Autobiographic blues

If nagged at Neil that he had not mentioned Karen, to Mabel. In all practical purpose, he and Mabel were sort of going steady. They were not living together, just yet. But, other than that technicality, there were an item, he supposed.
And yet, he was, on occasion, meeting up Karen, the single mother from his neighborhood, time to time. Today was one such occasion. Sure, he had not planned it. He had a long day walking around in the bushes by the dyke, looking for warblers, kinglets, larks and buntings. His legs felt tired and his throat felt thirsty. He had quenched his thirst with a bottled lemonade in a gas station. And now, he was heading towards the book store, hoping to pick up a magazine or something to read, and then sit down at the attached coffee shop. But who would he see on the road if not Karen? She too was heading the same way. Apparently, she needed to pick up something at the store next door to the book store, and was otherwise free. Her daughter was not with her. Neil had stopped his car and was talking with her. She ended up getting in his car so he could drop her off at her store while he walked into the book store next door.
She joined him there, and, as Neil could guess, they were going to spend the next hour, or two, together. Sure, it was a chance encounter, and in a public place.
But, it nagged him. Karen had a matured calmness and yet a refreshingly feminine and compassionate way about her that was rather attractive. She was a bleeding heart liberal and often joined protest marches for this or that.
Neil decided he would call Mabel up and tell her about the three occasions where he ended up spending time with Karen, two of them now without her daughter present. He hoped Mabel would take it for what it was, and not make too much of it. Neil, meanwhile, was not sure himself what exactly it was, if anything, between himself and Karen. Its not lime they were secret lovers or something!
Inside the book store, they ended up at the biography section, instead of the magazine corner. The biography section was at the back of the large book store, diametrically opposite to the coffee shop and the adjacent magazine racks.
Karen flipped through a few books. She had picked up a box that carried the picture of Queen Elisabeth II, opened it and flipped through the large and glossy book. This book, and some of the others, were displayed prominently on a table in front of the racks. A prominent spot on the table was occupied by a recent biography of Steve Jobs.
Neil glanced at the book racks of biographies. They appeared to be arranged alphabetically. Aristotle was placed next to Mohammad Ali, Louis Armstrong, Jennifer Anniston and Pamela Anderson. He almost picked up Aristotle, but then thought better of it and let his glance sweep across the racks. He remembered Aristotle as a Greek philosopher that had thinning hair and a good looking beard. A contemplative man, his writings perhaps laid the foundation of western philosophy and covered issues such as morality, science, and even metaphysics. He remembered Armstrong as a great jazz musician with a very interesting face with bulging eyes.
He was not in the right frame, to read biographies of any of them.
After ‘A’ there was ‘B’. Alexander Graham Bell squeezed in with Lucille Ball. Neil thought how it might have been if Graham bell used Lucille Ball as a model for advertising his telephones. The thought made him smile. He could think of a few more names with ‘B’, such as Babcock, Babbit, and Baber. But there were no books on them.
For ‘C’, Cleopatra, Bill Clinton, Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro, Tom Cruise and Christopher Columbus shared the same biographical pigeon hole. Perhaps an imaginary Clinton of the present could have an affair with Cleopatra of the past, for the sake of world peace. The couple could have been blessed by Castro, overlooked by Columbus, and acted on by Tom Cruise ?
He wondered if he might ask Karen for famous last names she remembered that started with ‘B’, and hint at Cabot, Cardigan, or even Caesar. But he thought better of it.
Karen put down the box on the queen and picked up another, on Elisabeth Taylor. Neil’s thoughts drifted to the time when he had seen the movie “Cleopatra” with Liz Taylor in the lead role and Richard Burton playing Mark Anthony. Charlton Heston was Caesar. Nice movie. He was young those days, and did not know that Cleopatra was not really an Egyptian princess as much as she was a princess ruling Egypt.
But Karen was a bleeding heart liberal and a feminist more than she was a woman in awe of glamor, Neil suspected. Soon enough, she had picked up another book on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the contribution of women in the abolition movement as well as an early women’s rights activist.
Neil knew a bit about her, but not too much. He looked over her shoulder at the book too. There was a picture of Ms Stanton. Karen noted Neil too was looking at the book. “She was one of my early heroines”.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Wikipedia

“Hmm.. Am not surprised. I haven’t read too much about her,  or about the women’s right activism of the nineteenth century America, you know.”
“Would you like to read it ?” Karen asked, turning the book over to see how much it costed. It was not cheap.
Neil shook his head. “Nope. I do not like paying big money for books. I read a lot, and am not a rich man, so I have to be careful. I guess I shall catch up on them through articles or free press through the Gutenberg project or something.”
“Gutenberg project ? You mean free electronic books?”
“Yes. I got a lot. Lately I started using my iPad for these books, and already have over two hundred of them.”
“Two hundred ? Wow, you gotta show me how it works. Its amazing !”
Neil nodded. “I have the iPad in my car, can get it when we go to the coffee shop. Its quite easy, but I guess one needs to open an account with the Apple book store first, unless you have a similar account with Amazon kindle or something.”
Karen shook her head. “I don’t know anything. Is it costly?”
“Not really. Opening an account does not cost anything, but you might have to link a credit card with the account. Then, if you buy something, like an eBook, and if it is free, you can download it straight away. But if it is not free, you have to agree to pay for it, and it will be charged to your credit card. There are a lot of good but old books that are free, or where the charges are very small, such as a few cents, or less than a dollar.”
“Really ? Wow”
“Yes, sure. I can show you. If you like reading books, this channel has its own advantage. Of course, you can also go to a library, but I find that a bit of a hassle.”
Karen nodded, looking at him. She put the book back in its place and nodded at him. “You know, you are quite a smart chap and know quite a lot. I guess all folks from India are genetically smart.”
“Thats a croak of shit, Karen. Nothing special about Indians, except that they suck up to the west a lot and ignore their own downtrodden. Pretty disgusting if you look at it from another angle.”
Karen stopped in her track and observed him somberly.
“You know Neil, I need to learn a bit more about India and whats going on there. Perhaps you need to tell me about it sometime ? I am a member of some social justice groups and women’s right groups and such that also work with immigrant communities, and even support causes in the countries of origin of some of the immigrants. I think I’d like your input in some issues. I really do not understand much of it, and have not been personally involved in those as a result”
Neil frowned. “Well, I am not a social worker or an activist per se, you know. But, I can tell you what I know. I am a curious person and like to figure out why things happen the way they do. I am alarmed about the way India is going and what is going to happen there, just as I am alarmed at where the west is taking the planet and what is in store for the future of mankind.”
“Future of mankind ?” There was a twinkle in her eyes. “Is there a conclusion, Neil ? Anything I should be aware of?” She asked, only half in jest.
Neil nodded. Well, for one thing, good old Canada is going to disappear in another generation. We can talk about it sometime, sure.
Neil watched the books on the shelf. Walt Disney, Salvador Dali and Charles Dickens appeared to suppressed by the towering presence of Charles Darwin. To Neil, Darwin was one of the all time greats in his list. He was very impressed at a time as much by Dali’s paintings as by his famous mustache. He had read many of Darwin’s voluminous writing and still loved going back to them to re-read. But he did not feel interested to read a biography of him written by a third party.
Karen moved with him. She had her bag over her shoulder. He supposed the bag contained whatever she bought in the store, which was obviously not anything big.
“Do you know anything about the Rohinga people?” She suddenly asked Neil.
“Rohinga?”
“Yes.”
“I know some, but not too much. I know they are ethnic minorities in Myanmar, or earlier Burma. They are muslim by faith and Arab by decent. They arrived there in multiple waves, starting from I think around the 7th or 8th century all the way till during the British Raj. They are not recognized by Burma’s military junta to be citizens of the nation. They claim these people came from India. Hence they are essentially stateless and without rights. The group is recognized as one of the most persecuted people of the world. Now that the junta is moving out of power, and perhaps parliamentary democracy is on the way, with some important role played by Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, may be they will finally see some reprieve.”
Karen listened. “What language do they speak?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t believe I have met any of them yet.”
“Hmm, interesting. I know some Rohinga community people that came to Canada as politican refugees. I was thinking about them. Perhaps you’d like to come with me sometime to see a few of them ?” She asked.
“Is that allowed ? Sure, I’d like to meet them if possible”
“It would be fine, since you’ll come with me. We sometimes organize social events, like taking some of the elderly to a day’s picnic. Perhaps you’d like to come to one of the nature parks. As it is you like to go there to chase birds, right ?”
“Well, not exactly chase them, but yes, I’d like that.”
Karen nodded, pleased with the understanding.
Neil glanced at the ‘E’ section. It had Eastman of the Kodak fame. It had Einstein, Eisenhower and Thomas Edison. Einstein, just like Darwin and Newton, were among the greatest of modern thinkers in their respective fields, Neil considered. But he was not going to be reading a biography yet.
The F section sported Sigmund Freud, Ben Franklin and Douglas Fairbanks. Neil did not have strong conviction about either, so he moved on.
Gandhi was next to them, with Greta Garbo, Judi Garland, Clark Gable and Ulysses Grant. Gandhi loomed larger than life here.
Karen picked up the book on Gandhi. It was a thick hard cover book. She flipped through the pages and glanced at the pictures. She shook her head in wonder. “Amazing man”.
Neil smiled in agreement.
There seemed to be no biographies for ‘I’. This made him stop and think. Did he know any famous man whose last name started with an I? He could not think of any other than a singer by the name of Iglesias, and the business guru Lee Iacocca. But he found no books on them. Iacocca used to be an important corporate guru a few decades ago. He even read an interesting audio book written by Iacocca recently, named “Where have all the leaders gone?”
“Find anything interesting?”
That was a question from Karen.
Neil shook his head. “I am not much of a biography reader. But I can see you like picking up books of glamourous women?”
Karen used her elbow to lightly dig into his side, in a sign of familiarity he did not expect. He was holding in her hand a book on Angelina Jolie.
“I love her movies. Do you see movies much ?”
Neil shook his head. “Not much. But if its a nice movie and I have good company, I’d drop in time to time, you know?”
Karen smiled at him. “Are you asking me out to see a movie?”
She was kidding, but Neil did not pick that up initially. He felt flustered, and was groping for something to say, till he noticed her eyes. He laughed. “I thought for a moment, you were serious. Ha ha. I don’t even know what movies are running in the halls right now.”
“Ohh I can tell you whats running. There is a movie called Windfall. I think its a documentary on wind energy. You might like it.”
Neil listened, nodding. He had his doubts about the viability of wind power as a serious alternative. He looked up at Karen, hoping to hear some more.
“Or you could ask me to come with you for another recent movie – The vow.”
“Th Vow ? Whats it about ?”
“Its a typical romantic comedy tear jerker. Girls will love you for it, you know ?”
Neil laughed. He was tempted to ask, but thought he really should ask Mabel rather than Karen.
Looking at Karen, he cleared his throat. “Karen, do you know Mabel ? Mabel Jacobsen ?”
Karen frowned. “Cannot recollect that name. Should I know her?”
“Well, she is a friend. She works in the construction business with her uncle. Anyhow, would you mind coming along for the movie if I also asked Mabel ?”
Recognition, and understanding, came into the large and liquid eyes of Karen. Her face softened but did not lose the mischievous smile. She touched his cheek lightly.
“I was kidding. You need to take your girl friend without a third party. But you might introduce me sometime. Let me check her out for you and check you out for her, you know ?”
Neil watched her, already beginning to feel a lot lighter. Things were, thankfully, not going to get more complicated than what he could handle.
“Ohh ok. But lets plan for a picnic of something, some time.”
Karen nodded, winked at him, moving past the next few books and picked up one.

Marilyn Monroe looked back at him from the cover.
He had had enough of biographies.
He tapped on Karen’s shoulder and indicated he was moving along to the coffee shop section. He left Douglas MacArthur, Jawaharlal Nehru and Paul Newman at their shelf space and walked on to the coffee section.

Things were OK, with or without biographies.
He went out to his car and retrieved the iPad. He met her again at the coffee shop and sat down at one of the smaller round tables. He stretched his legs and leaned back on the chair, taking a sip of the Caramel macchiato.
She took out her phone and called someone. He could hear her talking to her daughter, and checking on what she had been doing. Karen smiled at him while speaking with her daughter, and told her that she was sitting and having a coffee with Neil uncle, the same one that took their picture at the Bog a few weeks ago. She listened to her daughter and whispered back to him “She remembers you, and says hi”
Neil smiled and nodded. “Hi to her too.”
Karen finished her call and settled down with her coffee, looking around the coffee shop and checking on the other customers.
Neil played with his iPad, logging on to the free wifi provided by the shop. He then checked the book store on line and typed “Stanton” to check what comes up. He leaned over towards Karen to show the process. Karen watched, as the screen refreshed itself with the search results.
“Hmm.. The Women’s Bible is one book she obviously wrote. Its free of charge completely.”
Karen watched. “Amazing. I wonder whats in it.”
“You could check that out. I can download it for you here and loan you the iPad for a few days.”
Karen shook her head and pulled his shirt collar. “Cute, but no thanks. You need this iPad more than I do. But I shall consider getting hold of one. There is someone who might sell hers second hand, as she wishes to upgrade.”
Neil nodded and checked the other books.
“Here is another – Eighty Years and More : Reminiscences 1815-1897, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”
“Wow”
“This one too is free of charge. You see what I meant?”
“Yes. I see it, indeed.” Karen was impressed already.
“And here is another intriguing book. Collection of various writings, including Stanton. The name of the book tells it all – History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III”. It is 1033 pages long. And it is not free of charge, but costs only one dollar and ninety nine cents.”
Karen was amazed. “I’d like to get that book. But over a thousand pages ! Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah. But read the description. It has collection of contributors, edited by Anthony, Gage and Stanton, that come from England, USA, France and Canada, giving personal experience and the progress of the movement to grant equal voting rights to women. A monumental book I might say, though I have not read it. And its less than two dollars.”
Karen read through the lengthy description of the book and watched the picture of the cover page.

