Everything about us was Indo-Euro fusion, right down to religion. We were raised to be staunch Roman Catholics—church every Sunday, fish on Fridays, a little shrine in the living room dedicated to the Sacred Heart, where electric candles burned day and night and good report cards were placed when (and if) they arrived. Still, the flavour of Eastern superstition seeped into our spiritualism, bringing with it notions of the evil eye, the bad omen of an overturned slipper or anticipation of an unexpected visitor if a knife fell to the floor.
Yet for all the obvious signs of our Eastern roots, there was often a kind of deliberate amnesia among the Anglo-Indians, as though the Indian bit had crept in by osmosis. My grandmother would never acknowledge that Indians, however many generations removed, had figured somewhere in our bloodline. If anyone challenged her on it—and as a goading teenager, I did—she would look up sternly from the orange rice plate and shake her head. “There are no Indians in our family.”
“Come on, Nana. Look at us, look at our tans!”
“No, never. My father was English.”
“But who were his parents? And what about your mother?”
“There’s some Portuguese, but no Indian.”
Who taught them to how to grind spices and make curries, I wondered. Who passed down the recipes?
Nana said everyone had learned from the servants.
One Sunday afternoon, a few years after I’d moved out to my own apartment, I found myself craving Indian food. I called home for a recipe, and my grandmother was so genuinely happy to pass on her tricks for a quick chicken curry that she stayed on the line and walked me all the way through it.
“This is how my mother taught it to me,” she said.
“Your mother? I thought she was Portuguese.”
“Yes, Portuguese,” Nana said, and then she laughed.
I had always assumed that one day I would investigate our heritage. But I’d also assumed that I would be older—retired, shuffling around archives in caftans and orthopedic shoes. But the idea that modern genealogy could have as much to do with labs as with libraries kept luring me, and never more than in the months that followed the birth of my daughter.
Jade’s arrival in 2003 not only coincided with an international epidemic, but also the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure. Talk of things genomic was everywhere—how genetics had revolutionized forensic science, fingering the guilty and freeing the innocent; how it had helped to identify human remains and put names to old bones—and every week researchers were pinpointing the genes linked to a long list of ailments. At the same time, the technological ability to sequence DNA was improving in giant leaps. Stretches of the genome that had once taken researchers a month to decode could be pumped out in a week. Between 2000 and 2003, the cost of reading a single letter of DNA fell from $1.50 to less than a penny. Suddenly DNA was mass-market.
Academics started holding public workshops on “personal genomics,” convinced that DNA would soon be decoded for the same price as a pair of designer shoes. Sequencing all six billion letters of an entire genome would still run to millions of dollars, and in 2003 no one had a complete code in hand, not even Venter. But sequencing bits and pieces of DNA became affordable to the average pocketbook. Dozens of companies sprang up to cash in, making qualified promises to predict disease risk, design diet and fitness plans to suit your genome, or even find you the perfect date—a molecular love match. Experts described it as the rise of “recreational genomics,” implying that these direct-to-consumer tests were more sport than science and most likely to be treated as a kind of biological bingo game by fit baby boomers in tennis whites.
Most scientists agree that a straight line can rarely be drawn between a gene and a particular trait, not even height or eye colour. In most cases the science of genetic prediction was nowhere close to being able to accurately forecast a person’s health risks based on DNA. There are too many variables, too many unknown genes that might protect against that risk, or environmental factors that might increase it. As more than one expert put it, people might learn just as much from reading their horoscopes. But there was a crucial difference between relying on DNA to predict the future and using it to learn about the past. Tracing ancestry with DNA is arguably a simpler science, one of comparing one genome with another. The more the genetic codes of two people look alike, the more likely they are to be related. If two different populations share common stretches of code, they are likely to share a common ancestry.
Even as I sat in the hotel lobby with Craig Venter on that sunny morning in Toronto, the first companies to offer genetic tests for ancestry had already popped up, spinning off from research at major universities. I started reading about them shortly after Jade was born, and the more I read, the more curious I became as to whether DNA could provide the answers to the questions I’d asked ever since our alien invasion of Neptune Drive. Would DNA confirm the Eurasian mix of our heritage? Would it reveal any trace of the juggler? I had read enough to suspect that I needed more than my DNA alone to find the answers. I needed my parents—their support, their stories and—if I could convince them to give me some—their cells.
I drove the half-hour to their house in Mississauga one day during my maternity leave, one of those grey, wintry afternoons when Lake Ontario was the colour of dishwater and the traffic was light. Jade was dozing in the back and I had nothing but my thoughts to distract me.
I thought about my father, seventy-eight that year, and how the past he’d rarely discussed when I was a child had come back to him vividly since he’d retired. I was sure he would be on side. A letter from England that he received in 1996 had focused his attention squarely on the history of his father’s family. His sister Zia had sent him a card for his seventy-first birthday that said she had recently visited India, where she had discovered that Papa Albert’s older sister, Florence Abraham, long thought to have left this world, was alive and well in the Nilgiri Hills of south India. A daughter of the juggler, lucid and living at 103—my father was astounded. He’d never known his Aunty Florence well, but the news that she was alive tantalized him with the possibility of finding answers to questions he’d assumed were long past answering. Maybe, he thought, he’d even discover the family’s true surname, and that it would prove to be a Chinese name after all.
