Like Dr. Skorecki of Toronto, Greenspan started reading everything he could find on those studies, on genetic anthropology and mutations of the Y chromosome. And, as with Skorecki, the research led him to Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona. Hammer’s studies of the Y chromosome had continued at full pace through the late nineties, helping trace the origins of Native Americans in Asia, paternal lineages out of Africa and a genetic history of India’s Hindu castes. His work on the genetic ancestry of Jews had also kept his name in the press, most notably when his first discovery helped to prove that a Bantu-speaking tribe in southern Africa had actually descended from a small group of ancient Jews.
The Lemba people had always had an oral tradition of Jewish ancestry, believing that many moons ago, a forefather named Buba had led their ancestors out of Judea. They also practised Jewish customs, including circumcision, honouring one holy day a week, and abstaining from consumption of pig-like animals such as the hippopotamus. But not until researchers from University College London found markers associated with Jewish ancestry was there proof. It turned out that some of the Lemba men even belonged to the highest caste of Jewish holy priests: they carried the very same genetic kohanim signature on their Y chromosomes that Hammer’s team had identified.
When Greenspan finally reached Hammer by phone, he asked the scientist if a genetic test might prove the link between his family and the potential relatives he had discovered in Argentina. Hammer said it likely could, and Greenspan asked him if he would do the test.
“We don’t do that,” Hammer told him.
Greenspan persisted. “But could you do it?”
Hammer said again that he didn’t do it, but he added, “Someone should do it. Someone should start a company like this because we get phone calls from crazy genealogists like you all the time.”
Greenspan was forty-seven then, and having recently sold the family business, he figured he was the perfect someone. He also turned out to be perfectly persuasive, convincing Hammer, a career academic, to join him as an advisor in launching one of the first commercial efforts to bring genetics to genealogy. This included tests on mitochondrial DNA, which only mothers pass down to their children, and that great, lonely stump of malehood that is the Y.
Every man’s Y tells a story. Someone, anyone, can send in a male’s DNA sample and the lab can extract the Y chromosome, read its code and know where in the world that male’s paternal line originated, all based on the mutations it carries. Within that code, two types of mutations matter most in tracing ancestry—the SNP and the short tandem repeat, or STR.
SNPS tend to reveal a man’s more ancient origins, since each SNP is usually a unique event, a typo that pops up once in one man in history, often thousands of years ago—such as the first soul to sprout red hair. All males who harbour that SNP today are related to the original male ancestor who first carried it, just as modern-day redheads share a strand of common ancestry. Today’s males continue to sprout new SNPS, but only those that have been around a long time have had the chance to spread widely through a population. So studying these older SNPS on the Y can reveal the geographic origins of a man’s paternal line. The SNP is the mutation that says, Aha, you may be able to sing “God Save the Queen” in your sleep, but your forefather was Arabian, or You may look like any other southern Italian but your forty-third-generation grandpappy ran with Genghis Khan … or ran from him … or maybe he was Genghis Khan. Researchers have been mapping the various SNP mutations on Ys the world over, finding that these mutations differ by continent, a little by country, and sometimes dramatically within a country.
Men who share the same SNP mutations on their Ys are said to belong to the same haplogroup, the technical name for a very old boys’ club whose members descend from the long-ago forefather who passed down the typos they carry on their Y chromosomes. It’s a work in progress, but by studying mutations on the Ys of the world, researchers have identified common African haplogroups, Asian haplogroups, European, American, Micronesian and Polynesian haplogroups, and so on.
So the question was, to which haplogroup would my father’s Y belong? Would Papa Albert’s epicanthic fold and the scrawl of a French missionary be borne out in his biology? Did the Y he passed down to my father belong to one of the male-chromosome clubs of China?
Of course, even if we knew that, it would tell us nothing about the juggler’s story. It’s possible the juggler carried a SNP unique to his family. But generally, SNPS accumulate so slowly over time—over hundreds and thousands of years—that they are no help in figuring out what happened in 1905. To dig into the recent past, it’s the other type of mutation, the short tandem repeat, that offers the most value.
A short tandem repeat (STR) is a place on the Y chromosome where a stretch of code is duplicated over and over—five, ten, twenty times or so—like a record skipping. It’s the kind of genetic stutter mutation that happens far more often than a SNP, so much so that the number of times a stretch of code is repeated in certain places on the Y can actually be distinct to a family.
To figure out if two families are related to each other—the way scientists proved the link between Jefferson and Sally Hemings’s great-grandson—they compare these STR markers, which they do by testing several places along the Y to see if two men share the same number of repeats in those places. The more places the number of repeats match, the more likely the two men are related and the more recently they shared a common male ancestor. A man whose Y matches your Y could tell you about his family history, and from it you could find out about your own.
And that’s what it boiled down to as I discussed all this with my father: a kind of genetic dating game. Would we find a man whose STR mutations matched his?
