Category Archives: Novel

A sunset, mitochondria, a peat bog, and a kiss.

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Across his backyard and the open space behind where the power lines cut across the land, he could see the edge of the peat bog, and across it, the lowlands of the river delta, and far off into the distance, the faint lines of the pacific ocean. It was a while since he had seen a sap sucker up close. He had walked up to the trees where he could see rows of drilled holes on the bark, a clear sign of work by a sap sucker, and tried to check the sap collecting at the punctures. He had even tried tasting it. Actually it was kind of sweet. No wonder it attracted insects. The bark was in a way proving to be a conveyor belt for nutrients to travel up the trunk, all the way to the leaves. This was as if a chain of thousands of tiny heart were pumping the tree’s lifeblood one cell at a time, all the way to the top. There, leaves could then draw energy from the sun, and break down the sap by photosynthesis into essential ingredients to nurture the tree and help it grow and stay strong.
One of the forgotten scientists of his homeland, J.C. Bose, a century ago, had proven that plants responded to artificial stimuli, essentially proving that plants were living creatures.
Meanwhile the sap sucker would puncture a few holes in the bark, causing the sap to start oozing out, before the tree would trigger an automatic healing process by cauterizing, or closing up of the open wounds, and the sap would stop oozing out from there. If left in open air, the solvent would evaporate, and the sap would solidify, turning into resin, or amber, trapping tiny insects into them, sometimes for thousands or even millions of years, for man to sometimes stumble across some of them and discover ancient insect species frozen in time, possibly including some undamaged DNA of the long extinct species. Neil did not know if DNA or body cells and tissue would survive the length of time, even if it was encapsulated in amber. He needed to ask someone on this. Neil did not know any archaeologist, not any scientist working with ancient DNA.
Meanwhile, there was his own DNA – the mitochondrial one, to be precise, that was under investigation.
Mabel had been avidly looking at the computer screen, as Neil navigated through his home page, past the welcome sign. He selected the link “my tests” and onto a list of tests already conducted on his genes, and a few that were in progress.
“There” he showed Mabel, his finger pointing at the bottom of the screen. There was a small magnifying glass symbol, and a bit of text next to it that said – ‘mtDNA HVR-1 Status: Completed – View Results >>’’. “That is the first of the tests on my mitochondrial DNA, which I inherited only from my mother, with no influence from my father. My mother, in turn, inherited it from her mother, and so on. I have it, but I shall not be passing it to any future kid of mine, because I am a male. This part of our genes only moves from mothers down to their babies. It reaches a dead end at every male child, but continues to pass on through their female offsprings.”
Mabel listened to him, big eyed. “Can I see some of the findings?”
“Sure”. Neil clicked on the hot link ‘View Results’, and waited for the next page to com up.
Outside his home, the dimming light blanketed the landscape overlooking the Bog. A sequential set of events stretched over eons of time had made the creation of that bog and many others around the world possible. It was an important feature of the neighborhood, and was likely going to survive in spite of the raging fire that burned for weeks on end just half a mile from Neil’s home on the other side of the highway a few years ago.
Mabel’s cheek brushed Neil’s as they peered into the laptop screen. Neil had an urge, to turn and kiss Mabel on her lips. He was thirty four years old, and yet, he hesitated, unsure of what she might do. He could hear her breathing softly, inches from his face. He wondered if Mabel was purely interested in checking how genetic mapping is done, or if her interest included Neil in person, and not just academically. He knew the answer, he told himself, and yet, could not muster the courage to just hold her face in his hands and look into those wide blue eyes.
The sun had dipped below the horizon, but still lighted up the underside of low clouds over the ocean. The low lands of the Delta estuary and its agricultural fields allowed an uninterrupted view from Neil’s window into the faint purple of the fading western light. But Neil and Mabel seemed oblivious to the scene outside. Before he realized it, he had freed his left hand from hers, and had placed it around her shoulders, pulling her closer. “There, that is the top haplogroup identifiable from my mitochondria, the ‘L’ haplogroup. It originated in the north eastern Africa, somewhere between today’s Egypt and Sudan, some 150,000 years ago.”

This is where it started, 150,000 years ago.