My father has always felt an affinity for Chinese people. He made fast friends of Chinese work colleagues and forged an unusual bond with his Chinese doctor. A few times he told me—only half joking, I suspect—that he hoped I would marry a Chinese man, to return us to our roots. Over time I realized that China was like one of those tankers on the Welland Canal, casting a long shadow over his life.
For him, as it was for me, the mystery was rooted in his childhood. He told me it reached all the way back to 1932, when he was a boy sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his parents and seven of his siblings. They lived where most Eurasians lived, behind a walled compound in central Bombay. My grandfather had a job with the telegraph service; he spent long days, and sometimes nights, in a cavernous hall that echoed with the steady tick-tick-tick of everyone tapping through their shifts. Desperate for quiet, he’d come home to the newspaper and lose himself in the silent language of a crossword puzzle. My father would find him there when he came home from school—a fixture in the corner, half hidden by The Times, in his shorts and undershirt—and he would stare at his father’s yellowish skin and hairless limbs.
“Completely hairless he was. Not a hair, not a hair on his legs or his chest.” To my father, the pale and hairless skin was proof of Chinese blood. But Papa Albert “would never be drawn out about his background.” It was only from his mother, Ena, and her family that he learned his father was half Chinese, and why Papa Albert never spoke about it.
Two of my dad’s maternal aunts stayed with them in Bombay for a while, teenagers who liked to dance and play their music loud. When Albert asked them to turn it down, they told him a few things in return. “Shut up,
you bloody Chinaman,” they’d shout. “What do you know about anything, Mr. Wong?” It happened so often that the insult took on a deep meaning for my father. He was seven at the time and came to believe that Wong was his father’s real name, and that being Chinese was a shameful thing that ought to be kept secret. “It was like a silent world hidden away from me,” he said.
Eventually my father heard from his mother that Papa Albert did not have much to share about his heritage. His mother had died when he was a baby, and his father, John Abraham, had vanished when he was very young. My grandfather was raised by his older sisters, Julie and Florence, and they had done the practical thing, sending Albert to a boarding school, then to train as a telegrapher, at that time the cutting edge of long-distance communications.
Albert’s first job took him from Nilgiri’s tea hills to the bustling seaport town of Cochin. He met my grandmother walking on the beach, and Ena deCouto married Albert Abraham in 1923, despite the protests of her family. It was unfortunate enough to be an Indian in British India at the time, and uncomfortable to be an Anglo-Indian, but to be Chinese was beyond reckoning. To their minds, “Chinamen” were poor, non-English-speaking wallahs who fried noodles at roadside stalls or roamed the countryside with bolts of silk strapped to their backs, stopping at homes, unfurling sheets of pink and saffron in your garden, until you ran them off or threw them your rupees. In their world of mixed-blood people, Papa Albert looked like one mix too many. Yet for reasons I did not understand as a child, my father had quietly held on to that inscrutable fraction of his heritage like a lucky penny.
Yes, my father would certainly embrace the prospect of trying science to finally set the record straight. It was my mother I was worried about, intensely private as she is, and still haunted by Old World prejudices that being something other than “Anglo” was a liability. Yet my mother knows well that her heritage is an enigmatic mix; even in the mélange of British India’s railway colonies it was unusual. But unlike my father, she had always seemed resigned to the mysteries of her bloodline.
Albert and Ena Abraham, my paternal grandparents, after arriving in England from India in 1970.
Jade was still asleep as I pulled up to the house. I carried her in from the car and my mother and I shared a pot of tea at the kitchen table.
“So, Mum,” I began, “I’ve decided I’m going to research our family history.”
“Oh, that’s good,” my mother said. “You’ve always been keen.”
“Yes, but I’m going to research it with the genetics of our family. You can do that now, you know, with DNA tests. They can reveal things, like whether your ancestors really were European or Chinese or African—”
“DNA?”
“Yes, with DNA. I want to explore how far it can take us in figuring out who our ancestors were, where they came from.”
For a long moment my mother didn’t say a word. She bit her upper lip and pinched her eyebrows together as though the very idea contorted her sense of well-being.
I imagined the images that might be dancing through her mind. The disapproving gaze of her mother, Nana Gladys, shaking her head—“We’re English.” The hopeful look in her father’s eyes when he spoke of Jamaica and a tattered portrait of the sea captain he’d never met. I could see all of it weighing on her, even as she tried to make a joke.
“Why can’t you just make up a family?” my mother asked.