The same year Greenspan launched his company, evidence of the Y’s usefulness started piling up. A 2000 study by Brian Sykes at the University of Oxford found that men in England named Sykes, for instance, tended to share the same Y chromosome, even when they had no idea they were related. Sykes, a professor of human genetics, concluded that the Ys that did not match were due to cases of adoption or infidelity, or perhaps new mutations that had sprung up since the name Sykes first appeared in the record books back in 1300. But given that so many men in the twenty-first century still carried the Y of the original Sykes man seven hundred years later, it was, the professor noted, a testament to the fidelity of many a Mrs. Sykes.
In 2004, German scientists at the University of Göttingen reported similar results after testing the Y chromosomes of thirty-four men named Zierdt. The men came from three different families in Germany and the United States, and while one family line “revealed a deviant Y-haplotype,” men from the two other families shared the same male chromosome. Two years later, Mark Jobling at the University of Leicester tested 150 pairs of randomly selected English men who happened to have the same surname, and found that nearly a quarter of them also shared the same Y.
The work was so compelling that it led to forensic interest in the Y chromosome, the idea being that a male DNA sample from a crime scene could point to the surname of a perpetrator if it matched other Y chromosomes in a database. Of course, for police investigators as well as for genealogists, finding a matching Y depends largely on the size of the database you have for comparison—the bigger, the better, whether you are looking for a serial killer or a cousin.
Since Family Tree DNA had been operating longer than any other company in its field, by 2006 it had amassed the largest Y-chromosome database—about forty thousand samples—and that number would grow exponentially in the following months. Greenspan’s firm had forged an agreement to provide DNA tests for a massive and ambitious effort to trace the genetic history of the world.
In April 2005, National Geographic and IBM launched the Genographic Project, a $40-million, five-year effort to explain how humankind populated the planet. Its researchers needed samples from remote indigenous tribes that had long been isolated from the genes of outsiders, to glimpse how DNA looked in a
ncient times. But they also needed DNA from hundreds of thousands of people across all five continents to map the migration routes of modern humans out of Africa and beyond. In short, they needed huge public participation. So the Genographic Project began offering hundred-dollar mail-order ancestry tests and billed it as a bargain. People willing to swab and contribute to the project could learn titillating details about their deep roots, such as whether their ancient ancestors once dominated sea trade in the Mediterranean, painted on porcelain or were the first to domesticate horses.
The offer proved immediately seductive. Within a year of its launch, one hundred thousand people had mailed back their DNA kits, flooding the gene pool available for comparisons. At the same time the Genographic Project was attracting the kind of publicity a small-start up could only dream of—major network coverage, front-page articles, magazine features—convincing even more people to contribute their DNA to the genetic genealogy market. Maybe, just maybe, a long-lost relation of the juggler or the Captain was among them.
Our Family Tree DNA collection kits arrived from Houston just before my parents took off for India in January 2006. During their 1997 trip my parents had rekindled their relationship with the subcontinent, and India became a regular winter destination. My father had kept in touch with cousins he’d met, and corresponded regularly with Father Francis at St. Anthony’s Church in the Nilgiri Hills.
Stephen and I planned to meet up with them in south India that March. I wanted to see where my father had been born and the hills where my great-grandfather had appeared and disappeared. And I hoped that while I searched for answers in the Nilgiris, the lab in Arizona would unearth them from my father’s Y chromosome.
There was nothing flashy about the Family Tree kits; there was no fancy brochure, just a padded brown envelope with instructions and a consent form to allow the company to add your Y-chromosome results and email address to its database. But its two swabbing sticks were impressive—long wands with detachable jagged cotton heads to be stored and mailed, post-swab, in vials of special fluid to deter bacterial growth.
I arrived to swab my father the very day my parents were flying out for their three-month excursion. He was rushing between rooms, bundling stacks of his perfectly pressed shirts with rubber bands and looking for the keys to his suitcase. He stopped in mid-stride to swab where he stood. He hadn’t quite made it to the recommended one-minute mark before he yanked the swab out of his mouth and thrust it at me like a relay baton.
“Good enough?” he said.
I nodded.
There was no toast raised to great-grandfather this time, no ceremony or solemnity as there had been with the first DNA collection. But then, there was a plane to catch. Some days the past just isn’t as urgent as the future.
6
RETURN OF THE CHOTA SAHIB
A week before we left to meet my parents in India, I found tigers in the mailbox—three handsome Bengal cats lolling on the front of a postcard. It was from my mother. Darling Carolyn, she wrote. The days are drawing closer for you and Stephen to be here and I realize you must be having kittens.… Whatever mixed feelings you have, you have to accept INDIA.
“Having kittens” is my mother’s favourite euphemism for a bout of high anxiety, known best to non-medical professionals as freaking out. I wasn’t, but she did have good reason to suspect it. After graduation in 1991, Stephen and I had set off to experience South Asia on the proverbial shoestring, and India was the first leg of our journey. We had backpacks jammed with guidebooks, cameras and journals, and heads stuffed full of romantic notions. Stephen was going to make art with his Pentax. I was going to bond with my ancestral homeland—to eat mangoes fresh from the tree, buy a sari and dance on the sands of Juhu Beach, where my parents first kissed and our future began.
