It was a cold day for Vancouver. He looked out of the window, past the drooping branches of the cedar trees. The sky was clear. He checked the clock. It was just before six in the morning. The alarm was set at six twenty. He got up and shuffled to the bathroom, preparing for the day. It was Monday, and the start of another week. He was back in Vancouver, after a week in Houston, Texas.
By the time he left home, it was seven in the morning. Temperature had dropped a few degrees below freezing. There was no snow. The car had gotten a bit cold in the garage overnight, so he switched the Air conditioner on, setting the internal temperature to 19 degrees. His thoughts veered to the issue of the speeding Y-chromosome.
He knew the last of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in his DNA was the sex determining one. He knew XY makes a male and XX makes a female. He knew the Y-chromosome comes down from father to son, but does not go to the daughter. Y-chromosome and its DNA trace could therefore be analyzed to track paternal ancestry of a person. He had actually gotten it done for his own genes, and was proceeding with more detailed tests on the same item, hoping to peer further into his ancestral footprints.
Females do not inherit this Y chromosome, and therefore, this method of paternal ancestry cannot be used on females.
But that was not what was bothering him. This Y-chromosome had apparently evolved rather fast for humans, and the difference in this area between humans and chimps are far greater than the average difference in the entire genome of man and chimp.
He sipped his cup of coffee, and lifted his camera to the eye. He was topped at a traffic light, and the view in front showed not only the street and the city, but also the mountain range in the distance, with its snow covered peaks and the floating traces of clouds against a low contrast blue-gray sky. It was pretty. He knew the scene would change minute to minute, as the sun prepared to emerge over the sky. He squeezed off a shot, and then another. Setting the camera down on the passenger seat, he eased the car forward again. The light had turned green.
What bothered him, was the gossip that the human Y-chromosome was rotting, and on its way to extinction. Some believed it because it had, over the millions of years since it became sex determining item for mammals, been losing sections of itself, thereby getting smaller and smaller, compared to its partner, the X chromosome. Today, the human Y-chromosome apparently had lost 97 percent of its original content The story was, according to papers coming out, started 300 million years ago, as the mammalian class separated itself from the others.
However, the monotremes, such as the platypus, apparently had a different system of sex determination, based on five pairs of chromosomes, and perhaps closer to the birds than the rest of the mammals. But when it came to placental mammals, the 23 chromosome was pretty much the sex determinant, out of which the X-chromosome remained healthy and able to repair itself from defects through recombination, while the Y apparently shut itself off from recombination hundreds of millions of years ago, and since then had been losing sections of itself continuously.
He had another sip of coffee. But, apparently, it was not all lost, and the male humans need not panic, yet. If the reports now coming out of MIT researchers are to be believed, the Y-chromosome went into a sort of free fall initially, but later more or less steadied itself, perhaps through process of natural selection. If someone had a miniscule and non functioning Y chromosome, he could not produce male off springs, and would therefore go extinct himself, leaving the field ripe for more successful holders of Y-chromosome.
Whatever the reason, a greatly shrunk liliputian Y-chromosome was stable, and here to stay.
He scratched his chin and turned the car into West Hastings street, within sight of his office. He wondered if and how he might insert that fact about the incredible shrinking Y-chromosome, into the story of Neil, as he dealt with his job, his Indian perspective on life in Canada, and his dealings with a burgeoning romance with Mabel, while the same time having to deal with the emergence of a second woman. He might write a few pages on it in the evening, he decided, as he pulled his car into the entrance driveway to the underground parking.
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Neil was slightly self conscious. He had put on a clean shirt and a a red pullover. He had actually stood before the bathroom mirror and watched himself for a while, and combed his unruly hair once more. This was an activity he was normally not known to engage in. But today, he had taken some trouble to actually fish out a cologne and dab his face with it after shaving.
The thing was, he was taking Mabel out of a date. This was the first time he was taking anybody out on a date in Canada. And if one discounts the few more or less forgettable events during his last vacation in India, and the trip to Shanghai, China, this was the first time in many years that he was taking a girl out. He had felt mildly apprehensive.