2
NIGHT OF THE SWAB
Eons before my family memorized the provinces and swore an oath to Canada and the Crown, before there was a captain or a juggler, complexions or countries, we were cells—primitive specks clumping together under a young sky, mutating into higher beings—anchored polyps, flatworms, fish with teeth and backbones. We were a busy lot, sprouting lungs, legs and little brains, slithering out of the water to lay eggs on land. We outlived dinosaurs and morphed into mammals, small, hairy and warm of blood, like shrews and lemurs. We suckled our young and swung high in the trees. But with the passage of glaciers, volcanic eruptions and time, most of all, we lost our tails. We grew into bipeds, too big for the branches, longer of torso and neck. Up we stood, brains blossoming by the generation. We stoked fires, cooked food and became tinier of teeth. We made spears of sticks and hammers of stone. We were hominids, and grunts grew into words. We wandered over land and seas, painted and prayed, farmed and beat famine, survived plagues, wrote books and fought wars. We made pottery, medicine, music, money and love—lots of it, until the first fancy Q-tips arrived to swab the nucleotides swirling in our cells and in a blink of evolution, we were there, eating cake in the suburbs.
“Happy birthday, Mum,” I said, putting my arms around her. “You look fantastic.”
And she did, and not just for a woman in a filmy leopard print blouse turning seventy-three. My mother has those features that never seem to fall out of fashion: high cheekbones, good skin and thick, full lips. My mother has never liked her lips. I tell her that women pay top dollar for lips like hers, sucking fat from their own behinds to get that bee-stung pout. Given all the efforts to find genes behind this and that, I wondered if one day it might be possible to use DNA to trace my mother’s lips all the way back to the Gold Coast of West Africa. But DNA testing was not an easy sell to my mother.
The conversation that we had started over a cup of tea had continued for two years. I always thought that the chance to try something new would overcome whatever qualms she might have about using genetic tests to uncover our family’s past. She was the force that had propelled us to new countries, from India to England and then to Canada, even when my father was content to stay put. She never hesitated to hunt for new jobs, charging into executive offices with her Pitman shorthand and seventy words a minute. After she left secretarial work, she taught herself to play the stock market, and to play it well. In many areas of her life she’s a risk-taker. And hitting her seventies hadn’t slowed those appetites. Laptopped, iPodded and wireless, my mother was an early convert to the digital revolution. Yet the novelty of using genetic technology to reveal ancestry—a science in its infancy—held no such sway.
My mother once told me that she feared I might dig up frightening things from our genome, genetic proof that cancer or a heart attack would come her way no matter how much flax she ate or red meat she avoided. I insisted that I had no interest in our future health risks, susceptibilities or vulnerabilities. This was about uncovering the past. Didn’t she want to know, I asked, about the Captain, her grandfather? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know his story at last?
Maybe it would, she said. But she remembered vividly how much her father had wanted to know too, and look how it had turned out for him: “He was heartbroken.”
Both my grandfathers grew up fatherless. Papa Albert was a child when John Abraham disappeared, and Papa Freddie, my mum’s father, was just eighteen months old when the Captain died. Where the juggler’s legacy was shrouded in secrecy, the Captain’s was clouded by wild speculation. Over the years, Frederick William Crooks Sr. seemed to be many things: a high-ranking Freemason with mysterious clout; a hero who saved a boatload of drowning people from the Indian Ocean; a man of distinction who came from Jamaica and money—plantation money. None of our Crookses had forged a lasting connection with the Crookses of the Caribbean, or even seemed to know if we were related. There was something spooky about that disconnect, as if something dark had kept us from our island kin all these years, and from the legendary Crooks fortune that apparently came with them.
My seafaring great-grandfather left such tall tales in his wake that it was hard to distinguish truth from details invented for the sake of drama or a good joke. After all, most of what I knew, or thought I knew, of the Captain I had learned at Crooks family parties, where drama and good jokes flowed like the whisky. It never occurred to me as a child that tall tales might be preferable to the truth—that anyone who owned a plantation in Jamaica more than a hundred years ago might well have owned slaves. The prospect of genetic testing raise
d an obvious question to ask about the Captain: was he—were we—descended from slaves or slave owners? Did the answer lie in our DNA?
Wouldn’t it be something, I said to my mother, to finally know whether we have family in Jamaica, to learn if there was a plantation, and the history of the Crookses on the island?
“Yes,” she agreed, “that would be something.”
But I knew from her tone there was no guarantee that something would be better than nothing.
In June 2005 I stumbled across a place to begin the testing. I was researching a story on the prickly topic of race and genetics when I learned about an unusual DNA test that police had used to track a serial killer in Louisiana. Several women had been raped and murdered in the Baton Rouge area in 2002, and based on witness reports, police had been looking for a white man driving a suspicious white van. But a biotech company in Florida that tested a crime-scene sample of DNA concluded that the killer was not a white man.
The idea that you could know something about the “race” or physical appearance of anyone from a DNA sample alone was revolutionary. Crime-scene DNA is usually valuable for its potential to be compared with the DNA of possible suspects: find a match and you might find the perpetrator. But DNAPrint Genomics Inc. of Sarasota said its test could tell police something about the ancestry of a perpetrator from one sample alone, and use those results to infer physical characteristics—skin colour in particular—without the benefit of any other information. The sample from Louisiana, for instance, indicated that the killer was 85 percent sub-Saharan African and 15 percent Native American. According to the company, this meant police should be looking for a black man, or at least someone who was brown. The company likened the test to a kind of “molecular eyewitness.” Two months after the test result, police arrested Derrick Todd Lee, a black man who now sits on death row, convicted of murdering two women.
The Juggler's Children Page 3