“You know Neil. You just sold me the idea of buying that second hand iPad. You are a sweetheart.”

Neil smiled, and scratched his ear. He decided to download that book himself, and read it by and by. It was rather too thick, but, perhaps should be informative.

They finished their coffee and got up. Neil dropped Karen at her friends place, where her daughter had spend the day. She leaned across and kissed him on his cheek. “You are a good guy. Stay that way Neil. We shall stay in touch, about the Rohinga, the book, and things.”
Neil nodded.
“And say hi to Mabel for me. We should go out sometime for a meal or something. She is welcome to join up when and if we go with the Rohinga and others, you know!”
“OK, thank Karen. I shall tell her.”
Karen turned and walked up the front door of the house.
Neil turned his car and prepared to head out.

A northern flicker, pecking at the side of a trunk got a sudden flash of his cars headlight as he turned his car around. With a small call of surprise, it launched itself in the air and flew almost directly over his car. Neil craned his neck to watch it disappear, and smiled.
It had been a good day.

Rice in the Vedas

“Come to think of it, this is a complicated question.” Neil finally observed.
They were stretched out on a flat rock by the water’s edge. Neil thought of taking his shoe off and dipping his feet in the water, but decided against it. It was still quite cold, and the water might be near freezing. Besides, he could not remember when he last changed his sock, and was conscious that his socks might smell. It had happened to him before.
Mabel was sitting next, and she had taken her shoes off. She had feet that, to Neil, looked as it they had been encased in shoes all her life. Her toes were sort of clustered tightly together, each crowding onto the other and all trying to join up with each other at a point in front of the feet. That’s how painters often drew buildings and roads – where things further would look smaller, and all parallel lines would be inclined so that they join up at some point further up. This brings the perception of depth, of distance. In that sense, Mabel’s toes were three dimensional and followed the European renaissance painter’s preferences.
Neil’s own toes came from a different theory. Not being encased in shoes early in his life, the toes propagated, or tried to, like branches on a tree – each striving to enter into uncharted territory and get much of the space around it as its own. His toes were independent, and not necessarily democratic. Her toes where, he thought, more like groups of elderly Japanese tourists – always clustered together, never venturing too far out where he or she could get separated, and always wearing a sign that identifies him or her as belonging to the group.

Mabel shook her feet and curled her toes a bit, and looked across at him. Sun was still bright and it fell on them sideways, casting a longish shadow over the grass.
“I thought you liked complicated questions”. She teased.

Neil remembered finally. He had changed his sock yesterday. He took his shoe off and peeled off his socks. Then he extended his feet and compared his against hers. His were brown. His toe nails were less pedicured. Some of the toe nails looked as it thy might benefit from a bit of clipping. And, his toes were free. He could even flex then and fan them out, like a Japanese hand fan. They were almost diametrically opposite, from her toes.
Mabel watched and laughed, seeing his toes fanned out as it it were the fingers on a hand. “That’s funny.”
“Yeah. I could always do that, from my childhood days.”
Neil contemplated the question again.
“You see, there are some unknown issues here. I do not know when folks identifiable as Aryans, first arrived in different parts of India. I am not at all sure that they were invaders or visitors and not from the indigenous crowd. So, the date of their emergence would be important. Next, we also need to pin them on a map, along with dates. Then we need to know when each of those regions started farming of rice, if ever. I know rice was more wild than cultivated in their early days. It is possible that some folks just collected the wild rice seeds for eating, while some also attempted to farm it. They might have had a mixed diet of wild and farmed rice. They might have boiled them, or might have roasted them, or might even have eaten it raw, grinding the seeds down to a powder in their molars.”
Neil closed his eyes and tried to imagine a bunch of early semi-nomadic folks at the edge of a jungle, couching in the open by a small seasonal stream of water, washing early rice seeds in the water and attempting to eat them. He tried to imagine that crowd having one of two distinct people that got to be known as Aryans. The picture did not evolve properly in his minds eye. He ended up opening his eyes and squinting at the clear blue sky above, and the small flock of trumpeter swans that crossed his vision, long necks extended and in single file, each riding the wake of the slip stream of bird in front, honking loudly in their passage.
Mabel watched him, wearing a bemused smile.
“So, what do you think? He ate rice or not?”
Neil turned away and looked her in the eye. He had an urge to give her a smooch. It was nice, spending the last two nights together. He was beginning to get used to her habits including the fact that she liked sleeping on her belly – a very odd way of sleeping, he thought.
“I am tempted to guess in the negative. But am not sure. It is possible that folks that lived in the forest environment ate a mixed diet of home grown as well as wild food. I know some of them hunted anything that had fur on it, and would cook and eat it. They were not fussy those days. But – rice – I don’t know. I have never read about anyone that might have investigated this issue. And I have not read the Vedas in their original Sanskrit, and don’t even know if rice in mentioned as a cultivated crop in those verses.”
Mabel snaked closer. She was not feeling particularly cold. She had taken off her parka and set it aside. She snaked an around around his head, and pulled him closer. “Perhaps you know someone that can answer that ?”

Neil thought of two persons who might just do that. One was a woman he knew from his school days, who studied Sanskrit and the Vedas. She was a professor in a University in India. She might be able to help. The other person was someone involved with preservation of indigenous strains of rice, since many of the original strains were already lost through disuse and neglect. He might know something about it.

“Yes, I know some folks. We can consider asking them, though not sure if the question will be considered important by those folks.
I meanwhile have in my iPad a pdf document on the subject of preservation of varieties of rice in the eastern part of India. Let me show you.”
He took it out from their backpack and played with it for a few moments. The screen came to life. He opened the application iBooks and finally opened the item he was looking for. The screen got filled with a picture of various strains of rice, the stock of each having some kind of an identifying tag. They were of varying shades of a warm color – from beige to almost red. The article heading below the picture said “Valuing Folk Crop Varieties for Agroecology and Food Security.” It was dated October 2009.
He showed it to Mabel.

Mabel took the iPad. She was interested in its capacity to hold so much of interesting documents which would need multiple book racks and likely would overflow a house. She had been toying with the idea of getting one herself. She did not read as much as Neil did, but still, she did like to read stuff. She had gotten used to navigating through the gadget, because Neil often gave it to her.

She read through the article, nodded at Neil, and then closed the article, going back to the book shelf for eBooks instead of pdf files. There, she found books that were of her interest. One was about the geology of British Columbia. Before she knew Neil, this was not an interesting subject. But that was then. Now, we was very keen on it.
There were other books of interest too. Backwoods of Canada was one. She had read part of it one day. She remembered reading about the Strickland Trail, written by one of the early pioneering women. The article was written in the 1830s, almost 180 years ago. She liked reading books like this, and she found in incredible that Neil had this book too. After all, he was born in India and had come to Canada relatively recently.
She was also interested to read about Annie Wood Bessant, a very interesting woman, and elected member of parliament in the UK and among the first to agitate for equality of rights and pay for women in the workforce. She was among the earliest of the true feminists and spiritual independents that broke from the Judea-Christian mold and carved a niche for herself and all free thinkers of the future. Mabel did not know anything about her before she met Neil. But Neil knew a lot about her, since she eventually left Europe and settled in India, and was among the earliest of the leaders for India’s independence from British rule.
She did not know about a lot of things before she met Neil. Neil thought that her fascination with him was more because she was impressed by what he had read, rather than because she liked him as a person. Mabel would laugh at that. Neil might know things about the external world, but he knew nothing much about women.
He had a lot to learn, and she intended to broaden his horizon there.

She looked into his eyes, up close, and kissed his nose. “Thank you. Yes, I agree that folk rice varieties are the best. In fact, I’d even add that the folk human varieties are not bad themselves.
I have one right here reclining on a stone next to me.”

Neil ignored the comment about himself, feeling a bit flustered. “You know, the saline resistant strains of rice that had … “
He did not get a chance to complete the sentence.
Mabel had rolled herself on top of him and smothered him with kisses.

The Vedas, the Aryans and issues of early rice cultivation in eastern India would have to wait.

Eocene thermal maximum in a bowl of soup.