The other problem he had was deciding where to take her. Dinner was easy. Though he was not a wine connoisseur, he had been around the world enough to get around in international cuisine. He was not much of a drinker and did not really enjoy spending hours in a pub. Also, he was not a good dancer and did avoided noisy night clubs. The collective din of the dim lit and crowded atmosphere gave him a headache, and he felt out of place. He identified  this to be a problem, since many of his colleagues and folks he knew did like hanging out in pubs and nightclubs.
So he had asked Mabel out for a movie and a dinner. They had a choice of movies that were running in the cineplex nearby. The movie about Edgar Hoover was one. But somehow, watching a movie about a power hungry ugly gay man that secretly kept tabs on senators did not seem to be the best choice for a first date with a pretty woman.
Then there was a documentary about the history of Detroit. Neil decided to discount that too. Also, an Indian hindi movie with English subtitles was on, but he did not want to push that one on Mabel. Besides, he was not fond of formula movies in Hindi. He did not know if the movie was formula or above average, but did not feel enthusiastic about finding out.
Finally, he had decided to ask Mabel if she might like to see a film about a trailer park teenage girl that had stolen a car and driven a few hundred miles to a city she had never been to before, to search for a father she had never seen before either. Mabel had agreed readily, on phone. In fact, she did not seem to care which movie he liked to see, and was equally agreeable to see any. And after the movie, he said he’d like to take her to dinner in a Vietnamese restaurant. Mabel had agreed to both. She even told him, jokingly, that she was still keen to learn about the incredibly shrinking Y-chromosome and what he had so far found from the report on the DNA analysis of his own Y-chromosomes.
And so, here he was, standing at her door, feeling slightly anxious and same time elated. He was fourteen years older than Mabel. He did not know if this was a wise thing to do. And yet, here he was.

Mabel opened the door and smiled. She had this wide smile that transformed her face. She exuded a natural radiance and lack of pretense, an ability to put people at ease. She was mostly casual in her dress. Neil remembered her mostly wearing blue jeans or pants, more often than not with a baseball cap on her head. But today, she had dressed herself. Her hair was shiny and free flowing. She had on a dress and a sweater. She had a scarf around her neck. She looked lovely. Neil was conscious again at her youth, and their age difference.
‘Hi’ he greeted her, slightly awkward. ‘You look lovely’.
Her smile widened. She stepped back and pirouetted. She was aware of his eyes on her. She did not dress for a party, and they were only going to a movie and a dinner. But she had taken the trouble of dressing herself enough for the occasion. She was thrilled that he finally asked her out for an evening. This had been a six year wait for her. She fell for him the first time they met, when she was a mere sixteen years old and still in school.
The last weekend was the watershed event finally, when she grabbed his face and kissed him, taking the initiative. That had lead to them spending the night together at his place. This was hopefully to be the beginning of an affair that would end in them staying together for life. She had not yet announced anything to anyone. She had already been planning on how they might spend some of their weekends. She was going to accompany him on his birding trips around Vancouver. She had already borrowed a field guide and was reading up on the flora and fauna of the area. She had been an outdoors woman and knew as much as the next person about the local plants and animals. But that was not going to be enough. She intended to develop a passion and a level of curiosity about the surroundings that would match Neil. His curiosity about the natural world around them had rubbed off on Mabel over the years. She had inadvertently started reading up on plate tectonics, continental drift, climatology, ice age glaciation and a whole lot of other things. It even influenced her decision on the part time college course she started taking.
She wanted a career in line with her uncle’s business, in construction, interior and landscape decoration and building of homes. But same time, she now had opened another horizon for herself, and was studying architecture on one side, and geology on another. Neil, without any conscious effort, had played a large part in her decisions to go for college, and in selection her subjects.
To her, the age difference did not count. Difference in their race was irrelevant, and would not matter to her, although she suspected Neil was bothered a bit about both issues.
She smiled and winked back at Neil, causing his eyebrows to go up. ‘I dressed up for you. Like ?’

Neil stepped into the room and gathered her in his arms.