Foreign Mission Society and a famously pious family. His first cousin Dominique was the priest who ministered to the young Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France, during her visions of the Virgin Mary, and who raised one of Catholicism’s most celebrated churches and shrines. His cousin in Coonoor left a more modest legacy: a Catholic school, a convent, and a hill full of converts.

  It was presumably Father Peyramale who had filled out the baptismal register, and whose handwriting was only slightly more legible than a doctor’s prescription. “What does this mean?” I asked, pointing at an unrecognizable word written under the column denoting caste or occupation. “It looks like churumba or churumber. What is that?”

  Both priests bent down for a closer look, and then Father Alphabet shot back up. “Not churumber, Kurumba!” he said excitedly, adding something in Tamil to Father Francis.

  “Ya, ya, Kurumba,” Father Francis said.

  After a lengthy exchange in Tamil with Father Francis, Father Alphabet confirmed. “There is no Tamil word churumber with a ch. There is only the word Kurumba, with a K.”

  “When I first saw it, someone told me it meant ‘honey collector,’ ” my father said.

  “Yes,” said Father Alphabet. “Kurumba means ‘tribal,’ which means the native peoples, and they are honey collectors.”

  “The Kurumba are tribes of these Nilgiris—the natives,” Father Francis added. “Even now there are Kurumbas in these hills.”

  “But why would a tribe be listed as our great-grandfather’s caste or profession?” I asked.

  “No, I think what it means.… He came here and he mingled with us,” said Father Alphabet. “The Chinaman mingled with the tribespeople here and settled here.”

  “Maybe he collected honey with them,” Father Francis said. “In the Nilgiris this is a very dangerous job. The hives are very high up in the mountains—from the cliffs they hang down.”

  “Do you think his wife could have been of the Kurumba tribe?” I asked.

  Father Francis thought this was possible, but her name was Mariamal—a very common Tamil, not tribal, name, he said, meaning “Mary.” But a lot of tribal people took a Tamil name, said Father Alphabet, particularly when they converted. Especially, they agreed, a name like Mary.

  Why did we know even less about the juggler’s wife than about the juggler? My father had never even heard his grandmother’s name until he found it in these record books. Was she the Indian grandmother that our
relative did not want to discuss? A tribal woman? Kurumba?

  While everyone else hashed out the possibilities, I flipped again through the ledgers in search of details we might have missed about her. In the record of her marriage to John Abraham, age forty, the “Chinaman carpenter,” she was listed as being seventeen and a spinster. Over the next fifteen years she and John Abraham had at least six children together, but Arokiam was the only child with a non-Anglo name. Perhaps, the priests thought, this was in keeping with the Tamil tradition of naming the first-born male after a grandfather, who presumably had been Mariamal’s father.

  John Abraham’s profession was noted with every baptism. Whatever else he is said to have done for a living, he was always listed as a carpenter, even an “artisan Chinaman carpenter.” If he did build, he must have had steady work during the British-led construction boom, but it was odd that Julie never mentioned his woodworking, only his glassware, his candied peel and his juggling. The final mention of my grandparents in the records appeared on December 14, 1907, when Mariamal, the “wife of John Chinese,” died of a cold. She was thirty-five.

  A few things about that entry haunted me: how young she was when she died; that after mothering six children, a “cold” killed her; that she was identified only as the wife of John Chinese, as if that fact alone distinguished her existence. I felt a pang of guilt as I realized that was what she had been to me all these years—nothing more than the juggler’s wife. I had never seen my great-grandmother as a mystery in her own right. Even in my grade-school essay she was merely a pretty face in the circus crowd.

  I knew the chances of learning anything else about Mariamal from the ledgers were as remote as these hills. I wasn’t the first family researcher to hit the gender wall; like world history, family histories have traditionally been told along male lines, through the men who headed the households, held the property, fought the wars, sailed the ships. Women are relatively absent in historical paper trails. Women too rarely wrote wills or paid taxes, joined the military or owned property. More often they themselves were considered property.

  There’s an irony to this, in that humans as a species have more female than male ancestors. While it takes two to procreate, through human history more women than men—by some estimates twice as many—actually did procreate. Many men simply died before they had a chance to try; they were busy going about the risky business of hunting and fighting wars and sailing ships into the beyond. The fraction of men who did reproduce often did so with more than one woman, perhaps because one wife had died in childbirth and they took another, or maybe they were just greedy and had harems of eight hundred, like Jahangir. Regardless, they added more women ancestors to the collective family tree.

  The robust longevity of female lines shows up in our mitochondiral DNA, which dates back, through an unbroken chain of mothers, to that genetic Eve of about 200,000 years ago. The Y tells a much shorter story, reaching back to the genetic Adam, who lived an estimated 80,000 to 130,000 years ago.

  Unfortunately, as a tool to unearth recent history, mtDNA is a fairly blunt instrument. Its code mutates more quickly than the one-letter SNP typos that are used to define the world’s ancient history and haplogroups on the Y chromosome. But it does not change as quickly as the Y’s handy stretches of repeated code, the STR markers. Anthropologists are big fans of mtDNA for investigating “deep history,” mining its molecules in men and women to reconstruct relationships between populations over great leaps of time. But for family historians trying to confirm relationships between people, its utility at the moment is limited.

