Extra Place Basil

Description

Ocimum gratissimum, African or clove basil, is known on Madagascar’s east coast as rômba. It is a branched subshrub with a woody base. The stems are square, finely hairy and reddish-brown below. The opposite leaves are ovate, 6–11 cm long, coarsely toothed and gland-dotted, and smell of clove when bruised. Small greenish-white flowers grow in whorls on terminal spikes; the calyx persists and dries brown around four nutlets.

Observations

Any list of people made within about two metres of the plant (a register, headcount, rota or cast list) ends with one more entry than its compiler wrote. The extra line, in the compiler’s own hand or typeface, gives a full name in correct local form. That name belongs to a living person with no birth registration or other civil record. Nobody has seen the line written. Once that person is registered, the next list names someone else. Counts of money, objects and animals are unaffected.

The file

In 2019 we asked Voahangy Razanamparany, secretary of Fokontany Ivoloina from 1994 to 2016, how the plant reached us. She annotated her copy of a village programme and posted it.

Tsy Ampy Seza — Not Enough Chairs

Programme for a village comedy, with margin notes and a pinned receipt, kept and annotated by V. Razanamparany, retired fokontany secretary

Mpilalao Ivoloina presents a comedy in two acts. It will be performed in the yard of EPP Ivoloina on Saturday 24 November 2007 at seven o’clock.

Cast, in order of appearance

• Hanitra Raveloson: Mme Bao, mother of the bride
• Rivo Andrianjaka: M. Bao, who borrowed the chairs
• Lalaina Rasoamanana: the bride
• Toky Ramaroson: the groom
• Mbola Razafindrakoto: the aunt from Tana
• Pupils of EPP Ivoloina: the neighbours
• Fanomezantsoa Tojo Rakotonirina: the boy at the door

Margin, blue biro: I typed this list on the office machine, the romba at my elbow, and I typed six lines. Nobody in the company knew the seventh name, and it was not in my register. Hanitra said there was a Tojo who sold peanuts at the taxi-brousse stop.

The play

The Bao family have invited forty guests and borrowed thirty-nine chairs. Act two is M. Bao counting. The chairs, the table and the pot of basil are lent by the fokontany office.

Margin: There was no part called the boy at the door, and there was no door. We played in the yard.

Front of house

Programmes cost 200 Ar. All door takings go to the fokontany roof fund.

Margin: We took 31 400 Ar. Counted twice beside the basil; the same both times.

Pinned inside the back cover

A carbon receipt, folded in four: Tribunal de Première Instance de Toamasina, Greffe. Reçu n° 0417. Received from Mme RAZANAMPARANY Voahangy the sum of 6 000 Ar in fees for a jugement supplétif d’acte de naissance, in favour of RAKOTONIRINA Fanomezantsoa Tojo, born about March 1996 at Ivoloina. Toamasina, 11 December 2007.

Margin: I paid it out of the roof tin. He was eleven and had spent the evening outside the school wall with his peanuts. In February Ivan took the roof off. The insurance man who came about the claim took a slip for his wife’s kitchen. Tojo has his own stall now, at the same stop.

Genetic analysis

The lowercase stretch is a 12-bp tandem repeat in the chloroplast trnL–trnF spacer. Every long read spanning it contains four copies. Every assembly and every count of aligned reads, by person or program, returns five. The extra copy is identical to the others and its 50% GC content fits the region, but no read contains it. The 2014 cutting at Ivoloina gives the same result.

Cultivation

We keep one plant, grown from the Haja Rasolofonirina cutting, on the desk in the Glasshouse office. It grows in a 25 cm terracotta pot of loam and grit at a minimum of 15 °C.

Cuttings root easily in water, but we do not give them out: each plant counts on its own, and two pots on one desk add two lines. In 2014 we sent a rooted cutting back to Ivoloina after the original pot was lost when the office was rebuilt.

Effects

Staff take the monthly visitor headcount beside the plant. Each extra name goes to the register office for the district where the person is found. The people traced so far include:

• a man of 58 who has lived on a narrowboat since birth
• twin girls born at home to a family of seasonal pickers
• a woman of 71 whose birth was never entered, because the registrar’s office flooded that week

None of them has been dead or invented. None has yet lived more than a day’s travel from the desk.