“How much time?”
Neil was looking at the clips of movies he had taken recently, mostly of wild ducks. In one clip, a couple of hooded mergansers were bathing and cleaning themselves vigorously, one in the water and the other standing on a floating log. Neil loved it. He decided to use it later, to make a home movie. That was one of his hobbies.
Mabel sat next to him, watching. She was not there when he took the video, but religiously saw all the still shots, of which there were a few hundred, as well as all the video clips, some half a dozen.
The conversation had moved on to the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock. Neil had just finished his latest book – The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Some of the points raised by Lovelock went against even his own earlier belief, and that of many of his environmentally conscious friends, he could not brush them off. A large part of what Lovelock said, made sense.
It was in that context that Neil had mentioned that the planet had crossed a significant threshold – a point of no return. Earth was almost certainly going to heat up to a level where large swaths of its landmass would be unsuitable for human habitation as we know it today. In that sense, the planet to a large extent is doomed, and modern industrial man was largely responsible for it – except for one wild card in the game, Gaia. The question was no more if, but when the planet was going to deteriorate rapidly and what Gaia might do in response.
Neil turned to Mabel.
She had been working today. They were not supposed to meet. He himself had just gotten home from work. Tomorrow was also a working day.
But, it felt good to spend time together. He had often thought of asking Mabel to move in with him, but could not bring himself to do that just yet. Mabel, meanwhile, would usually call him up once a day or so, and drop in at his place every few days after work. Neil had only been to her place once, for a few minutes. She had a small one room apartment on a multi-story building. He felt a bit out of place there. Mabel never asked him to spend the night there. Perhaps she sensed he was not comfortable. It was she that usually spend the night at his place, whenever that happened. Her white jeep parked in front of his house was a sort of familiar feature in the neighborhood by now.
He was still adjusting to the fact that Mabel might be a bit young for him, and could not shake off the thought that she might eventually tire of him and move on to someone closer to her age. He was aware that although Mabel was an adult now, she nourished a six year long teenage crush on him ever since she first saw him as a sixteen year old high school girl. He was already twenty eight at the time, and was not even aware that she liked him. That was a long time ago. Today, he was a bachelor of thirty four and she was a mere twenty two. Apart from years, he also felt a generation apart both culturally and mentally. And yet, they seemed to gel well. She brought warmth and a freshness into his life, apart from being in totally in synch with his interests and hobbies and thoughts. She was good for his ego, Neil decided. But perhaps he was not the best thing for her life. This was one thought he could not rid himself off. Being a somewhat private person, he found it difficult to discuss these issues with her face to face. He was also worried that he might hurt her by questioning their affair.
It was a mess, but hopefully, would end in a good outcome for both of them.
“How long?” She asked. She had such a fresh face and a calming appearance – it tugged at Neil’s heart.
He held her face and kissed her on her mouth. She closed her eyes. Her mouth softened. She had full, pliant lips. It can be addictive – Neil thought.
Mabel opened her eyes at the end of it, and gave him a small peck on his lips in return. “How long?”
“How long do we have on this planet ?”
She nodded.
“Well, I hope it would be longer than it takes for us to kiss a little.” He chuckled, teasing her.
She cuffed him. “No, seriously.”
“Well, opinion is divided on it. If you ask many of the western Governments, including Canada and USA, global warming is a myth or at best an unproven theory. Therefore, these Governments do not any more feel the need to do anything significant singly or collectively, to address this issue. Some are blaming China of today or India of the near future, for being responsible for the mess. China of course is blaming the west for adding all the carbon di-oxide for the last few centuries through dirty industrialization in the first place. So, we are in a blame game right now.”
“Never mind China, Canada or USA and the blame game. How much time does a man in Tahiti have?”
“Man in Tahiti ?” Neil scratched his head. “I don’t believe I know that man, in tahiti.” He said in mock seriousness.
She cuffed him again.
“Well, if you ask me, we have crossed the point of no return already. How long the earth will take to make it hell for humans, is something no one can correctly predict. But a few decades to a century is the time span when the serious deterioration begins to hit us. So, you and I are likely to see the beginning of it. In fact we are already seeing the beginning of it for a long time, just did not wish to acknowledge it for what it is. But more than you and me, it is the next generation kids, and the next, that will really see the crap hit the fan, so to speak.”
Mabel contemplated the issue. “Why is it that so many scientists cannot tell us when this will begin to get nasty and how to prevent a catastrophe? We are an advanced technology civilization, are we not?”
“Are we?” he asked back.
Mabel did not answer but widened her eyes at him. She did that, whenever confronted with a question that could have multiple answers.
“There are not too many independent pure scientists left in the world, Mabel.” Neil opined. “What we have is truck-loads of quasi-scientists that are funded by selfish organizations that pollute science and destroy neutral analysis. They want theories to come out protecting the business as usual model. Everything must relate to making a profit. Even curbing green house gas emission must be designed such that folks would trade on carbon credits and make money. Its disgusting to even think how little the world really cares of the future. We have bankers, politicians, corporate moguls and media pundits, animal right activists, sustainable living advocates, bleeding heart liberals and right wing conservatives – all pushing their own partial agenda on the table and making everything bewilderingly complex. Any debate on the issue stops being rational and scientific and descends into a cacophony of noise.”
“Hmm.. We need some clear thinking persons that can talk – right ?”
“Right. Dalai Lama is one clear thinking person. I do not know if he has read James Lovelock though. I know he is technically savvy and quite aware of many things. I read a book by him titled The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality”. He is certainly wiser and more balanced than any other living religious guru that I know of. He is aware of global warming, but he is not the right person to think outside the box on this particular issue. It needs a scientists that is unfettered by interest groups.”
“James Lovelock is that person?”
“Well, he is among a handful that are not speaking on behalf of a lobby. Also, he has a clearer way to seeing things that I admire. This includes his views on nuclear energy, which he supports. Many environmentalist I know vehemently opposes nuclear power plants. That is an important issue, but not the main one any more. The train has left the station when it comes to preventing global warming, you know? Developping emission free energy is going to be important, but a far more challenging necessity is facing us – that of turning our idea of modern civilization as well as man’s place on this planet on its head. But it is too late to think we can prevent catastrophic global warming.”
“You are saying it is too late to do anything, therefore do nothing ? That sounds defeatist. Not like you.” She looked at him.
“Thats not what Lovelock is saying. As to me, I have a more resigned view at it – perhaps similar to Dalai Lama. I have decided not to get excited and accept a few hard facts.”
Mabel contemplated that. “What are those hard facts?”
Neil counted them in his finger – “A) a human being is an accidental evolutionary outcome that is neither chosen by god, nor permanent, and therefore, if man survives or not is not so interesting for the planet”
Mabel nodded. “And B)?”
Neil cleared his throat. “B) whatever happens, was perhaps going to happen anyway. If man was destined to damage its own environment and cause mass extinction of species including his own, well that was perhaps how things were to happen anyway.”
“Thats all?”
“There is more. C) man is not unique in changing the earth biosphere. Other creatures have been doing it a long time before man came. In fact, if other organisms did not alter the atmosphere, higher oxygen breathing mammals, birds, fish and reptiles would not even have evolved. So, nothing particularly earth shattering to know that man is responsible for bringing massive change to the planets atmosphere, and gaia will react to it like it has done in the past. The only difference is, Man did what he did so fast, that Gaia is likely to kick back equally fast, and many of the living creatures may not have enough time to adjust to it.”
“And that includes man, right?”
“Yes. It particularly affects man.”
“So is Lovelock saying there is no need to do anything?”
“Thats not what he is saying. I think his point is – stop trying to engage in superficial efforts and lip service to climate change issues. Stop promoting bogus technologies just to make money, in the name of alternative energy source. Stop pretending the planet can sustain eight billion people and their pets and domestic animals without damaging the environment irreversibly. And finally, accept that damage is irreversible, and instead of attempting to stop it, change your civilization, redraw it from scratch, and take steps now, so that even a smaller number of humans at least have a chance to survive the climatic onslaught that is facing us.”
“Thats sounds like a doomsday warning.”
Neil nodded. “Lovelock is a scientist that worked in the Jet Propulsion Lab in California many years ago. He is a known scientist, albeit long retired, with a theory that the planet earth is not a passive element, where all changes in its climate is a response to external conditions. It is a dynamic entity, Gaia, which also triggers internal reorganization as a response to external stimuli. Scientists almost always miss-calculate earths degrading climate because its computer models are flawed and because it cannot understand that the planet is not passive, but active. According to Lovelock, man has damaged this bio-system enough to prevent the planet from self-controlling its atmosphere, and we have entered a phase of runaway climate change, like it happened 55 million years ago. But this time, it is expected to happen much more rapidly.”
Neil got up and moved to the kitchen. He was going to warm up some soup and vegetables. Mabel joined him, taking out cutlery and setting the small table inside the kitchen. Sometimes they sit down there and finish a meal. It feel more cozy than the large dining table in the next room.
“How fast or slow did the warming happen 55 million years ago. Since humans were not there, what caused it? What kind of creatures lived there at the time?”
“Too many questions. I don’t know all the answer. It happened at the onset of the Eocene era.”
“Whats Eocene ?”
“Well, you know about the age of the dinosaurs, right ?”
“Right.”
“They died out, in a phase of rapid mass extinction of many kinds of living creatures. That was the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago. That opened up the field for diminutive mammals that were unable to gain stature under competition of the dinosaurs. So the next phase is often called the age of mammals. That started around 65 million years ago and continues till today. This phase has been broken into some segments. The first segment immediately after the dinosaurs is called Paleocene. That era ended at around 55 million years ago, and the next era started – Eocene. It is the boundary between Paleocene and Eocene when the earth suddenly warmed up with very high concentration of atmospheric carbon di-oxide comparable to today. Scientists think that the warming happened over a period of say twenty thousand years or so. That was slow enough for many of the animals and plants to move to relatively cooler regions and evolve to adopt the new environment. The planet would take almost twenty million years to come to a stage where ice sheets can again form on Antarctica, the land mass at South pole.”
Mabel tried to absorb that news and relate to it. She had never been outside of Canada. Antarctica was just a name. She could not remember any friend or relative ever talk about Antarctica seriously. Except perhaps Neil.
Neil continued, “But today, Lovelock believes the same sudden warming is likely to happen within a century or so, which will not be enough for most of the living creatures to adjust. Humans will have to take a very big hit.”
“Jesus”
“Yeah. I am not a very religious man. But a religious Hindu might say ‘Hai Ram’ which would be his way of expressing the same thing, in the name of a different God.”
Mabel smiled ruefully. “Its terrible. Does that warming up have a name, what happened at Paleocene-Eocene boundary?”
Neil tried cocking an eyebrow, and failed. Mabel was picking up terminology fast enough. She had a keen interest, which pleased as well as tickled him.
“I think it is called Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximus or something. In short – PETM. You can see it in the chart in Wikipedia – a sudden sharp spike in Atmospheric Co2 content and a long warming of the planet.”

PETM spike - Wikipedia

The microwave let out of small chime, indicating it had finished heating the food, having delivered the desired thermal maximum in their bowl of soup.

Storm Warning

It was early Saturday morning when power went off. There was no sound, no indication of a storm, and no bang. But, the sudden silence woke him up. The brain perhaps gets used to tiny levels of continuous drone or repetitive low level noise, so that folks can sleep through them. The brain might even work like a noise canceling device that allows folks to sleep on a moving train, for example. They become part of the background noise.
But when the noise stops, there is a dead silence. Somehow this triggers the brain to recognize a change of status as an event of sufficient importance to wake one up.
He could sense that the entire neighborhood had gone silent, and rightly guessed it was a regional power cut. Calling up the local power supply company proved his suspicion. Several thousand homes were without power. There was a storm at night. Folks had identified the location where the trouble was. It was expected that power would be restored in about two hours.
He got up and looked at the time on his mobile phone. It was just after six in the morning. He had been planning to spend the weekend north of Vancouver into the mountains, if weather permitted. Weather was always a big thing in this season. It rained often in winter. It was not convenient to go hiking through the countryside if it was raining. But, the flip side of the argument was, it was perhaps better than it rained, instead of snowed, in winter. Iced up roads in a hilly land can be difficult for vehicular traffic. Accidents can be frequent.
He did not have an all-wheel drive vehicle. IT did not snow in the lower mainlands around Vancouver except of a few days in a year. And he did not take his own car for long trips into the mountains much. He preferred to rent a newer all wheel drive vehicle on his trips. A front wheel drive vehicle like his can get bogged in snow or mud. It had happened to him a few times already.
Mountain roads were often steep and with hairpin bends. Also, remote highways and roads were not plowed as regularly as roads with heavier traffic.
He had gotten himself a new SLT digital camera. SLT stood for single lens translucent – a new term. He loved the camera, partly because of its ability to shoot many still frames in a second, or high definition movies, though not both at the same time.
He had recently gotten a swinging Gimbal for his tripod mount, to handle heavy cameras. He loved it so far, though did not get enough chance to use it yet.
He was planning to go either to Boundary Bay area or to Westham Island or to the serpentine fen region early Sunday morning, if it did not rain. Miguel was going with him.
But meanwhile, this power cut made his work a bit difficult. He brushed his teeth. The tooth brush was powered, but with batteries. Same for his electric shaver. He used up what hot water was in the boiler, which was sufficient for him for now.
He dressed up using his flashlight to search for clothes in the closet. He woke Miguel up and explained the situation. Miguel took it with his customary sense of humor. Apparently this was common in his home country in Ecuador. While Miguel got himself ready, he got down and opened the garage door manually and took his car out into the drive way and closed the garage door down by hand again.
The roads appeared littered with small branches of conifers, indicating there had been a storm at night, which he apparently slept through.
He drove to the local Starbucks and sat down with a hot chocolate and a sandwich. Miguel duplicated the order. They had internet and a wall socket. He checked on the status of power supply and the local weather forecast. The overnight storm had abated, but the rain was there for the next several hours. He might find a dry sky with scattered clouds later in the afternoon.
Atmospheric storms were different than those caused by seismic activity at the seabed and below, that causes tsunami. The Asian tsunami of 2009 caused death of a quarter million people.
In contrast, the recent tsunami in Japan killed a few thousand. And the damage to Fukushima nuclear power plant as a result, has not killed a single Japanese, and is unlikely to kill anyone outside of Japan either.
“We are going to have a bigger meal a bit later Miguel, either at home or in a restaurant. I needed my morning coffee, and without power, I could not make it in our kitchen.”
Miguel nodded. “No problem. I enjoy myself any way. They have Starbucks here too!”
Neil nodded. They had that here too. Soon, there may be no significant difference between one country and another, wherever you go.
They sat down at a table at the back end of the place.
The coffee was hot and good. The sandwich was hot and tasty. Miguel went into it right away.
Neil sat back and contemplated the news coverage of the Asian Tsunami of 2009, Hurricane Aila a year later, and the smaller Tsunami of Japan the next year followed by the damage to the nuclear power plant there.
There is a lot more talk of the Fukushima plant and the dangers of accident at nuclear power plants, than deaths and destruction caused by the tsunami, and the danger of global warming, sea level rise and sinking of various islands and coastlines.
Bangladesh is one example of a densely populated low elevation country that is threatened by  rising sea level. Flat island nations around the world are threatened. Countries like India are going to lose a lot of coastal land with rising sea.
Even in Canada, the cities of Delta, where he lived, and Richmond, where barely above sea level, and are prone to tsunami on one side, and also earth quake prone.
But nations such as India and China are in grave threat of their own. While China might battle with scarcity of water and deterioration of agricultural land, India too will lose a lot of coastal land as well as great reduction of water in their rivers. India’s population density was already approaching 400 per square km. That was over 120 times that of Canada. Canada had room to move internal climate refugees. India did not.
Africa, on the other hand, was going to be cooked.
China might be tempted to invade Siberia, which would get increasingly habitable and fertile as the planet warms up.
There would be an unprecedented rush to colonize Antarctica, the last continent to be taken over by man.

He sipped a coffee and looked around. Through the glass wall facing the street, he saw Karen park her car and get out with her daughter.
She was a neighbor, though they don’t meet often. The last time he saw her was at the bog two weeks ago. That was when he clicked the barred owl.
They were walking towards Starbucks too. It was very likely that their home too was without power.
Karen swung the door open and let her daughter in. Neil was sitting at the back end of the coffee shop. Karen did not see him first. They stood in line at the counter. Mother and daughter discussed what they wanted to have. Karen moved up the line and placed her order. Then they moved to the near end of the counter to collect their choice of drink and a sandwich. That was when the little girl saw him. She stopped and pouted, then pointed at him with her finger.
Karen glanced at him, and smiled.
“Hello there, stranger. How are you?”
Neil smiled and nodded. “Good morning. Power cut at home for you too ?”
“Yep. No light. Decided to drop in for a coffee and a cookie”
“Join us?”
They had a small table, but there were four chairs to it. Karen nodded and looked down at her daughter. “We shall join Neil and his friend for our cookie and milk. Okay Kate?”
The little girl nodded, watching Miguel.
Neil remembered her name – it was Kate.

Neil introduced everyone, referring to Miguel as a friend from Miami, and Kate as his friend from the neighborhood, and Karen as Kate’s mother. The little girl liked it, smiled, and shook hands with Miguel formally.
As Miguel engaged Kate, Neil and Karen caught up with each other. Karen was what Neil thought of as a bleeding heart liberal. She spent a lot of her spare time on efforts geared towards getting the liberal party back in power. She had invited Neil once to protest the Harper Government in Ottawa on some issue perceived to be not too parliamentary. Neil did not understand the issue too well, but had joined the protest on a Sunday just to see and get a flavor of things. It was a good experience.
She had asked to be Neil’s friend on Facebook, and often sent her invitations to various events related to social justice. She had borrowed a book from Neil almost a year ago, and had not yet returned it. It was ‘Shock doctrine’ by Naomi Kline.
“So, how far have you gone with Shock Doctrine?”
Karen shook her head and smiled energetically. “I have read about half of it Neil. Its so true about the way disaster is used by corporations and governments to make money.”
Neil nodded. “There were two Naomis he had read. One is American – Naomi Wolf. The other is Naomi Kline. Both wrote interesting books.”
Karen shook his head at Neil. “You are such a well read person. I am not a fast reader. You should tell me something about her books too.”
“Well”, Neil finished his sandwich. “I have read her ‘Give me Liberty’. It was a reminder that encroachment into personal freedom and liberty by a Government in the name of national security can be a dangerous path for the people. She draws a lot of examples from Germany of the 1930s, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, the German democratic Government was turning into a monster, and the public went along with it, in a fever of excess nationalism.”
Karen nodded. “People cannot take democracy for granted. I have always felt one has to fight to keep their Governments from moving to a war mongering military industrial complex.”

Miguel was listening to all this, without comment. But he was watching Kate use her colored pencil on the picture of a bird, painting her wings blue.