Mabel kissed him.
—————————–

Tony got up and looked outside the window. It was a Saturday. No office today. Time was half past seven in the morning. And it was raining cats and dogs. He wondered how that term came to be – raining cats and dogs. He was glad though, that geology, ocean current and other factors had combined to give Vancouver and nearby areas a milder climate. So, instead of snowing, it rained in winter.
One thing he could not do now was take his camera and binocular – and go bird watching. If it stopped raining in the afternoon, he might consider visiting the Iona Beach area for a few hours.
Meanwhile, time to make the proverbial mug of coffee.
At least he managed to do something this morning – produce a kiss in his story of Neil and Mabel. He still did not have a clear idea of the way the story might proceed, but some notions were getting into his head. Tracing his ancestry was one thread. Overlapping the story of Neil in the present with a woman from the past, who carried that mitochondria which was to pass through eons of time on to him – was another thread. He has to improve his knowledge and skills in order to be able to write about forgotten humanity in landscapes that no longer existed. He knew he did not have to be absolutely accurate. He was writing a novel and not a thesis.
He glanced into the bedroom. Anu was still sleeping.
He padded his way down, whistling softly to himself. Writing about his mitochondrial track, he managed to produce a kiss. Hmm.. Fancy that !

Considering Mabel

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“I had bought this house, if you remember, Mabel, partially because of the comments your uncle made six years ago regarding its construction, and also because of what you told me about the topography, the soil, the elevation and the chances of survival against both and earth quake and a tsunami. Remember?”
Mabel smiled back. She had a radiant smile that spread across her roundish face and it up her eyes. She had been a sixteen year old teenager when Neil had first seen her. Her uncle had built the house 18 years ago, and was also the realtor involved in selling it. Mabel had been living with his uncle for her summer job, and eventually joined him at his work. Neil was a new immigrant and had been living in a rented house. Bank loans were easy and cheap. Housing market collapse across the border in the US was several years into the future.
What Neil did not know much about, is that the fault lines that made California famous for her earth quakes of the past century, also plagued the Canadian west coast, with massive earth quakes happening once every few centuries. Depending on how the earth plates adjusted themselves, there may or may not be a Tsunami moving towards the West Coast of mainland Canada. But if there ever is to be one, major parts of the city of Delta and even Richmond would likely be flooded or washed away. The house he was was buying was at the higher grounds of Sunshine hills, at the edge of the great bog by the Fraser river estuary. The land was apparently safe both because of its higher elevation and because of its rocky foundation. Apparently, it was a stone quarry before it was turned into a residential block.
Neil was impressed by Mabel’s basic grasp of plate tectonics,  and of the geological history of the region. She, and his neighbor Jean, were among the first Canadian few Canadian women that Neil came to know when he moved here with a new job. His first impression of Canadian women were formed based on his observations of them. While Jean was elderly, kindly and neighborly, Mabel was young, bright and thorough in her ways. Both held a liberal world view and a caring, sympathetic outlook towards existence. Neither were dogmatic in their religious views, and carried their individual versions of dignity, and feminism that Neil found charming. Neil got to equate Canadians, that they were nice people, especially the womenfolk, through his initial observations of these two women.
Neil sat with Mabel and they together opened up two screens on the laptop – one on Neil’s genetic analysis report and the other on the geologic formations of British Columbia. His home page on the Genetic report had several links they could follow, including a search about ancestry on his fathers or his mothers side. Some of the reports, charts, maps and details were fascinating, both to Neil and to Mabel. She was in fact toying with the idea of having her own genes analyzed.