But we never did make it to Juhu, and the only dance I managed was a frenetic two-step to find a loo. On top of that, I developed a nasty psychological reaction to the anti-malarial pills I was taking each week; we took to calling them my “mefloquine Mondays,” although they lasted well into Wednesday. It was a kind of PMS tinged with anxiety and paranoia—perfect travel companions for touring the blistering chaos of urban India, with its crowds, beggars, arrogant cows, an old man with betel-red teeth who squeezed my breasts at the market. I stumbled through it in a medicated stupor, clutching my money belt, my hermetically sealed water bottle and my chest.
But illness was only part of it. Even then I knew I couldn’t fault an entire subcontinent for Delhi belly and bad side effects. The emotional pain of the trip stemmed from having high hopes of feeling like some prodigal daughter, a wayward soul returned from the diaspora, only to feel nothing at all—nothing familiar, nothing to recall the Sunday afternoon chronicles of my grandmother. I wanted to love India. Why didn’t I love it? There were certain delights: the fine hospitality of a Sikh brigadier whose son worked with my father; seeing the Taj Mahal glimmer at sunrise; the camel fair at Pushkar; discovering what’s special about special lassis and how to get back to your guesthouse after drinking one. Most people naturally assumed I was Indian, which only made the disconnect more acute. I was a counterfeit Indian in India, wrestling with the demons of identity.
When we finally left for Nepal, four weeks ahead of schedule, I said that was it for India and me. It had chewed me up and spit me out like a mouthful of paan. We were finished, an ill-fated couple with nothing but geography in common.
Even before my mother sent the tigers, all this had come back to me. But fifteen years had passed, and India had been locked away so long in my psychic vault of life’s disappointments, it was as if someone else had taken that trip. Wasn’t this one bound to be different? I was different. Also, we were heading to a corner of India we’d never been to before. “You can’t visit the east side of Vancouver and say you’ve seen Canada,” Stephen said. I skipped the anti-malarials and packed a few boxes of Imodium, sunscreen and sweaters for the hills. As I threw in a few DNA collection kits, it struck me that my mother was right. On some level, I had to accept India. It was in our blood, even if we rarely said so.
Ten degrees north of the equator, between the Western Ghat mountains and the Arabian Sea, the fabled state of Kerala hugs India’s southwestern shore. Hindu legend has it that a warrior-saint saved it from the sea, chopping down greedy waves with the blade of his axe. This was not just any Hindu saint but Parasurama, an incarnation of the supreme four-armed god Vishnu, which suggests that Kerala has been a blessed strip of waterfront real estate since time began.
Travellers know it as a place of respite, a paradise of lazy beaches and backwaters. Ancients knew it as part of the mythical Malabar Coast, a living treasure of teak forests and lush hills that lured traders for more than five thousand years: Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Phoenicians, the Chinese. They came by boat and by caravan for its spices—pepper above all, the first black gold. But all this belongs to those foggy and often forgotten chapters of Indian history, before the Europeans arrived in the twilight of the fifteenth century. By then Cochin had become Malabar’s hottest trading port, the queen of the Arabian Sea, and eventually the cradle of India’s colonization.
Twenty hours after we left Canada and touched down in Cochin, the Indian sun packed a noonday sting at nine a.m. It roasted our heads as we emerged from the airport, pushing our luggage cart into a sea of gleaming white Ambassadors. Hindustan Motors started making the cars shortly after India gained independence, and they still look as if they have driven right out of the 1950s. We spotted my parents wedged between two of them, all high-beam smiles as they hailed us over to their taxi.
We fell fast into conversation in the back seat amid the chutney of Indian traffic, rumbling alongside oxen pulling carts, motorized rickshaws and trucks adorned with tinsel and pictures of Hindu gods. Gorgeous Indian women grinned down on it all from giant billboards advertising toothpaste, instant rice pilaus and cold creams to lighten the complexion.
We reached the Abad in less than an hour. It si
ts on a busy roundabout in central Kochi, as Cochin is now called, making it a perfect spot for any pedestrian with a death wish. It was a fine place, a clean, quiet hotel that my parents had made home base over the previous two months, getting to know the staff by name and by story. Carolyn, this is Anthony. He’s from Munnar, the hill station where they grow cardamom. He’s getting married to a nice girl this weekend—an arranged marriage, but he likes her very much.
We went to the beach that first day. After an early lunch and a jet-lagged sleep that swallowed the afternoon, the four of us took a city bus to the old district of Fort Kochi. We shared the ride with homebound commuters off the ferry from Ernakulum, Kochi’s commercial district on the mainland. So many waterways run through and around the peninsula and its cluster of islands that people often call Kochi “the Venice of the East.” More than a million people live in the area, but it suffers far less from the slum poverty and unemployment that plague other urban areas of the country. Not surprising, since Kerala is considered India’s most socially progressive state, and its most literate: its women and children are the nation’s best-educated. Malayalam is the main language, an ancient meld of Tamil and Sanskrit and one of fifteen languages that appear on the Indian rupee. But by religion if not by tongue, Kerala is a pan-Indian mishmash of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs and Jews too, a tradition of mixing that owes a debt to its long history as the world’s spice cabinet.
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