Neil watched Kate and Miguel. “Did you like the picture I sent of the owl” he asked Kate. Kate looked up and nodded vigorously.
Karen piped in. “She loved the picture of the owl. The other picture was also so good, of Kate and her mother. Did you not like that one too, Kate baby “?
Kate nodded again. “I have them on my wall.”
Karen clapped her hands to show her support. “Yes. We printed the pictures and put up on the wall in her bedroom. They are so good. Thank Neil, Kate, for the pictures.”
Kate smiled back at Neil. “Thank you”.

Volcanic hotspots, from Geology of British Columbia, by Greystone Books

They finished their mini breakfast. Someone commented that power was going to come back in another hour.
“I have another book in my sight, of Naomi Wolf. Its called End of America. It was a best seller and a kind of indictment of the Bush presidency, more or less in the same line as her first book, I think. Thats why I haven’t bought it yet.”
Karen shook her head. “You are amazing.”
Neil smiled and flipped open his iPad. He had carried it with him. He had hoped to show Miguel some of the maps that explained British Columbian geography and geology. Karen watched as he brought the device to life and opened a page on a book. It showed colored picture of the Canadian west coast with lots of black circles on them.
“What is that ?”


“Its a map showing the seismic hot spots. As you can see the hottest region is at the end of the continental plate to the immediate west of Vancouver island. And then there are more on the shore line and a few more just inside the shore line. The various plates and sub-plates are grinding, colliding, or pulling away from each other there.”
“Wow. Where did you find this ?”
“Well, its available as an eBook free of charge online. I bought it to learn about British Columbian geology. It is very good. For example, look at this map of the early Devonian period. Can you identify future Canada here?”
Karen peered at the map, as did Miguel. Even Kate looked in and pointed her finger at a patch of grey on the map.
“Uh huhh, thats Gondwana. Thats not what will turn into North America.” Neil smiled and watched Karen as she scrutinized the map.
“I dont know. I can see Siberia mentioned as a ball. I cannot recognize the other names.”
“Well, yes, Siberia is there. But the clue is not so much in the names as in the shape or the contours of the fragmenting landmass. If you look closely, you can identify north America, with the future Husdon bay somewhere.” Neil said, giving a clue. He smiled and watched as Karen went over the pieces on the map again.
He flipped the page. A new map came up, from late Devonian – Mississippian phase, 350 million years ago. Karen’s eyes lit up. She had seen a name attached to a lump of land separated from the fragmenting chunks of Gondwana. That lump was south of the Siberian landmass, separated by an Uralian sea. This lump of land had a new name – Euamerica. She pointed at it – “There it is.”
Neil smiled back and nodded. “If you have a kindle or an iPad, you might consider getting this book. Wont cost you nothing.”
Karen nodded, continuing to look at the maps, as she flipped more pages. “Its amazing. You are an amazing person, Neil. You know so much.”
Neil felt embarrassed. It was not about him. It was about the geology of British Columbia that was so interesting, and same time so alarming with regard to chances of earth quakes and tsunami.
Karen stopped at a page showing the map of Pangaea. One could clearly make out Africa and South America fitting each other like a jig saw puzzle, and north America hovering nearby. She could even make out the Hudson bay, along with Green land floating above and some of the Canadian arctic islands. She felt like a school girl and clapped her hands.
Neil flipped the pages, and stage by stage, maps showed how the planet began to gradually looked identifiable with todays landmasses. Karen could see the breach between Africa and South America widen up, along with the gap between North America and Europe, thus widening the newborn Atlantic ocean, a that essentially continues till date.
Neil pointed out a small piece drifting in the ocean to the west of Africa. “Thats India. It travels on its own for a long while, moving north by north east for tens of millions of years, till it collides with Eurasia some forty million years ago.
“Wow” came the response.
Neil grinned and leaned back in his chair. Miguel too appeared interested. He had a way of widening his eyes in wonder.
“Let me ask you a trick question. This is a hint already – its a trick question. Which kind of dinosaurs drank water from the Ganges in India?”
Karen smiled and frowned in mock concentration. “Trick question ? There were no dinosaurs in India at all ?”
Neil shook his head. “Close, but not close enough. There surely were dinosaurs when India split from Africa. So, some of those dinosaurs separated from their African brothers, and evolved independently on India. Fossil evidence of that has been found.”
“Then whats the answer, and where is the trick?”
“The trick is not in the dinosaurs, but in the birth of river Ganges.”
“How ?”
“Well, India the island subcontinent had its own river system, but Ganges was not one of them. Ganges and a few other rivers of India was born as a result of the rising Himalayan mountain range. Himalaya rose only as a result of India’s collision with Eurasia. That collision happened 40 million years ago. But the dinosaurs all across the planet, including in India, went extinct at around 65 million years ago, a good 25 million years before India collided and more million of years before Ganges was born and became a big river. So, the dinosaurs were long extinct before Ganges had water for anybody to drink from.”
Karen clapped her hands. “Thats so cute. I must remember that trick question. Do you have any such for Canada?”
Neil’s face widened up in a broad smile. “Canada is full of geological tricks. Some day I might tell you about them. Do you know anything about Burgess Shale ?”
“Umm not much” Karen said.
“Then there is the issue of the moving hot spot that is currently under Yellowstone. And why Canada has so many fresh water lakes. Some day, we can talk about them.”
Kate listened to it and finally make a comment. “I have seen Pitt Lake”.
“There you go Kate. Some day, you can ask mom to show you Slave Lake and Mackenzie river. A bit cold at this time. But if you make it by April, you can also see the northern lights in Yellowknife”
Kate clapped her hands although she perhaps did not understand all of that.
“I have seen Northern lights, in in Kelowna, but that was sometime ago.”
Neil looked at his watch. “Well, the Easter holidays are coming. I was contemplating going somewhere. One idea is Winnipeg and on to Churchill, but I think that takes longer time. The other is only Winnipeg. The third is Yellowknife, for a second time. The fourth is White Horse, also a second time. Cannot figure out where, yet. Visiting WInnipeg or Whitehorse might be the cheapest, far as airfare goes. Whitehorse is unique in its own way. Winnipeg and Manitoba is a province I have never been to, so I guess I owe it to myself to go there, even if just for three days.”
“Wow. Are you going alone?”
“Well, yes. I often end up doing that. Involving friends can be tricky. Not everyone wishes to hang around in remote locations just to watch the sky or the river, rodents building a dam or a bird catching another bird”, Neil smiled.
Karen nodded. “I’d have loved to go with you some time. But with Kate, I cannot plan these things on the spur of the moment.”

“Of course. But you might consider widening her horizon. Not that you need to come with me, per se. Just visiting places and telling her about them is a good way to help a kid in her growing years, I’d guess. Thats education of a kind that one cannot duplicate in a class room. I am not particularly impressed by the school system in North America as such, you know. This is not to say that I am impressed by the school system anywhere. But I do not know much about it except that I have seen in India, Hong Kong, Singapore, USA and Canada, with a bit of indirect exposure to the system used in the old Soviet Union and in Great Britain.”
“Ohh wow. Neil, you know way too much already”. Karen widened her arms to emphasize how much she thought Neil knew. “What is wrong with the school education system, you think?”
Neil considered the question.
“I am not too articulate when it comes to this subject. I just feel that the curriculum based education system of today, like much else about our civilization, is heading down the wrong path. It is blinding the people from some aspects of knowledge and it is inundating the pupils on specifics that might prove counter productive down the line. Also, the schools are turning out to be mostly a bad influence in a child’s cognitive development and ability to think outside the box. Education, like most other things, is a business venture today, to make money. It tries to create mass produced zombies.”
Neil stopped. Perhaps she spoke a bit much. It can be annoying, or depressing, to someone like Karen, with a young child about to enter school age.
Karen nodded somberly. She too looked at her watch. It was getting time to leave. “You are right, Neil. It is so hard to get the right exposure for a child these days. And for a single mother like me, it is more difficult. We are always fighting for time. I know the best thing for her is to have more time with me and with close relatives. As it is, she does not have the company of her father.”
Neil did not comment. As such, he had no idea who the father of the kid was, and if Karen was married to the guy, or if she was till married or what.
Life, for single mothers in Canada, was a lot tougher than his own, Neil concluded. But then, just being a mother of a young child should be so much rewarding at a different plane. Neil could easily appreciate that fact.

Life was complex. That was for sure!

Miguel, the Everglades, and Lovelock’s warning

“Everglades is one place I shall not forget. Miguel meanwhile might be my last human link with the place” Neil said.
They were walking out of the car park towards the arrival gate in Vancouver international airport, to receive Miguel. Neil explained how unique the everglades were in Florida, as a river that lost its way and meandered through a vast swamp of sawgrass. The water slowed down so much that it would travel a few miles every month, till it eventually reached the ocean. That vast swampland created an unique eco-system not to be duplicated anywhere.


“I have never been to Florida. I hear much about it though, as a vacation spots, and some friends who have been there in the winter.” Mabel commented ruefully.
“I know. Florida is a popular destination for folks living in the colder parts of USA and Canada and even Europe. It is also a hub for the cruise ship industry. I am not particularly fond of the tourist industry though. To me Florida is unique for the eco-system.”
Mabel snaked her arm around his waste. She was as tall as Neil and liked holding him while they walked. She apparently liked being seen in public with him. Neil was not too fond of public display of personal affection. He did not relish the thought of kissing, or being kissed, by anybody in a public place. He was more orthodox than Mabel, he guessed.
“What makes Florida special in your eyes ?” Mabel asked.
They crossed the street and walked into the airport building. A giant electronic screen flashed information on which aircraft had landed and which had not – in english and french. Neil glanced at it. It would be another five minutes before Miguel would land. It might take another half hour, depending on traffic lines at the customs, for him to collect his bags and walk out.
“Lets take a coffee while we wait”
They sat at the coffee shop adjacent to the passenger arrival gate, with two paper cups of coffee.
“It was corals that started it” he said, stretching his legs.
“Corals ? What ?”
“Corals that were the works of dying micro-organisms that deposited their skeleton on top of each other in the warm oceans of the US gulf. This process built slabs of coral from the shallow  seabed up to the surface, and then spread sideways like a table top of white porous slab of soft rock composed mostly of calcium and dirt, going miles and miles in all directions. That was the platform over which the mangrove trees with their unique root system created massive filters in the  shallow ocean. Passage of the moon around the planet and the resulting tides and ocean currents brought floating debris that would be caught by the sieve of the mangrove roots. Slowly, a thin layer of soil would form. As hundreds of thousands of years pass, the process allows local trees to find ways to encroach into this oceanside swampland, and miniature versions of the tree that could withstand brackish water begin to form a kind of watery forest.”
Neil took a sip of coffee. Mabel was listening. She nodded but did not interrupt.
“Fish, birds and animals adopt this specialized land. High rainfall and depressions in this newly created land makes for gigantic fresh water lakes. Resulting rivers that would drain the land and lead the run off to the sea gets trapped by high growth sawgrass. Over time  the dense sawgrass slows the flow of fresh water and turned it all into a gigantic fresh water marsh that grew like a long slice of land that connected up with the continental north America, and was once claimed by Spain and is today known as Florida, one of the states of USA.”
Neil said that in one breath, and with a touch of drama. This brought the customary smile in Mabel. She liked Neil explaining things, and was same time amused as the way he explained, almost like a school teacher. She should have known that Florida or many of the southern states were claimed by Spain, or France of Mexico, at some point or another. She did not know how Florida came to be a landmass though.
“Let’s go there sometime together. Forget the cruise ships, and lets spend time at the Everglades.” Mabel suggested. She had a way of tugging his shirt sleeve to emphasize her point.
Neil had not known much about Florida’s geologic or geographic history, when he first landed there as an immigrant. He considered himself to be a reasonably well read person with a reasonable curiosity about the planet. But he had no idea how curiously unique the state of Florida was, and how much of that uniqueness was already gone, thanks to modern human civilization. He had fallen in love with the Florida Everglades the first time he visited the place, within a week of his arrival at Miami. He remembered sitting amazed at a quiet spot by the water, watching the fallen logs and the shadow cast by the overhanging low branches, and fish occasionally leaping out of the water surface. The splash of its fall back would break the tranquility, alerting him that this was a living eco-system. He saw alligators catching fish and get their heads off the water, to eat the fish with relish. He could hear the crunch of their teeth crushing the bones of the fish.
He saw darters sunning themselves on low branches by the water and herons standing still like a statue. He saw nesting Ospreys. This was a world he would return to, again and again, during his seven year long stay in Florida.
He would see the great blue heron even here British Columbia, as well as white crowned night herons. He would see sandhill cranes. He would see plenty of Ospreys and a hundred times as many bald eagles as he saw in Florida.
But there were no alligators here in BC. Neither any ibis or darter. He did not see blue jays in Vancouver, although there were Steller’s jays, equally colorful. He even saw many hummingbirds, something he had a hard time spotting in Florida. He remembered the beautiful scissor-tailed flycatchers that he found even in Dade county within site of the urban developments.
Mabel tugged her hand. “You are lost in thought.” she said.
“Yes. Was thinking about scissor-tailed Flycatchers of Flroida.”
Mabel did not know what a Flycatcher was, but could guess it was  a bird and that it had a tail like scissors. In time, he would tell her about them, she was sure.
He looked at his Timex watch. It was sort of old fashioned and an inexpensive model. It had a conventional dial but with numbers for the hours, instead of the original style of writing them in Roman letters. The main reason he liked this watch, was that it showed day of week and date of month side by side. Most other watches, he had been presented with, some of them quite expensive, showed either only the date, or nothing more than the time. He liked to see the day of week. It had gotten to be a sort of habit for him. So, he preferred the inexpensive but functional watch more than the more fancy ones in his drawer. In fact, his other watches were all dysfunctional since he never even changed their battery, in the last two decades. Perhaps he should try selling them off in eBay or Craigslist.
It may be another fifteen minutes before Miguel emerged. They had a good view of the area and could see the trickle of travelers coming out, either meeting with loved ones or heading out for a taxi.
“I want to see them too, some day, and you are going to show me. Yes ?” Mabel responded, finishing her coffee.
“What?”
“Florida, and the Flycatchers”
“Ohh, OK. We can take a vacation sometime, say for two weeks. Its a long drive from here, so it’d be better to fly there and rent a car. The place is full of history – geologic, geographic, as well as in paleoanthropology, not to mention of recent human interactions of the post-Columbian era.”
Mabel looked at him with mock wide eyes and grinned. She had a wide mouth which opened up when she grinned.
“Yes, sir, professor Dusty.”
Neil laughed. “Did you know some of the terror birds of South America had actually crossed the land bridge and ended up in the southerns states including in Florida ? That was before the better evolved mammalian feline predators could push them back and enter the south American continent. South America did not have a killer cat till rather recent times, you know.”
“I did not know. Whats a terror bird?”
They got up, put the used cups into the trash and sauntered down to the arrival area. Soon, Miguel should arrive through the gate. He did have a cell phone but was not going to use it here because of roaming charges. So he would not be to announce his arrival to Neil. He had said so before leaving. Besides, he was a simple man and did not know how to send text messages through phones. He was also a poor man, relatively speaking. Apparently, his mobile phone was a gift from his grown up daughter, who wished to be able to check up on her dad time to time. The charges for the phone was being paid by his daughter.
How Neil came to know Miguel and befriend him, was itself a strange story. But, come to think of it, perhaps it was not that strange. Florida had been a melting pot of different kinds of people coming across each other for a long time. Everybody was a sort of visitor to the place. No one really was a native there. Neil came through legal and high end channels of immigration. Miguel came differently. Neil moved on. Miguel did not, or could not. Somehow, fate made them unlikely friends. And the friendship endured, even through the decade since Neil left Florida, never to return there again.
“A terror bird was a giant flightless bird in similar lines to the Rhea of south America, Ostrich of Africa or a Cassowary of Australia of today, or the now extinct Moa of New Zealand. The only difference is, that giant bird was a fast running ground hunter that liked chasing down early pigs and horses and swallow them limb by limb. It had a massive head and even more massive beak designed to tear limbs from animals. A terrifying creature. It became extinct as the ancestors of leopards and others of the killer cat family evolved and crossed the land bridge, and entered south America. It could not survive the feline competition.”