  It cannot reveal with certainty whether two siblings shared the same mother, only that they did not. Even two people with perfectly matching mtDNA will know only that they are descended from the same female ancestor, but she might have been around five years ago or five hundred years ago. Tracking the Y also offers the added bonus of having a surname that generally follows its descent through the generations. Find men with the same surname and you can prove their relatedness with a Y-chromosome test. Through most of Western history, however, a woman’s surname changed when she married, making it much more difficult to track a maternal line by either record book or biology. My great-grandmother’s maiden surname never appeared in the record books at all, if she actually had one. Not all south Indians did—particularly, I would think, if they came from an ancient honey-collecting tribe in the Nilgiris.

  As we drove off from St. Anthony’s later that afternoon, I wondered if Mariamal’s mitochondrial DNA would connect her to the Kurumbas. Was their tribal matriarch different from the maternal line shared by most Indians? Who was still alive that carried Mariamal’s, that I might test it? Not my father—he inherited his mtDNA from his mother. Papa Albert, my father’s father, had inherited his from Mariamal, but it ended with him when he died in 1978. That great old centenarian Aunty Flo, who had no children, also took hers to the grave. Not knowing what had happened to Mariamal’s mysterious other daughters, Mary and Annie, I was left only with the descendants of Aunty Julie, the eldest daughter, who had raised my grandfather.

  Julie and her husband had six children, four sons and two daughters, none of whom were still alive. That meant my only hope of finding a sample of Mariamal’s mtDNA rested with the children of Julie’s daughters. One of these daughters was Bulah, who according to my mother married but had a rheumatic heart and died during the delivery of their first and only child, a daughter named Marion. As it turned out, Julie took on yet another child and raised Marion. My mother reminded me that I had seen Marion’s picture. It was in the red tartan bag, in the package of black-and-whites from my parents’ 1958 trip. Marion was a child then, as my brothers were, maybe five or six, with ankle socks and a bow in her hair. She is standing between my brothers, in front of Julie and my parents, looking sullenly at the camera, right here in these hills.

  “So where is Marion now?” I asked my parents.

  They didn’t know. They weren’t sure anyone did.

  My parents flanking Aunty Julie in her garden in 1958. In the front row, Marion stands between Kevin (left) and Conrad, who had bumped his forehead in the car on the way up the mountains.

  With all the talk of tribes that morning, I nearly forgot about the tea. But you can’t forget the tea for long in Coonoor. It surrounds the town, cascading down the mountainsides onto terraced plantations of emerald green. My father always suspected that his grandmother had been a local tea picker. He’s not sure how he came by the impression, but whenever we make Nilgiri tea back home, it’s always steeped in the fanciful notion that we are brewing an ancestral crop.

  The success of Nilgiri’s nineteenth-century tea crops brought an unquenchable demand for labourers to pick it. Tea producers in China once trained monkeys to do the work. In India, in the Nilgiris, it was always women, and still is; their slender fingers are thought to be best suited to the task.

  Dinesh Kumar, the son of a family friend, runs the Bengorm tea estate above Coonoor, and we took an ear-popping drive further up the mountains to see him that afternoon. He was waiting outside the estate’s expansive bungalow in a ball cap and wind-breaker to show us around the crops. We followed him down the road behind the house, where the tea grows in bushes, dense rows of irregular shapes fitting together like a dazzling jigsaw puzzle that goes on for acres, interrupted only by asphalt ribbons and the odd jacaranda tree. The armies of women who are hired to pluck it wrap their heads in brightly coloured scarves, just as they did in my great-grandparents’ day. They wade chest-deep between the shrubs, removing the waxy upper leaves with a swift flick of the wrist and toss them into large burlap sacks slung over their backs, all in one fast, fluid motion. The top of each plant appears so perfectly flat it seems unfathomable that it was harvested by anything other than a blade. Dinesh looks out on this manicured geometry every morning while he does his five hundred jumping jacks on the back veranda. His wife and two children live in town and Dinesh sees them only on weekends; the rest of the tim
e he lives here on the estate along with the tea pickers, who live in cottages nearby with their families.

  We learned much about tea that afternoon, that each plant lives about ninety years and has roots that reach down six metres, and that tea grows quickest with the May rains. But it was what Dinesh said about the pickers that stuck with me. Many, he said, are women of the Nilgiri tribes, as they always have been.

  We left Coonoor for Ooty the next day, found rooms at the Holiday Inn and drove over to the cathedral to meet Father Francis and, it turned out, his entourage. There was Charles, his assistant, who made the priest’s appointments and his lunches; and George, a young local contractor who turned the priest’s many charitable ventures into bricks and mortar; and sweet Father Vincent, just twenty-three and yet to earn the stripes of his own parish, who said off-hour Masses and zoomed around the hills on a motorcycle with “only God as his helmet.”

  We sat around the large kitchen table in the rectory, talking again about this business with the Kurumbas and the tribes. Father Francis felt we had to see the Kurumbas for ourselves, convinced that once we saw how African they looked we would know there was no familial relationship. “They are looking like they have the Negro features,” he said. “If your grandmother or grandfather was Kurumba you would see it in your daddy.”

  Would we? The genome is like a thick deck of cards, and the further back the ancestor, the fewer cards he or she contributes to the deck. I had never picked out Chinese features in my father, but I had seen them in Papa Albert. Father Francis was certain of his theory, however, so we took off en masse deep into the hills to test it.