The Juggler's Children

  The Kurumba reserve is nearly invisible from the roadway, a tiny village of tin-roofed huts around a courtyard of concrete, fenced off by a high wire perimeter fence that keeps the jungle out. Children came rushing from all corners as we climbed out of our cars, boys wearing shorts and polo shirts and girls dressed like cupcakes in frothy synthetic frocks, as if they had been waiting all afternoon for a party to start. They giggled shyly and kept their enormous dark eyes trained on their feet until they saw Stephen, tall and white, and his video camera; then they took turns waving in front of it. No one appeared to speak English. There was a lot of nodding and smiling and hand gestures.

  Unprompted, the children assembled in a semicircle. After some half-broken exchange of words, Father Francis announced they were going to sing for us. And they did—in high, sweet voices in a tongue we’d never heard. We dug in our bags for something to offer in thanks, but came up with only a few pens and a protein bar, which they took happily and ran off delighted.

  If this band of Kurumbas was descended directly from Africans, nothing about their appearance suggested it. Even Father Francis was surprised. “They are looking like Indians,” he said.

  I visited the Nilgiri library that afternoon, in a downpour of cold English rain. It was another portal to the past, all its colonial trappings intact: plush old velvet curtains, Victorian mouldings, heavy bookcases that stretched to high ceilings, bearing leather-bound volumes and rare first editions. In one corner was a grand wingback chair where an elderly English man in a tweed jacket was hidden behind a copy of The Independent.

  I settled in at a long mahogany table with memoirs and travelogues of the nineteenth century that convinced me we had at least read the church record correctly. Kurumba was often spelled with a C in those days, as Curumber and Cooroombah. They are one of about half a dozen noted tribes in the Nilgiris, the best known being the buffalo-worshipping Todas. With their surprisingly fair skin and storied descent from a mysterious Scythian community of Iranians, Todas are said to be the most studied tribal group in the world. Even the Prince of Wales came to check them out when he visited India in the 1870s. The anthropologists who led the tour had tried to coax the Todas out of their huts by telling them the prince was a very wealthy and important warrior, with many houses and many soldiers. Yes, the Todas had responded, but how many buffalo does he have?

  The Kurumbas distinguished themselves by being the most mysterious of the Nilgiri tribes, beguiling tricksters of the woods. The name itself may come from kurumbo, the Tamil term for mischief. “Shy woodsmen and sorcerers who kept to their old ways … deep in their jungle home,” according to a 1968 National Geographic publication called Vanishing Peoples of the Earth. They lived off what they could forage or grow, wove baskets, painted bright landscapes on the walls of crude temples, cremated their dead and worshipped the ghosts of their ancestors. But it was their use of magic that fascinated and frightened other tribes and foreigners: their charms and incantations to treat the sick, their exorcisms, their uncanny ability to tame wild beasts, the elephant especially. This impressed the British, who relied on elephants to help clear the old forests for their tea plantations.

  Like many indigenous peoples, the Kurumbas’ way of life fell prey to modernization. Deforestation and tea cultivation forced them from their woodland homes and into poverty. Collecting and selling honey became one of their more lucrative ventures; no other tribe is as well known for besting the dreaded rock bee, and the Kurumba name became synonymous with it. They often reached the cliffside hives by climbing forest vines twisted into long rope ladders, one end tied to a tree or rock above, the other held fast down below as the man made his treacherous ascent. One comb could yield as much as forty kilos of honey. Traditionally the Kurumbas worked in teams of two or three, often the husband and brother of one woman, insurance that both men had every incentive to make sure the other returned alive.

  Had my great-grandfather worked in such a trio? Did he disappear into these woods fleeing a murder charge, and then the circus, to hide and collect honey with the Kurumbas? It strained credulity to think the tribe would have admitted an outsider to its ranks, let alone one as foreign as a Chinese circus juggler. But maybe it was his alien status that bonded them, or maybe he’d already met Mariamal in town and she introduced him to her people, and also to the church where they were married nine days after his conversion.