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I wrote this much, and stopped. It was Friday late evening. I had been checking on a few old VHS tapes that was converted to digital. Average rate of success was around 80%. This meant, out of every five tapes of home video I had shot twenty years ago, four were salvageable and one would be deteriorated beyond recovery. I had been peering at the latest batch, scene upon scene.
I remembered the large eared male African elephant standing tall in Ngorongoro crater, in Tanzania, back in January of 1991. I had not seen that scene on screen for so long. And now, it was there before me. I remember the night spent at Tree Tops, the famous spot in Kenya were you can see wild animals up close from the wooden house on top of a tree, while elephants, buffalo and even rhinoceros came to drink at the waterhole.
Tomorrow I had planned to go outdoors to photograph nature and wildlife as one can find in these parts of southern British Columbia. I had a new gimbal head for the long lenses for my camera. It was made by Manfrotto of Italy. It should help keep the heavy lens and camera assembly centered on my tripod as I swung the camera rapidly to follow a moving object, such as a bird in flight.
I wished to write about Miguel. But then, I wished to write about so many other things too. Miguel was an immigrant from Ecuador that worked as a caretaker in the office building where I worked in Miami so many years ago. He had been in Miami for almost twenty years when I first arrived. And yet, his world was small and he almost never went outside of town. He did not know about the existence of The Everglades. I found it hard to believe.
Okay, I too did not know much about it myself before I arrived. But my curiosity made me aware of the place within a few days. I realized that I enjoyed some privileges Miguel did not have. I had computer, and access to internet although internet itself was just a handful of years old in the public space. I had money in my pocket and interest enough to walk into book stores to look up travel books on Florida. I had a car and a driving license. I could go where I wanted. Miguel did not have any of that. Also, he was not very literate in English, although he could speak a little.
Finally, he did not have friends or associates that were excited about the Everglades, till he met me. So he did not learn about it from his usual friends. In that, we had a common theme. I too did not have a friend that was interested about the Everglades. I had lots of friends through my work, and I met more folks through them. My circle of friends and associates were wide and very different from that of Miguel. And yet, we both shared one theme – we did not learn about the Everglades from our friends.
But I had virtual friends already through internet bulletin boards. I was advised to check a few things as I went to Florida. The Everglades was one of them. I was privileged to have these sources available where Miguel was not.
And about British Columbia, are things much different?
Well, I know folks that have been here for thirty years and did not know about Reifel migratory bird sanctuary, or what makes British Columbia geographically unique. They did not know of the contribution of glaciation in carving the landscape of British Columbia, nor the phenomenal work that simple animals like beavers did to transform this landscape. They did not know how the salmon evolved itself to take advantage of a new niche as the glaciers retreated over newly exposed land. Nor did they know about the evolution of polar bears to take advantage of winter sea ice to hunt a protein rich diet – the thick blubber of fat on marine mammals out in the open arctic ocean. Many had never been into the arctic circle in Canada or knew about the issues of the warming oceans there. Most of my compatriots did not know about the snow geese arriving here from Siberia at the onset of each winter.
In some ways, Miguel in Miami and myself in Vancouver lived in compatible parallel worlds. We were surrounded by global villagers and residents of nowhere. It did not matter which continent or geographic region you lived in. There was a Pizza hut round the corner, a department store that sold the latest fashion imitation, a pub, a night club and MTV channel. What did it matter where you lived. It was all standardized by the globalized economy, did it not?

James Lovelock's portrait

But there are also other issues on my mind.
Take James Lovelock, the scientist that once worked in California’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Still alive at 90, he was one of the last free spirits of science, one that pursued the subject without being a representative or any institution, unlike the hordes of quasi-scientists of today that only work to bias public view towards whatever or whoever was paying them. The world today had a decreasing number of real politicians, real social reformers, real anthropologists, free thinkers or real scientists. Every one worked to promote either a their employers or their doctrine. Few were willing to think through issues from outside their proverbial box.
The issue of increasing population was one pet peeve. More I asked famous people, more I got disenchanted with their vague and evasive response.
Well, at least James Lovelock looked at issues straight on and without a tinted glass, except a few isolated issues of his nationality. He is a British. In his latest book he takes example of Winston Churchill as a great person worth quoting. I, on the other hand was born in India. I read through his by now well documented dislike of the Indian people. I knew of his derogatory comments regarding India and Indian people, as well as his actions and inactions during the Bengal famine that happened in his watch, killing about four million people. I knew how much of Indian national output and wealth Britain was sucking out of India right through the war years while it watched millions of Indians die out of a man made famine. All this was reasonably well documented today. To me, most all politicians are double faced, and Churchill is merely a great example of his class. But I forgive James Lovelock to be biased towards CHurchill. I guess I am biased a bit towards Gandhi and Tagore. Perhaps more than a bit.
Anyhow, I had read James Lovelock a few times and thought a lot about the Gaia hypotheses. I was aware of the fact that his notions were partially supported by different groups, while some of his notions were vehemently opposed by others. I found the notion very very intriguing and quite believable in a thoughtful way.
I had also read Gwynne Dyer a few times. It was interesting to note that Dyer mentioned Lovelock in one of his later books named “Climate Wars”. I found an electronic version of the book and bought it. I have gotten a bit wary of buying printed books which fill up my shelf and become a burden after I have read it once. Nobody else has an interest to read them anyway. Its such a waste of paper and resources. An audio book is my first preference. If that is not available, then an eBook that I can read through a reader such as iPad is the second choice. And so, I was reading “Climate Wars” by Dyer on my iPad. I was tickled to note Dyer mention James Lovelock and his books on the Gaia theory. I myself had read The Revenge of Gaia by Lovelock. Besides, his most recent book, as a final warning to mankind, had come out. It was called The Vanishing Face of Gaia – A final warning. I had that book too, in audio format. I was simultaneously reading both, sort of. I read Dyer at lunch time and time to time at home. I listened to Lovelock while driving to work or returning from work. It was normal for me to pursue two or three different books side by side in parallel rather than in series, through the course of a few weeks.
Thoughts covered in those books engaged me. In fact I bought those books because I share a common interest in those themes. So it was nice to find noted journalists such as Dyer mention James Lovelock and the notion of the earth acting as an organism. I too considered the planet in those terms, like a colony of mutually reactive organisms – like a Portuguese man-of-war, the famous poisonous colony of self cohabiting organisms that unsuspecting humans are known to mistake as a benign jelly fish. It is neither jelly, nor fish, nor jelly fish. It is not even an “it”. It is a colony of many creatures, and deadly for any human wanting to play with it.
Anyhow, I had a wish to write about this thing too. No, not about jelly fish or a Portuguese man-of-war, but about Gaia and how humans are spoiling the planet at a breakneck speed. Lovelock had written his previous book, Revenge of Gaiga, where  Gaiga, the living planet, takes revenge against humans for spoiling the planet. It makes human life miserable, and forces humans to die in large numbers or change their living habits totally. One way or another, Gaia was not the passive environment merely responding to changes imposed on it. Gaia was able to trigger unexpected reversals of climate and accelerate the process of change that fell outside of all the human engineered climate models on computers. Gaia was going to kick humans in the rear.
And then he wrote the next one, the most recent, which I was now reading. It was not inconsequential that a slowly growing number of scientists were beginning to look at Lovelock more seriously.
I was taken by his clear sightedness when he compared climate change through carbon emission, and the issue of generating power through alternative means. He cuts through a lot of bull – especially about the so called renewable energy debate, of bio-fuel coming from food crops, and wind farms. His views on nuclear energy is fundamentally different from proponents of green peace and sustainable living.
These issues deserved great deal of thinking and debate. The problem is, there were not many that I knew, who were even remotely concerned about the future which went past their individual lives.
Also, very few experts wished to look towards a solution to the climate crisis that did not provide a financial benefit to the promoter of the solution. Everything had to be profit oriented. Save the world and become a millionaire. Thats the only motto that the Governments, corporations, economists and the media understand.
I might write about my general frustration at people around me for being nonplussed, and for providing a lip service to various causes, and for being so disappointingly trivial and uncaring.
My dilemma was, like in this blog, to decide if I should write all this as a personal journal or as part of a series of short stories, or as a novel, or what.
But, having a bit of a stubborn streak in me, I am also tempted to write in ways that breaks conventional wisdom and challenge the reason why one should write anything.
Could it be a rant ?
Anyhow, I decided to keep the title of this blog unchanged – Miguel, the Everglades, and Lovelock’s warning.
The title had no place for Mabel.
But then, it had no place for me either.