The other tab on the browser covered an eBook on the geology of British Columbia. There were sections on it that covered the fault lines and the epicenters of past earth quake events in the regions. It was interesting to see that the entire Vancouver island was covered with overlapping large circles of past events. Clearly, the longish island just off the pacific coast of British Columbia was geologically the most stressed and active zone in the entire region. The question was, where might the next big event happen, and if that might trigger a tsunami heading towards the British Colombian shore. Was it at all possible to have a bad tsunami coming from a narrow strip of the ocean. After all, the pacific ocean was sort of blocked by this longish island less than a hundred Km to the west.
But first thing first – Mabel wanted to know about Niels parental ancestry. Neil click on the maternal branch of his genetic report, following analysis of his mitochondria.
Mabel was wearing a cotton shirt and a half sleeve sweater and denim pants. She had taken her shoes off and was sitting next to Neil in her socks. As far as he could tell, she had no make up on her face, although her face looked sort of without blemish, and sort of glowing. He could smell a faint trace of some perfume. Neil did not use much scented stuff and his knowledge on these things were primitive. But, she smelled nice. He looked at her and smiled.
“What ?” She asked.
“You smell nice, Mabel”.
Her face got softer. He could see she was pleased. Neil was forever unsure of women and did not know if he should be romantically involved with someone twelve years his junior. Clearly, Mabel liked him a lot, and perhaps had even idol worshiped him as a teenager some years ago.
Neil was not used to complimenting women on their looks, or even smell. He felt embarrassed at having mentioned it. To complicate matters, he was thirty six and carried with him the baggage of a mindset that had its roots in India. She was twenty two and belonged to a different generation, a different world and a different culture. And Neil was shy when it came to opening up to women. He almost blushed at the thought that he complimented Mabel on her smell.
“Thanks Neil. You should compliment me more often. I really like it.” Mabel snaked her hand into his, locked fingers, disabling his left hand, and pointed at the laptop with her eyes.
“You use your right hand and I use my left, to type and navigate through your mitochondria”.
Outside, a skunk moved along the wooden boundary fence of Neil’s home, sniffing into the grass. It had made a tunnel under the fence and had taken to visiting this backyard occassionally. It found no trace of dog smell or markings, and had considered the ground to be safe. It needed a fresh burrow, and searched around the compound, spending some time under the remaining stump of the Douglas fir tree that had topped some years ago in a fierce storm, and scratched the ground with its front paws. Perhaps this was a good place for a burrow.
Light faded from the sky and darkness fell on the west coast of Canada. Mabel and Neil moved through sixty thousand years of travel of a copy of mitochondria, that took them from north eastern Africa, across the Mediterranean into the south-eastern tips of Europe, before the arrows started branching into different lines and spread across the landmass of the planet as it stood ten thousand and more years ago.
————————
Tonu considered what he wrote, and scratched the inside of his ear with his ball point pen. He was most uncomfortable dealing with relationships between men and women, on a keyboard. He felt more at ease letting his thoughts flow on topics others might consider academic, such as how likely it is to have massive earth quakes on Vancouver island, a hundred miles off the pacific shores of mainland British Columbia, or how his ancestors might have left in his genome some tell tale signs having been in far off places in specific periods in the dim past of human evolution.
He was not a geologist, a microbiologist, nor an anthropologist. He was an engineer. But he found those topics of great interest and could write his thoughts without inhibition. But people might like to know more about what happens between Mabel, born near 100 Mile House, British Columbia, and Neil, born half a generation earlier in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. These two creatures of chance were subject of a chance encounter that established an acquaintance spanning six years and promising to move on to another stage. He wondered if that made a good story, and for whom.
Coffee. One this Tonu was partial about, when it came to writing stories without a plot, was coffee, especially since he had given up smoking some years ago. He got up to make a coffee for himself.