  We dined on speculation that last night in the Nilgiris, over masala fish and Kingfishers with Father Francis and his friends. Somehow it was my mother’s ancestry in India that came to dominate the conversation. Her mother, Nana Gladys, was born in south India, about five hours east of the Nilgiris, in Trichy. The city’s official name is Tiruchirappalli, but for a mouthful of reasons people rarely call it that.

  Father Francis started it. He asked if we planned to head there next. He wanted to join us, he said, to help access any church records we might need. Stephen was hesitant—five hours to Trichy and then nine hours back to Kochi, where I still had to meet up with Gladwyn and collect the DNA sample he’d promised. And of course we had a plane to catch in three days.

  How sad, my mother said, to come all this way and not stand in the church where her mother was baptized. She admitted that she knew nothing of the city, how long her mother had lived there, whether the family had any significant history there. Still, it was a shame to be so close and not at least see her mother’s birthplace.

  My father agreed. My mother had been a good sport while we’d been consumed with tracking his side of the family. We ought to go, he said.

  I saw that my mother could be persuaded to skip Trichy, but I could also see the bruise it would leave, that we had been so close to her mother’s birthplace but never visited. I understood her desire. She wanted a sense of the place, to see it, to breathe it in. That’s what had brought me to the Nilgiris and what had brought my father to these hills in 1958, when he had a young family to pack up and move to England.

  I looked at Stephen. He was worried about the time the trip would take, but his sense of place, of origin, ran as deep as any tea root. The day we got married in Ontario, his father had reached out from the pew and pressed a fistful of Alberta grain into his palm. It was a symbol of growth, of reaping what you sow, and also the late harvest that had held up our wedding. But the wheat from their fields was also a powerful symbol of place and history, the earth he came from. That he understood completely.

  Trichy was an instant reminder that we’d spent most of our trip shielded by the serenity of the Indian countryside. Sitting on the banks of the Kaveri River, it is a sprawling ancient urban centre that pulses with people and traffic. We’d been there less than fifteen minutes when we lost sight of Father Francis’s bronze Ambassador, and our bearings. Stopping to ask for directions to the cathederal, where we were sure we’d find him again, we spotted a faded old sign pointing the way to the Railway Colony. My mother got out of the car. “Nana’s family must have lived here,” she said, walking off to see if there was anything left of the place.

  After Madras, Trichy was the most important city in the south under the Raj, and once home to a large Anglo-Indian community. At St. Mary’s Cathedral we discovered that Anglo-Indians had been buried in their own cemetery, and all the church records related to them were kept in separate ledgers. It took no time to pinpoint my grandmother’s christening in the record books, where we also happened across pages of Rouses—not one or two, but dozens.

  “See there,” my father said to Stephen. “We come all this way and we find your relatives.”

  “Great,” I said, “so long as they’re not related to our relatives.”

  It was too hot to walk far in Trichy that afternoon. Even blinking felt arduous. The locals stood under sun umbrellas and kept to the shady side of the street. Yet Father Francis, a native of the cool hills, seemed oblivious to the temperature. Even as the perspiration sparkled at his temples and rolled down his face, he was keen to stop and buy bananas. The others ha
d gone off to shop and explore, so I strolled with him over to a fruit stall, where the vendor held up a small bunch. Father Francis took one, turned it over in his hands and peeled back its skin. He broke off an inch of its creamy flesh, slipped it into his mouth and chewed slowly. Watching his jaw move up and down in the heat was slightly hypnotic.

  Finally he swallowed, nodded and handed a few rupees to the vendor, who passed him the whole bunch. We began to walk again. “So what do you think about your ancestors?” he said. “You think your great-grandpa was Kurumba, or your grandma?”

  I told him I didn’t know what to think. But I suspected the church record meant something, that he’d had some connection to the Kurumbas. From what we knew, he was at home in the hills, making a living from what he foraged, and maybe he had somehow learned some of that from tribespeople. I asked Father Francis if he found it odd that any of us should care at all about a great-grandfather who had abandoned his children.