Where pronghorns meet trilobites

I looked at list of items before me. There were the pronghorns, feisty little pseudo-antelopes from Montana.
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“Pronghorns are interesting animals. I heard they do not like jumping fences”, Neil observed. “Instead, they prefer to crouch and go under the lowest opening, the lowest line of a wire fence.”
“Really?”
“Well, I did not see them crossing a fence myself. But I heard from our tour guide in Yellowstone.”
They were glancing through pictures on his iPad, clicked just a few months ago, at the turn of the year, mostly in Montana and British Columbia. A group of pronghorns were browsing the brownish grass on a field lightly covered in snow by the side of the highway. Neil was driving east towards Yellowstone and stopped by the roadside, clicking off a few shots through his window. He usually kept one digital camera with a long lens on the passenger seat beside him, and another smaller pocket type camera in hanging off his neck.
——————————————
The story was moving in fits. I wondered if it was right to engage Neil speaking with Mabel about pronghorns. He had barely managed one scene with a second woman, a single mother named Karen. Her child still did not have a name, partly because I could not think of one. Without developing that side of the story and giving it some shape and texture, I had instead brought Mabel back, and tossed a group of pronghorns on her lap – pronghorns that did not like jumping fences.
They were not true antelopes, these pronghorns. Antelopes were essentially grazing mammals from the old world. In the new world, pronghorns were artiodactyls that look similar to antelopes due to convergent evolution. Now, if he was to explain convergence in evolution to Mabel, through Neil, or let both of them search it out, there was going to be several pages written about that animal. Besides, the term ‘old world’ and ‘new world’ was wrong. The north and south American continents were discovered by modern Anglo Saxon men only five hundred years ago, while indigenous Asians had already walked into them some twelve thousand years back. The continents themselves have been around, in different forms and arrangements, as long as other continents. Calling the American continents as ‘new world’ based on todays knowledge, felt a bit stupid.
I decided to be careful in future, in using the established but wrong terminology of old and new world. Perhaps we owed it to ourselves to use better representative adjectives for such issues. But, the question was the direction of the story.
As it is, pronghorns were the sole surviving species of a larger family of Ruminant Artiodactyls that were present when man first stepped onto the savannah. I had no doubt that arrival of man, the ultimate hunter, was at least partially responsible for the extinction of all those species, except for the pronghorns. That goes to show that early man was as destructive as modern man, in annihilating and eating through entire genera of the animal kingdom if he cold. The only difference is, being hunter gatherers, their numbers were small, and they did not possess the technology to speed up their activity. Modern man does everything super fast – including denegration of this planet’s ecosystem and causing mass extinction of species.
But, again, the story was supposed to focus on a few people and not on the whole biosphere and the future of mankind ! I wondered if discussions of this kind should deserve a number of pages in a story that was essentially about Neil and his search for a root in Canada.
There were three women and one man in the story already – a story that was still searching for a theme.  Two of the women lived in the present, both in Canada. That was because the main character in the story, Neil, was sort of an alter ego of myself, who, like myself, also lived in Canada, but was of Indian descent. Indian descent might mean different things to different people. Hereabouts, Indians can mean people from West Indies. Down south in the US, Indian can mean American Indian tribes. Anyhow, if was after I arrived in Canada, that I learned a new name for my kind – east Indian. This distinguishes me from a west Indian. The original inhabitants of the land here are not called Indians or American Indians, but first nation.
I felt a bit odd about being called East Indian. After all, the term Indian, when applied to either American tribals or people from West Indies, was due to a gargantuan mistake in geography by Christopher Columbus. India, or the land I was born in, was the one and only India, and all others were mistakenly linked to it. Therefore, I should be an Indian – end of story. All others may be called new Indian, green Indian or, preferably by their own names, such as Apache or Blackfoot or Maya etc. Being called an East Indian was, I found, odd, and again, perpetuating that greatest mistake of geography by Columbus.
Anyhow, back to the story.
I glanced at my notebook. I had jotted a few places and things on it, as potential sub-topics for the story. Next to the pronghorns, I had written two words – Burgess Shale. And next to it I had also jotted a few words that related to the human genome, and that of the living creatures of this planet. There were RNA, DNA, gene, chromosome etc there. I had also jotted items such as evolution, and geology. There was a bewildering mix of topics, none of which seemed directly linked to Neil’s effort to blend in his adopted country – Canada.
I went to the bathroom and prepared to take a shower, still thinking about it all. Perhaps I should leave the genetics but touch upon Burgess Shale.
A pronghorn and Burgess shale had little to do with each other, except for a proximity in the map of north America. I saw most of the pronghorns in northern Montana, not far from the Canadian border. And Burgess Shale was only a bit to the north across the border in British Columbia.
Apart from that, there was no similarity. Burgess shale was famous not because of animals that roam there right now, but because animals that lived over five hundred million years ago in a shallow tropical ocean. These sea animals were the products of the Cambrian explosion – the first of the Cambrian multi cellular large creatures of the sea that were to give rise of all living animals of the world today, including the first of the known chordata, or animals with a central backbone. There were foot long trilobites and other creatures with an exoskeleton, as well as worm like creatures that showed signs of rudimentary central column, or a spine.
The planet at the time did not have animals, or plants of insects on the land or in the air. Life only existed in the sea, and there was an explosion of new species coming up at an incredibly fast rate. That was why scientists call it the Cambrian explosion.
These marine creatures sometimes got buried by mud due to the special underwater cliff like arrangement of the continental shelf of the time. These soft bodied creatures buried in fine silt and mud eventually got fossilized. The continent was at the time right angle and horizontal over the equator. But over time turned itself ninety degree around and travelled north to its current location. Different blocks of it got clubbed together or torn apart. What is southern British Columbia today, was that shallow ocean with buried earliest of creatures. Tectonic forces engaged in mountain building, and the fossilized creatures ended up high on the mountains of the Rockies, in British Columbia in Burgess Shale. Today, it is recognized as one of the best locations for fossils of the earliest of the animal kingdom.
It was about ten hours drive from my home.
But, should there be pronghorns and fossils of Burgess Shale in the conversation with Mabel? What would be relevant for the story?
I sighed as I dried myself off in the shower stand. I did not know what should be relevant for a reader. I knew I liked all those multi directional threads, and snippets, from the past and the present, that, together made up what this planet and this land is all about. It is natural for me to watch life at the surface and let my thoughts drift below that surface to pry out what took place in the past and what might happen in the future. The present was just a point in the space-time coordinate, and my banging the keyboard was a collection of events that played only a marginal role in the game of dice that propelled existence as we know it – towards its unknown destiny.

I had seen the pronghorns, but had not been to Yoho National park yet, though I drove past it a few times. Ir was in that park that Burgess Shale was located. There was also the Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation nearby, in the town of Field, BC.’ It would be a whole days drive through serpentine mountain roads. I had done it before. The journey would be as pleasing as the destination might be thrilling. Add a 22 Km round trip through mountain slopes and a climb of perhaps over two thousand feet, to reach some of the fossil beds there. The place was out of bounds except by guided tours of less than a dozen individual at a time. I was not sure I could do the 22 Km hilly trek a day and still have time to check the fossil beds. One would need to start at around 7 in the morning and be back before dark.
Pronghorns were easier.
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Pronghorns in Montana – 30th Dec 2011

“They look so cute. I have never seen these deers.”
“Well, I am not sure these should be called deers, Mabel. Of course, there are lots of deers in America and Canada. But these are not among them. Some call them antelopes, because they have sort of permanent horns, like old world antelopes. But this animal is not a true antelope, and the horns themselves are different – actually they are projected bones from their skull. The animal just looks like the antelopes of the old world – I mean from Eurasia and Africa. It is a Ruminant Artiodactyl, and the last surviving species in its family.”
“Wow. Whats a Ruminant whatever ?”
“Artiodactyl. That means a hoofed animal that has even number of hooves on its feet. It has to be either two or four. It is classed differently than hoofed animals that have odd number of hoofs. The difference is in the way weight is distributed through their legs. An even hoofed animal has multiple hooves that sort of shares the load and the centre of gravity runs through the middle of its feet with the hooves arranged on each side of it. But for an animal with odd number of hoofs, the centre of gravity runs through the central hoof”.
Mabel watched him. “And give me an example of each type, Mr. Neil Dusty, if you will”, she said with mock seriousness. She was both fascinated by the topic and equally fascinated by the way he described these issues.
“Well, pretty much most of the hoofed animals you know are even-toed angulates, or  artiodactyla. This includes all domesticated hoofed mammals. A cow, a buffalo, a lamb, a goat, a pig, as well as deers and antelopes are all examples of it”, Neil said. He picked up a cream cracker from the plastic box before them. They were sitting on a woven mat on a field near the river mouth. It was a sunny clear skied afternoon. A gentle breeze was blowing. It was still cold in March, and both of them kept their Parka on. Neil had taken his shoe off and stretched his feet forward, leaning back on his arms.
“Hmm, ok. And how about the other kind?’
“Odd toed ungulates are called Perissodactyla. There are a few rather famous animals in it – a horse, a donkey, a rhinoceros.”
“Ohh cool. A rhino! They all have a single hoof?”
“Nope. A horse and a donkey does. But a rhino has three hoofs. So, a Rhino is a closer relative of a horse than a moose or a cow.”
—————————————–
I stepped off the shower and watched myself on the mirror and tried to see a similarity between myself, a pronghorn a trilobite, a rhinoceros and a scavenging anthropoid from Burgess Shale.
Similarity of not, I got them into the story already, not to mention an ice age nomadic woman from central Asia for good measure. Neil an Mabel were just talking about animals and soon might also talk about mitochondria and ice age women. What they did not seem to do, was the most normal things that two humans might do when in a sort of relationship – talk about each other. More than talk, they needed to relate to each other, act on and about each other and try to overlap each others sphere a bit. That was what relationship was all about, was it not?
I looked at myself in the mirror, and focussed on the nails on my fingers. Come to think of it, a hoof was only a modified nail. And a nail was only a modified scale from our reptilian common ancestry, I thought. This was just a guess from me. I had not read it anywhere, but it seemed logical to me. The scales came from fishes, onto the first of the animals that got on land and needed a water tight body, unlike the amphibians. This allowed them to venture far from water. But, development of water tight skin made scales somewhat unnecessary. Hair was evolved down the line, I suppose, as a result of finding natural insulation for the body, in cases where body fat for the same purpose was not desirable.

I had a bathrobe that came in handy. Stepping into my shorts and the bathrobe, I shuffled bare feet to the kitchen downstairs to make a coffee.
I might think about it some more. There was a four day vacation coming – Good Friday and Easter Monday. That was in April. I wondered if that might be a good time to drive to Yoho National Park and take a look at the fossils of the time.
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Mabel liked flipping through the pictures by brushing her fingers across the face of the iPad screen. She liked how the images moved sideways. But more importantly, he took wonderful pictures. There was a landscape in stark black and white world with rising steam and hot water across a snow covered landscape – of Yellowstone national park in winter. Neil had not told Mabel about going there, alone. Had be offered, she would have gone with him. It would have been so romantic.
She turned and watched him a moment, as Neil spoke about how close to the surface the hot mantle of the planet was at Yellowstone and how thin the crust was.
She took his face in her hands and kissed his mouth.
“I love you.”
That shut him up.

Of time, space and a barred owl

Neil stepped by the unpaved road and tried to focus his lens on a purple martin. He liked how the sun brightened its glossy dark purple plumage against the faded blue of the sky. The bird was sitting at a high branch of a shrub. He was half an hour into the Bog, walking, taking pictures, and listening to an audio book through his iPod. This was the first time he got a clear shot at a purple martin inside the bog at reasonably close range. This bird seemed to be resting, so Neil took time to take a number of shots, using his newfound zoon lens attached to his camera. He had taken the trouble of carrying his tripod. This made his gear more cumbersome, but ensured that a higher percentage of his pictures will be sharp.

He was alone. Mabel, his almost constant companion for the past few weeks, had left for the weekend, to spend with her folks up north.

Things were happening in Neil’s personal life at an accelerated pace. For many years, he had been a lone ranger. He had been living an isolated life, segregated from the community around him. His involvement was with the land, and its flora and fauna. But when it came to humans, Neil was more at ease by himself. At work, he was friendly and popular. But he separated his work from his personal life.

And now, his personal life was undergoing change. And Mabel had been the primary cause.

Neil balanced his tripod mounted camera on is shoulder and moved on. He had never ween a green heron in these parts. When he moved to British Columbia from Florida, he did not know much about bogs. But he learned how unique bogs were, and how unique Burns Bog was even among bogs. He had learned that the bog had been drained by main, and its vegetation and character had changed since then.

Stepping off the gravel road, he knelt at a shiny leaf on the ground – pond lilly growing among moss. He took his second camera, mounted with a 100mm macro lens, and focussed on the round leaf of the lilly, and the radially spreading veins. Sun reflected off its shiny surface. It was lovely.

Neil did not have any specific plans on what to do with the pictures he took. He was an amateur admirer of nature and wild life, and liked taking pictures. But he did not publish them anywhere and was not planning to.

His thoughts drifted to Mabel and at what phase their relationship was. Was it an affair ?

Neither of them had called it an affair as such. They had not engaged in any serious talk about going steady or moving in together. But, they had slept together on two weekends in the past month. The first time, it had been somewhat spontaneous. But ha planned it the next time. They went for a movie, a dinner, and then she spent the night at his place.

He was still a bit bothered about the fact that she was fourteen years his junior. Also, he was technically a Hindu, although he did not believe in it much. She was a Christian, a protestant, and from the Anglican Church of Canada. He had little idea what that meant. But she too was not serious about religion. They did not talk much about differences in their faith. But Neil had told her about his doubts about all organized religions. He considered them as a kind of a business  and and gave a lot of power to a few men, but otherwise had little to do with either God or spirituality. She knew his views from casual comments he made in the past on the topic, in bits and pieces. But he was a tolerant person and got along well with religious folks. He did not try to impose his views on others, and did not judge folks that felt otherwise.

Thus, just as Neil was trying to adjust to this new situation in his life with regard to Mabel, and wondering if things were not moving a bit fast – they had sort of decided to give each other some space.

Mabel had perhaps sensed that their differences were still bothering Neil a bit. She suggested giving each other space, and not allowing the relationship to become stifling to either. Neil, at thirty four, was pretty well set by now in leading a solitary life in his personal space.

So, Mabel had planned to be away in the next two weekends. She also mentioned she might go out with other friends for movies and parties time to time, where he might not like to come. Same time, she hinted that he might like to mix with other womenfolk. This might give him time to settle his thoughts and sort his feelings out.

Neil got the impression that Mabel was doing it for him. She was happy as it is, having an affair with him and settling down to a steady relationship. At least that is what she seemed to imply. She still needed her own life and her own circle of friends. However, she understood that this was sudden for Neil and he was still not sure about hitching up with a woman so much younger.

Mabel was even willing to introduce him in the single’s circuit, whatever that meant. Mabel laughed about it, and said there were a whole list of females she knew that’d love to settle down with a nice boy with a good job and a serious attitude to life. But good guys were hard to find. She told him that he had charm he did not even know about, even if he did not understand hockey and could not ski, and did not get roaring drunk in new year.

Neil smiled, thinking about it, and then stopped. He was a barred owl on a pine tree at the road side ahead of him. The owl was watching him. He sensed that if he took a few more steps forward, it would fly away. He stood still for a moment, then slowly eased his tripod off his shoulder and on the ground. He switched the camera on and removed the lens cap, turning it to point at the bird. Looking through the view finder, he squeezed off a shot at the bird. The bird continued to watch him. It was large, and clear bars on its chest and belly. He knew barred owls were not common in British Columbia a generation ago, and had move up from the US only in the last few decades. He did not know if that was due to climate change or global warming.

He changed to setting of the camera to continuous rapid shots, rechecked the bird, and pressed the shutter button, taking a series of five or six rapid shots.

A barred owl watches him from a low branch

The bird leaned forward and tensed itself. Neil sensed it was going to fly away. He pressed the shutter just as the bird launched itself into the air and flew silently, taking a turn around the trunk of the tree and seeking a higher branch of a tree not too far away. It settled itself, facing away from him, and stopped paying him any attention.

Well, the lighting was okay. Neil thought he had perhaps a couple of good shots of the bird. He was happy not to have stressed the bird unduly. It was too low on a branch for a passing human. But now, a bit higher up, it did not need to feel as if the man was violating its personal space.

We all need our personal space – Neil thought. But same time, he was sort of missing Mabel already. It would have been so much nicer if she was with him today. She had a charming way about her.

Time and space. Neil remembered the science books he read in his school days – ‘Of time, space, and other things’ by Isaac Asimov, and 1-2-3 infinity, by George Gamow. Those were likely the first set of books that, other than Einstein’s relativity, helped him understand how the universe worked.

And here he was, almost twenty years down the line – protecting time and space around himself, and providing same around Mabel, but on a different context.

He walked past the tree with the owl on it. It watched him, but did not budge. He had seen this owl on different locations around Vancouver. Often, crows would gang up on it and attempt to drive it away. He had even seen a crow execute mock attacks and dive bombing on hawks, to drive them away from nesting grounds for itself, thereby also saving other smaller passerines. He had been lucky to catch a few of those moments on his camera.

He was underneath 72nd Avenue and moved towards the river end, stopping to watch a rabbit vanish in the undergrowth ahead of him. He knew there were deer and black bears in the bog area, but had never seen any up close. He had noticed a group of white tailed deers from the road once, driving to work alongside the bog. The traffic had slowed down and everyone was taking a look at the animals, who seemed happy browsing on the lush grass by the road side.

HE thought of sending a message to Mabel. She was not on internet that much, but used her phone for messaging. He considered sending her a short ‘whats up’ note, then thought against it. Let her enjoy herself with her folks.

He had not told any of his folks about Mabel. There were not many folks left, for that matter, back in India. And he did not have any relative close enough in North America or any place else. IN short, he had nobody to send any note to. He had no elder left among his relatives. No uncle, no aunt and no parents. It was a terrible feeling. He did have elder cousins back in India. But he was not that intimate with them to share his personal life with.

Neil often felt all alone, but not necessarily in a bad way. His mother, in her late years, used to contemplate on the purpose of life, and the fact that, at the end of the day, every one was alone. She had a gift of writing penetrating thoughts, and maintained a diary. Neil had gotten hold of it after his mother passed away. There, in the late years of her life, she often questions why a human comes to life, and why he or she goes, and what is the ultimate purpose of existence, for the individual and the species. She even wrote poems that reflected an introspective mind. She was not necessarily bitter, but more importantly, contemplative and introspective. Perhaps Neil had inherited a bit of that.

And here he was, walking among pebbles and pieces of concrete broken from a floor of some construction a long time ago. The construction is no more, but the bricks and cement has remained here and there. People used to mine the peat as fuel. Effort was on to let the bog recover from that.

Burns bog was a very large raised or dome bog, unique on the planet by its unusual construction as well as huge size. It was four or five times the size of Stanley Park. It originated from shallow depressions on the ground where water was trapped and could not escape. Into it certain plants and more importantly certain kinds of moss lived and died, and the stagnant water helped create the peat bog over time. It was also the source of a lot of fires, from the stored fuel as well as methane. The water turned acidic and anaerobic, not supporting much fish, but it did support a huge number of plants, birds and animals. Scientists believed that the bog also played an important role in climate control of the area.

Neil had stood at some spots and tried to jump, feeling under his feet how the ground compressed and expanded. It was as if he was standing on several feet of rubber.

He did not know how long it took for nature to build the peat bog, but suspected it would be a few thousand years and perhaps no more. That was because much of the land in Delta was under a shallow edge of pacific ocean at the time, and the shoreline more of less ended at Surrvey to the east and Vancouver to the north. The towns of Richmond and Delta were more or less submerged at the time.

Neil stopped and sat on a fallen trunk of a small tree. It was a cool morning, but he was slightly sweating with the exercise. He decided to sit, and soak in the atmosphere a bit.

He had placed the tripod upright on the ground with his first camera mounted on it with a big lens. He sat with the second camera, with a smaller macro lens and looked through it around him. IN his viewfinder, there was movement of bright flashing colors from behind the brush. He kept watching as a pair of humans emerged, speaking with each other. He could hear their soft voices, as well as the sound of their feet on the gravel. A small girl was accompanied by an adult female. The girl had golden hair in a pony tail. The women was peaking a bright parka, and had dark hair curled around her ears. Sun reflected of her hair.

He inadvertently pressed the shutter, and heard the click of the camera. Conscious that he might have done something unethical, he lowered the camera from his eyes, and looked down. He contemplated deleting the image. The sound was getting louder. He looked up. The small girl was watching him somberly. The woman was also looking at him, but had a pleasant expression in her face.

He raised his hand and waved. “Good morning”.

The woman waved back. “Good morning”.

“My name is Neil”, he said, somewhat self consciously.

“Hello Neil”, the woman said. She did not offer her name. The child kept watching him, holding the woman’s hand.

Neil pointed at his camera. “I was looking through the viewfinder when you suddenly emerged from behind that bush. I made a mistake, and clicked. I think I have both of you on it. Did not want to invade your privacy. So, if you like, I shall delete that image”, he smiled apologetically at them.

The woman stopped and watched him for a moment. “I have seen you before. Do you live hear?”

“Yes I do. Barely two hundred yards from the western entrance at westview drive”, he responded. He tried to recollect if he had seen her, and thought he might have. She walked with her daughter on Lyon road at times.

“I think we might be neighbors” the woman nodded. “My name is Karen.”

“Hello Karen”. Neil got up. It appeared impolite for him to be sitting while they stood. “And hello young lady” He waved at the little girl. The child did not reply but smiled faintly at him.

“Can we see the picture? If it is good, perhaps you can email it to me.”

Neil nodded and checked bringing the picture to the display screen at the back of the camera. The picture came out sharp and with a fair contrast with the dark foliage behind them. He walked a few steps to them and showed them the picture. The small girl tugged at his pants. She wanted to see it too. He kneeled down to show her. Karen kneeled too.

The girl wanted to hold the camera, which was a bit heavy. Neil let her hold it, but supported it with his hand.

“Thats a nice picture. Would you like it? “ Karen asked the child. The girl nodded positively.

“Okay, I shall email it if you give me the address.”

“I want to see more pictures”, the girl said.

“No darling. Those are his personal pictures. Its not polite to see them.”

The girl pouted and returned the camera to him. “I have an owl’s picture in the other camera. I saw it a few minutes ago. I can show it in this camera if you like.”

The turned to watch the other camera, still on its tripod. “I want to see the owl”

Karen smiled. “Are you sure its OK?”

“Of course it is ok”.

Neil turned to his tripod mounted camera, and flipped through the images. Karen picked up the girl and came closer. He got to the series where the owl was about to launch into a flight. He cropped the view slightly, enlarging the bird on the screen and showed it to them.

They exclaimed, as he flipped through the series of five pictures, till the bird was fully airborne and turning in the air.

“These are marvellous pictures. Are you a professional photographer ?” Karen asked.

“Naah. Just a hobby”

“Well, its a wonderful hobby.”

Neil smiled and thanked her, pulling out the notebook that he always kept at his hip pocket, and a pencil. Karen gave him her email address.

The girl, down on the ground again, asked ‘Do you have many birds of the camera?”

Neil considered the question. “Well, I have a purple martin from today. I have many more birds and animals pictures, but not in this camera any more. I have them at home in my computer.” He was tempted to say he would be glad to show her the pictures, but refrained from mentioning it. Karen, who was likely her mother, might not approve.

Karen smiled, and surprisingly, extended her hand for a shake. “Well, time to move on. Thanks for the show and for offering to send that picture.”

“Dont mention. Hope to see you again sometime, and especially you, young lady” He turned and smiled at the child. He still did not know her name.

They waved at him, and turned, walking on. Neil got the tripod on his shoulder, his other camera hanging from his neck and started walking in the opposite direction.

He guessed Karen to be closer to thirty. Perhaps a single mother. There were many single mothers in British Columbia, perhaps in Canada. Marriage, as an institution, was not what it used to be a few generations ago. Also, women were often financially independent. He wondered about it all, as he walked on. He intended to spend the next two hours in the bog, before returning home.

Mabel had suggested that he might meet some womenfolk other than herself. Well, he just did, and at least got an email address if not a phone number. Well, that was a start, was it not ?

Othello

He had started writing the new blog on Friday. But, after going through six pages – he junked the whole lot, not even keeping a copy of it. The software he was using to write it all – pages from Apple, did have a habit of making backups. But he often trashed various versions of backups of an article that the software would create, leaving only the final copy. Not having any professional association with other writers, he did not know if this was a good habit or not. He himself did not miss the texts he had trashed. It had always been easy for him to type in new text, or jot down new feelings, and observations. Writing was never a problem, in either of the two main languages he used – English and Bengali. The problem was spelling, where he was known to make mistakes at times. More importantly, the problem was that he did not relish proof reading, and often sent out texts that had mistakes, both in spelling or in grammar.
His other issue was, he thought, his sentence construction. He seemed to be a bit long winded in that area. Its just the way his brain worked. One side of it encouraged him to construct rather long sentences. The other, told him to keep it simple. He knew he was writing from two reasons. One was to express his thoughts, and to have a creative outlet in that field. The other was to keep his writings tidied so that a reader might find in interesting to read.
Proof reading was a good habit that he sorely needed to develop.
Meanwhile, he was enjoying a new blog he had created, using his own domain name. It was www.tonu.org. He used WordPress, and he was already liking it a lot. One of the plugins or widgets allowed him to see which parts of the world people were reading his blog from. It had a world map, and tiny showed blue stars on it with name of the places where folks the readers were.
That was where he found the name of the place – Othello.
He did not know such a place existed in the US. But apparently, it was close to his own home, just across the border in USA and a bit to the east, or inland.
He guessed the name was derived from the famous Shakespearian play of the same name. What the link was between that play and the place in USA, he did not know.
But it fired his imagination anyway. Shakespeare, so long ago, had touched upon a rather sensitive issue – interracial love, passion and jealousy, on the play. He thought it was rather bold of him to do so. He personally had another version of it etched in his memory. That was a Bengali cinema he had seen in his teenage years, that depicted a famous pair of Bengali screen actor and actress playing out that scene in a college play. The man was supposed to be a high cast Brahmin boy studying medicine. The girl was recognized as a white girl of an English father. The boy had make up to look like an African, which crinkled hair and boot polish black paint on his face. The girl looked virginal in white. The short act proved powerful in the movie, perhaps planting a seed in the heart of the girl for the boy. Life was to take strange turns for them, and the story ends in the middle of the second world war, where the two of them meet up again, in very different circumstances.
The scene had left a powerful impression in his young mind – both in terms of the scope of the original play Othello, as well as the movie itself, perhaps one of the best movies he had ever seen in his native language.
The issue of race had been in his mind from his childhood, partially because he had a questioning mind and the scientific background of race was never quite clearly explained to him. He did read here and there, that race was more of a casual term used by people and not quite substantiated by science.
It took the development of genetic science, and sequencing of the human genome, to better understand the issue. He was no expert, but natural curiosity had prompted him to study more of it. Eventually, he even landed his own tissues samples for professional analysis to trace his ancestry through eons of time, by famous gene research firms.
Various issues had become clear to him, by a combination of sources. It is now more or less acknowledged in the scientific world, that the entire human population, despite differences in appearance based on our perception of race and tribe, are way too similar, compared to even our close genetic relatives such as Chimpanzee and other apes. Humans are far larger in number and far more widespread than any of the great apes. By that count, it would perhaps have been more natural for humans to show greater genetic diversity than the apes. But as scientists also check genes of the great apes and compare them to humans, the truth turns out to be the opposite. In short, there was some kind of a genetic bottle neck in the evolutionary past of humans, whereby a very small segment of humanity, bearing a small slice of the gene pool, survived, and all others perished. Subsequently, it is the descendants of this small slice of humans occupied the whole planet and diversified into so many sizes, shapes and colors. But, under the skin, humans were remarkably identical, from the evolutionary point of view.
And so, the differences in skin color, body shape and facial features, are all very recent. Not only that, he now know, from the analysis of his genes for maternal as well as paternal ancestry – he was as much a product of India, as from almost any other part of the planet. His ancestry was so checkered that depending on which time frame he looked, his ancestors, or their cousins, could have been an African, a middle eastern, a European, a Chinese, or an tribals in Eurasia, north America or Australasia.
He had read quite a few books on archaeology, geology, paleoanthropology, paleontology, genealogy and what have you, to quench an unquenchable thirst to know where he came from. He remembered having read the about the discovery of the near complete skeleton of ‘Lucy’ by the team under Donal Johanson, and reading several books on this early hominid, along with discoveries by the Leaky family, and so many others, from Africa as well as Asia and southern Europe. The book on Lucy profoundly affected him, and he never forgot the name given to that species – Australopithecus Afarensis. Those discoveries proved, once and for all, that our ancestors first became fully bipedal, and freed their hands for jobs other than locomotion, before the brain started expanding. Language developed later, and transformed the brainy creature into an unbeatable social group. Man, thus, stepped past a threshold and started controlling the biosphere around it, perhaps ushering in its own eventual demise by over taxing the planet that nurtured it.
Man’s greatest achievements and longest lasting legacy,  might be invention of junk, destruction of habitat and genocide of various species of living creatures.
The front bell rang. That should be the couple that wished to check their basement suite for rent.
He drained his coffee and prepared to go down to meet the potential tenants, his thoughts going back to the reader in a place apparently named Othello, in USA.

Who is an Aryan?