  “What else could he do? He had to leave,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked, astonished.

  As a widower he would have wanted his children to be educated, he explained. But with no one but him to look after them, he could not go to work to earn the money to send them to school. “If he left, he knew the Church would take them in as orphans and educate them.”

  “Was that how it went?” I asked. “The Church only provided an education if both parents were gone?”

  Usually, he said, that was the case.

  “If that’s true, it must have been an awful decision he had to make,” I said.

  “Very hard, yes.”

  The priest’s explanation rang true when I recalled stories about my grandmother pleading with Church officials to reduce tuition fees so she should keep all her children in school. The priests had agreed, so long as her children made the honour roll. My father never lost the sense that marks could make you or break you.

  I had never thought of the juggler that way, as a practical man who left so his children might have a chance at a better life. It would explain why Julie never had a bad word to say about him after he disappeared. It also cast him as a relentless slave to pragmatism, that he would do what he had to do to achieve his ends. In that way, my father—who would take a shot of amoebic dysentery to get shore leave, send his new and pregnant wife home to India alone, and embrace genetic ancestry testing from the get-go—would seem to possess a streak of the juggler.

  We ended the day at one of the oldest rocks on the planet, Trichy’s famous Rock Fort Temple, a massive, mystical boulder that dates back more than three billion years. No one can say what evolution it has witnessed, but people have long revered its proportions and secret perspectives. By the seventh century two Hindu temples had been carved into its interior. One is devoted to the supreme god Shiva, destroyer of the universe and the ego, the other to the elephant-headed Ganesh, lord of beginnings and deity of wisdom, pushing the faithful to see beyond the physical form to the spiritual. It was fitting that we ended up there when I now had all my hopes pinned on the physical—the testable, collectible genes of my ancestors—to answer the metaphysical questions of origin and existence.

  The shrine to Ganesh sits on top of the rock, which stands as tall as any cathedral spire. The only way to reach it is to climb, barefoot, up its steep and well-worn 370 steps. My parents took a pass to bargain hunt with Father Francis in the bustling bazaar at the rock’s base. Stephen, Charles and I made our way up the cool stone stairs with the temple crowd. When we finally reached the entrance to the shrine, it was dark inside. At first I couldn’t make out the creature in the shadows. Once my eyes adjusted, I could see that it was a live elephant, handsome as far as elephants go—even, I imagined, without the pink jewels and swirls painted above its eyes.

  “Go,” Charles said, nudging me forward. “Go, take the blessing.”

  I wasn’t surprised that the assistant to a Catholic priest was urging me to take part in a Hindu blessing. Religious divides seemed irrelevant inside a rock crammed with every stripe of humanity, and the next thing I knew I was kneeling before the massive animal, staring at its toes while its powerful trunk found the top of my head. I felt a gust of breath and then a soft, firm tap on my crown and the damp spray of a snort.

  Anyone can receive the blessing of the temple pachyderm for a few rupees, which the elephants are trained to collect with their trunks. It’s nearly as common as incense in south India. But at the end of that long day, near the end of a journey I once said I’d never make, in search of some connection to an ancestry we’d never known, it meant something to take part in that ancient Hindu ritual. It may have been a sacred rite to long-forgotten ancestors, before we, like so much of the world, split from our tribes and our gods. The symbolism of the act was powerful to me all the same, maybe even spiritual on some indefinable level—to feel small and vulnerable inside this big, timeless rock, on my knees before a beast that could crush me with a sneeze—the six-tonne pet of the Kurumbas; the workhorse of the British; an icon of wisdom, memory, India and, of course, the circus.