“This question has been with me ever since my childhood. Am I an Aryan ? Till date, a clear answer has eluded me.” Neil told Mabel. They were walking towards a coffee shop next to the movie theater. It was Friday. The weekend was ahead of them. They had just seen a movie. Later, he was going to take her to a Chinese restaurant. Meanwhile, they were going to have a coffee and yap a bit. It was still early for dinner.
Neil was enjoying her company, and her keen interest on things that Neil liked. He knew he was a bit different, and shared hobbies that were not particularly popular among folks he met or went out with. Among the expatriate Indian community, the issue of the Indus Valley Civilization, and the origin of the so called Aryans, was one such issue. The current debate in the academic circles on this issue, raging for a good generation now, was of intense interest to Neil. He had even tried to befriend a few experts on this topic.
But he never found another person among his friends, either of Indian descent or Canadian, or even American from his time in Florida, that was aware or interested, in this topic. This was a source of some frustration, for Neil.
Mabel was walking with her arm around his waist. She turned and smiled at him. Mabel was about the same height as Neil, five ft ten inches. The only thing was, she was wearing a few inches of heels, while he was not. Anyhow, this was something he had to get used to – finding her eyes at the same horizontal plane as himself. “So, are you an Aryan ?” She asked.
Neil smiled back and pulled her closer, still walking along the pavement, heading for the coffee shop. “The thing is, what exactly is an Aryan has not been properly settled yet. Conversional wisdom says that an Aryan was an invader in India, an ethnically different man than the locals. However, this view is getting a lot of scrutiny these days, and the answer is likely a lot more complicated. But, my interest in it is more to do with finding the facts. I am tending to lean towards the view that Aryans were part of the indigenous population, although a small trickle of outsiders might have come, mingled, and settled there, adding some flavor to the local culture, a long time ago.”
“Hmm ? How long ago?”
“Well, the time period under question relates to the dating of the Vedas, the original compositions of huge verses, that are often considered the original pillars of Hinduism. The dating itself is under debate. Conventional wisdom says 1,500 BC. But new thoughts appear to push that back by another thousand to 1,500 years, going back 2,500 or 3,000 BC, say five thousand years from now.”
They turned and walked into the coffee shop.
“Wow. You have to tell me about all this. I want to know. To me, sadly, Aryans only mean blue eyed blond crew cut soldiers that marched for Hitler and devastated half the world during the last world war.”
They took two cups of coffee and sat at a table. The coffee shop was almost full. It was attached to a large book store. People could take a book or a magazine, without paying for it, and sit down in the coffee shop to read.
Since the age of internet and eBooks, as well as online ordering of books through Amazon, local book stores have taken a major hit in their business, and are going through a continuous process of change, trying to stay in business and expanding the range of merchandise on sale.
Their table was near the magazine stack. Neil could see some of the magazines nearest to him. At least two of them were on tattooed women. It showed women with pierced nose, pierced eyebrow and pierced lower lips, not to mention ear lobes. They sported extraordinary multicolored tattoo on themselves, on their back, shoulder, arm, legs, and even on the back of their necks.
Neil disliked the idea of permanently disfiguring the body in the name of beauty. But, he was careful not to impose his opinion on others. To each his own. Thankfully, Mabel wasn’t one of them.
Mabel watched him glancing across the Magazine covers, his face displaying a tiny inadvertent frown. She chuckled. “I can see you are not too fond of full body tattoo.”
Neil turned back to her and smiled. “Well, no, I am not. Anyhow, about Aryans, I shall tell you little by little, so as not to overwhelm you with too much information. Suffice it to say that India is a very old civilization, and it has been in the cross roads of human movements ever since anatomically modern humans walked out of Africa. For me, the prime interest is to know a bit more about my ancestry. Therefore, the issue of who were the Aryans and what was the range and lifestyle of the Indus Valley civilization and how they interacted with each other and what influenced the later evolution of the faith system known as Hinduism, and its brother religions the Jainism and Buddhism, and other smaller sects, is of interest to me on an academic level. I am otherwise not too religions, you know.”
“Yes, I know. You were the first and the only person that told me the origin of the Aryan people were not Germany, and that Hitler borrowed the term from ancient Hindus, and likely unjustifiably. That is something I am unlikely to forget.”
Neil finished his coffee. He pulled her hand and watched her palm and her fingers carefully. He was not a palmist, but knew the basics from his childhood. She had a longish and smoothly semicircular lifeline, which did not quite connect with her head line. The line of destiny, or the fate line, was moderate and not as long as his own fate line from his right hand.
Mabel watched him. “Don’t tell me you can read palm too.”
“Well, I can see you are attracted to an older man from India.”
Mabel laughed out loud and cuffed him playfully. She too had finished her coffee. “One does not need to read my palm for that.”
They got up and left the coffee shop, heading for his car that was parked nearer to the movie theater.”
——————————————
I wrote this much and leaned back.
Should the ice age lady appear at their Chinese restaurant and share a Won Ton soup or something ? Or was I going to be spending more time with the non-Germanic Aryans that might have been brown skinned Indians wearing a loin cloth and bathing by the bank of the now vanished Saraswati river?
Or perhaps I was going to coax Neil into talking about his Y-chromosome ?
More I thought about it, more I felt that any sensible Canadian girl should by now get up and leave. These were likely taboo items for a date – essentially a first date between a young attractive woman and her boy friend.
But, I was not writing a book that would fit conventionality. I was writing it for my own pleasure, and for improving my unconventional writing style. Besides, I was writing on things that I liked.
I spent some time thinking about the difference between conventionality and conventionalism. Eventually I ended up scratching my head and looking up at the ceiling.
I had not yet been able to make up my mind on who the writer of the story should be. After all, this was not just a story of the present time about an expatriate Indian living in Canada. It was a story about writing a story, and that story was to have multiple centuries, millennia, spanned across it, with participants from different historical era and regions.
And yet, who was writing the story, itself was not yet clear in my mind. I could make myself the writer, and write this part in first person, like now.
Or, I could write in third person, describing the writer as Tony. Tony was, of course, the westernized version of my own pet name, which was Tonu.
Or, the writer could be Tonu.
I had used all three versions in different chapters by now. And yet, I could not decide.
Meanwhile, Mabel and Neil had gotten off the starting point, without achieving much of a plot. The ice age woman of central Asia was hovering at the periphery, mysteriously appearing and disappearing. She had a child with her. In one of the episodes, she is supposed to have sacrificed herself while in danger of attack from wild animals, in order to let the child survive. They carried the mitochondria, that was to come down copy by copy and generation by generation, all the way to me, or rather, to Neil. How they would eventually fit into the plot, I was not yet sure. The writer could keep hallucinating about the ice age woman, but how does one connect her with Neil?
Could it be that Neil too can see her in his minds eye? Could it be that she was a figment of not just my imagination, but also of Neil’s? Neil himself was a product of my imagination, as was Mabel.

Ohh well. I decided to slice an English cucumber and eat it with salt. Dinner is still an hour away. My wife had prepared some lasagna.

A few pages on a leap year day

There was a snow dump on downtown Vancouver early in the morning. As I turned into Kingsway, I could see piles of wet show pushed to the side of the lanes by passing wheels. Vehicles moving in the opposite direction would at times veer from the track and have their wheels splash through inches of wet snow, causing water and wet chunks of snow to splatter on his windshield and side window. I had taken care to roll up his window glass. It was also raining a bit.
I got up around five in the morning, which is not normal. If I went to sleep in the usual late hours, after 1 AM, I would normally sleep through the night and only wake up at the alarm, at 6:20 AM. But if I went to sleep earlier, say by 11 PM, I would invariably get up early, sometimes by 4 AM. This was one of those days. So, after tossing about on the bed for a while, I tiptoed out of the bedroom, leaving Anu fast asleep on her side of the bed, and went to my study, half undressed.
I had started writing his blog on the 2nd of Feb, with a piece titled “Hello, World”. The title was a suggestion from WordPress, and not my invention. That was the only title I had borrowed from WordPress templates. Since then, I had put up thirteen different blogs till this leap year day, Feb 29th.
Apparently, I had written upwards of twenty thousand words on this blog and in this month. That translated to about 750 words, or almost three pages, every day. Was that good, bad, or irrelevant?
Clearly, it was relevant from my point of view. But, being a social animal, one would normally judge success and failure by how much those twenty thousand words affected other people, or at least how much it fattened my bank account.
One answer was clear – it did not affect my bank account. I was not writing this for any commercial magazine and not advertising it. So why was I writing? Could it be that I cared for the first part of the question – affecting other people ?
I know that at least a handful of folks had read them, from Canada, the US, India, Bangladesh, Japan and New Zealand. How did I know that? Well, there is an add-on to my WordPress blog site that tells the admin (me) the location on a world map, from where folks had clicked on to my blog. But I have no illusion that only a handful of people from around the world had read any of my blogs.
Thats normal. Statistically, I would say that only a few knew about my blog, but these few were not isolated in one corner of the planet, or restricted to one circle of interest. I guessed some of them might be bird watchers, while some others were promoters of permaculture, or rights of indigenous people. Some might be by personal friends, or folks from my ethnic and linguistic groups.
I also knew that, as I write more, I would likely generate interest among a wider group. Alternately if I wrote on boring subjects or had an uninteresting style, my readership would dwindle.
But, I was still unsure if I was writing for the readers, or for personal reasons. Writing improves one’s skills in authorship. It is also a creative outlet. It helps release pent up tensions, just like painting or drawing, or watching nature and wildlife does. I was not necessarily good in any of my hobbies, but I was happy that I had so many. And writing was one avenue to expressing myself, and telling myself, that I exist, as of now.
I know how insignificant my existence is in the greater scheme of things. From the point of view of this Universe and its existence, I do not even deserve a tiny mention in the log book of its events. But then, neither does Julius Caesar, Chengis Khan, or as far as I am concerned, God. Every human, every prophet, every earthly or unearthly entity imagined by humans, was ultimately irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. God proposes, Universe disposes, and man only pontificates.
Well, my pontification was clearly not directed to the Gods of this world, nor the mere mortals hurtling ceaselessly towards an eventual oblivion six feet underground, or incinerated into thin air, or left to be consumed by scavengers. I did not know who it was directed as. The main purpose, I tried telling myself, was to have a release that was not geared to please someone else. Commercial writers were essentially entertainers – like an actor, or a soccer player, or a singer. They performed their task in order to entertain other people, and thus earn a living. If folks did not like watching movies, there would be no movies and no movie actor. If folks did not like to listen to music, there would be no musicians. But people, especially civilized people, are supposed to have time on their hands and money in their pocket. They spend that time and money to engage in their hobbies, like listening to music, or watching a movie or a game.
However, I had, to be honest, passed the links to some of my blogs, to a small number of people, asking for their comments. For example, I had sent the link to my post on the cult of Tagore, to Piyali and Tukul, and also to Rajib Chakraborti. I had heard back from both Piyali and Tukul. Rajib bahu is going to read it shortly, he said. Why did I send the links to them? I guess I thought I’d value their varied perspective and point of view.
Apart from that, I got a few of them linked on my Facebook and google plus account. I was more present in google plus than on facebook these days. But, on the whole, I spent a lot less time on these social networking sites, and a lot more on my own writings, and looking around for information to my liking.
The eBook store is a good place for searching out for information to my liking. Recently I got an eBook about the geology of British Columbia, and found it fascinating to read, all 250 pages of it with its numerous sketches, diagrams, drawings, tables and photographs. I wish I had with me a book of similar detail about India. Unfortunately, I do not have such a book and have not found such a book that would also be easy to get hold of and ideally free of charge or for very little money, preferably as an eBook that did not involving printing and paper.
He had found just one book so far, named “Himalaya to the Sea, Geology, Geomorphology and the Quaternary”. It was by John F. Shroder Jr. 472 pages long, the eBook was not free of charge by a long shot. Its price was US $ 249.99.
I was not ready to pay that much money for that book. Besides the book had no review by any customer. Its content was not described too well. It was a very expensive unknown entity, for me. And so, I was still looking for a suitable source for my education on the development of the Indian topography and natural history. Most of the books readily available were about Himalayan Treks, addressing western visitors, and did not cover my question.
He had one nice book that he liked – Natural history of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon, which was written by Robert Sterndale, published by Thacker, Spink and Co in Calcutta in 1884. It contained 170 illustrations by the author, by T.W. Wood and others. It not only contained details including hand drawn sketches of animals I remembered from my childhood, such as a fox-bat in English, Chamgadili in Hindi and Badurh in Bengali, but also more esoteric animals such as a collared hedgehog of northern Indian and Afghanistan, or a Himalayan Brown Bear, or the clouded leopard, which at the time was called a clouded panther.
I was digressing from the original thought – which was about writing and not reading eBooks. But, like all things, there was a link here too. I got that wonderful book about Mammals of India, published in Calcutta in 1884, completely free of charge and developed a regard for its author for the details of his work. He must have been financially rewarded by the purchase of that book by people at the time. But right now, it was sold free of charge as eBooks on line, if one had the patience to look for it. And thus, I connected with the man that was older than my grand father, and lived concurrent with Rabindranath Tagore and his brothers, but had done a fantastic job of detailing so many different mammals that lived across the Indian landmass stretching from Afghanistan to Burma and from Kashmir to Sri Lanka. Did he write it only for the financial reward ? I was not sure if those days manuscripts in English were typed or hand written. I knew Tagore’s manuscripts were hand written. Today, almost nobody writes by hand in English, and if my guess is right, they also type it in many of the vernacular languages today, rather than hand-write an entire book.
So here I was, driving along the Waterfront road in downtown Vancouver, heading for a day in office, and wondering – why do folks write anything ? What is the value of a few pages of typed text.

I turned into the drive way for the underground parking below my office.
It was going to be another cold day – for Vancouver.