  8

  HIC SUNT DRACONES

  It was in my inbox the night we landed back in Toronto. Sandwiched between a joke about what women really want and a bulk offer of Viagra, I found my father’s Y-chromosome test results. After years of speculating about the possibility of Chinese ancestry, it was now, apparently, mere clicks away. I followed the message prompts to a screen that read: “Dudley … Welcome to your Family Tree DNA personal page.”

  The greeting led to a series of options for viewing my father’s results—by the actual markers tested, by close genetic matches or by haplogroup. Haplogroups are not usually a huge draw for genealogists, since they say more about a man’s deep roots than his recent history, but there was nothing I wanted to know more. Confirming my father’s Y-chromosome haplogroup could confirm (or overturn) what we’d read in the church records in Coonoor and what I as a child had seen in the features of my grandfather.

  Haplogroups reflect the genetic trail early humans left behind as they departed Africa and fanned out around the globe. The precise origins and path of each group are still a matter of intense research, and opinions evolve as scientists uncover new Y mutations. But what seems well established is where in the world each haplogroup ended up.

  Scientists of the international Y Chromosome Consortium have named each major haplogroup after a letter of the alphabet. Haplogroups A and B, for example, are the oldest; they are found almost exclusively in Africa, the cradle of humanity and home to the genetic Adam, the man from whom all men alive today are believed to be descended. Haplogroup C seems to have emerged relatively soon after the first modern humans left Africa, migrating along the Arabian Peninsula and into India. It is one of the signature Ys of the subcontinent, but it spread far and wide from there, so that today it can also be found in Australia, Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Americas. Group D is thought to have sprung up in Asia some sixty thousand years ago; its subgroups appear today in men of Tibet, Japan and the Andaman Islands, and in about 10 percent of Thai males.

  Haplogroup E is prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa and among descendants of those brought as slaves to Europe and the Americas. F is the group that corresponds to the second great migration out of Africa; the largest haplogroup in the world, its founding father is thought to be the super-granddaddy to nearly all the world’s non-African men. Then there’s G, common in the Caucasus region, but with a reach that extends from southern portions of Russia and Ukraine and down into the Middle East, and H, prevalent in India but also popping up in Kurdish men, Syrians and Serbians. On it goes through the millennia to M, a genetic fixture among men in Southeast Asia, and the confusing N, present in East Asia but also Finland, with its origins still being debated.

  Then there is O, the dominant haplogroup of East Asia—and, as I discovered, the haplogroup to which my father’s Y chromosome belongs. The best research from the Genographic Project concluded that Haplogroup O is so common in E
ast Asia that a staggering 80 to 90 percent of men in the region belong to it. But in western Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, it is practically non-existent.

  No one knows exactly where the story of O begins, only that it seems it first appeared somewhere in the region of modern-day China before the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago. Hemmed in by mountains and ice, the hunter-gatherer ancestors of O moved eastward and at some point along the way a boy was born with a unique blip on his Y chromosome: it was missing a tiny string of genetic code. By virtue of a random copying error, five base pairs—five molecular building blocks—were deleted. Scientists now refer to this as mutation 175 (M175), the genetic hiccup that defines Haplogroup O. Every one of the hundreds of millions of Asian men who carry it, my father among them, is a direct descendant of that prehistoric boy who lived when woolly mammoths still roamed the planet.

  Of course, O has a wide reach through East Asia, which might suggest that my great-grandfather could have been Indonesian or Korean, or possibly Japanese. But the lab had gone one step further. Based on my father’s markers, they determined that he belonged to a distinct subgroup of Haplogroup O known as O3. The founding father of O3 was a descendant of O born sometime within the past ten thousand years, after his ancestors had wandered further south and east across the continent, spreading their signature Y as they went. As well as the missing code of M175, this boy also carried a new mutation on his Y, a typo that changed a T to a C—now dubbed mutation 122. This was the hallmark of Haplogroup O3, and, as the lab report noted, “one of the main lineages of China.”

  And there we had it. My father’s Y belongs to a main lineage of China, the paternal line of more than 50 percent of all Chinese men. In some areas of the country it’s more than 80 percent.