A coffee with a giant rhynoceros

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Tony was partially stuck with the story. He had been busy with work, but that, as the reader would know – was an excuse.

The reason he was stuck had more to do with a doubt on how to proceed, and what precisely, was to write about Neil and Mabel. Neil was a man, and Mabel was a woman. Both were young and unattached. Both happened to like each other. Both were together in the same opening scene in the book.
It should be pretty obvious that there needed to be some chemistry between the two. But Neil, instead was focussing on different sets of chemistry – Neil’s
mitochondrial chemistry, to be precise. It was supposed to be different from a typical romance book where the man is tall dark and handsome and his bare stomach and chiseled facial bone structures look as if they had been photoshopped.
Also, Tony had injected a sap sucker and a skunk already, along with a doze of South Western British Columbia’s topography, not to mention dragging in Bengali scientists of a century ago that worked on wireless communication as well as plant biology.

And that was not enough. Then came the parallel story of a young girl is the french riviera, but ten or fifteen thousand years ago, essentially in the middle of an ice age, stuck in a cave during a snow storm. And to complicate matters further, Tony did not know enough about the life and times of that era.

Tony had searched for free copies of eBooks on the subject, hoping to find something on the web for his iPad. But he had not found anything suitable, and free, yet.

He had mentioned wooly rhinoceros, but was tempted to toss in the giants of them all, an elasmotherium. It was supposed to be a gigantic single horned long legged rhinoceros that galloped along the siberian steppes in the Pliocene and Pleistocene, from about 2.6 million years ago, till at least 50,000 years ago. What Tony did not know, was if the animal was also present in more recent times, such as fifteen thousand years ago, and in more southern latitudes such as the mediterranean coast.
Tony was attracted by the story he heard of Russian legends that mentioned a huge unicorn like animal living in the Russian steppes, and if that legend could have anything to do with a giant rhinoceros that might or might not have survived long enough to enter human mythology.
Tony had found a sketch of the giant on wikipedia, created by one Dimitry Bogdanov. Tony decided to use that picture for his blog, and mention the source of the image. That was not going to play a major role in his story of his ancestors. But, it might add to the sense of drama in the mind of the reader. It added it for Tony for sure.

And so, a cup of coffee at his side, Tony started writing –

Early in the morning, the light was still dim through the swirling snow storm, a small group of hunter gatherers had decided this was a bad day to go searching for food. They turned back and were trying to find a shorter route back to their cave. But ahead of them, emerging out of the churning snow and the haze, a huge single horned creature that was apparently using its horns to plough the ground. Its grunts, and the sound of its exhalation were loud enough to be heard through the storm before it could be seen.
Not having as keen an eyesight as the human party, the creature continued to clear sections of the sloping ground, oblivious to the storm or the approaching bipeds.
Solu came to an abrupt halt, alerted by the pet wolf which had come to a dead stop, the hair on its neck bristling.

—-
Tony stopped again. Pet wolf ? Late Pleistocene ? Giant one horned rhyno ?
None of these creatures were a human female. Therefore, none of them carried an earlier copy of Neil’s mitochondria.
What was he doing, getting side tracked with imaginary one horned giant rhinoceros while trying to write a story about the maternal evolutionary ancestry of a Bengali babu ?

Ohh well, he thought. Lets finish the coffee and leave the story for another day.

Suta at the Riviera

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She woke up with the sound of howling winds. It rattled the stone buttressed flaps of leather across the narrow entrance to their cave. Puffs of snow burst through the narrow gaps and settled at the entrance. The stone below was cold, and her bed was lined with soft soil and leaves, on which she had part of a wooly rhinoceros hide, on which she had curled up with some dry grass and straw and another fox hide atop her. Hairs on her arms , back and legs had not grown much yet, and in any case, was not protection enough from the cold. Her mother had already left the cave, likely with Solu, their clan leader. Only baby Oth kept sleeping, curled around the wolf pup. Mama wolf had also gone, with the elders.

Suta gazed at the cave ceiling. The cave had earlier been used by bats, but abandoned since they themselves moved in. The strong smell of their excrement and urine made her heady at times, but every time the wind passed through the cave, the smell would go away for a few days. The cave had a narrow opening through which they could crawl out. The interior of the cave thinned out but did not end. A small shaft connected to the outside without the rocky mound. They would cover that opening with a stone slab, to prevent reptiles, wolverines and small critters from entering the cave. But when they needed the cave aired, they would open up both ends.
The cave was once also the home of a smilodon – a sabre toothed cat. Solu and his brother had fought and chased it away. Even now, the sabre tooth would occasionally pass by and growl at night, as if reminding them that it would like to have the cave back. Suta and her mother were not able to deter the smilodon from attacking them unarmed. But his mother had become and expert thrower or stone hand spears, a demonstration of which the sabre toothed cat carries on its hind flank as a scar, and learned to give them some distance in day time. A sabre tooth was an ambusher, and not a frontal attack predator – at least not for humans. Suta was still learning to throw a stone spear, but she was too small, and was more comfortable with the stone axe with the short wooden handle, used close to her body. She had once confronted a cornered fox with it and came out the winner, without getting bitten.
The cave was at the edge of a shallow lake in what in the future would be named the riviera. It would be a balmy popular oceanfront land of rich people. But in Suta’s time, it was a bleak, ice encrusted covered region in the grip of an ice age.
She was only six years old, and less than three feet tall. In another two years, she might find a mate and pair up either in their clan or go her own way. She did not know it yet, but she carried a piece of mitochondria, that, many thousands of years in the future, was going to end up in a woman of India, who would pass it to her son, who would be migrating to Canada, and sit down with a cup of coffee, and write about her times in the cave by the French riviera.
———————
Tony wrote this much, and leaned back in his chair, putting his feet up on the table, noticing that his big toes had some thick and fierce looking nails that were due for clipping. He sighed. He was never very good as chores of this kind. Fishing out the toe nail clipper from the shelf, he proceeded to tend to his toes, letting his thoughts go back to what he wrote.
The thing is – he was beginning to get an idea of a plot, and it was getting complex by the minutes.
First, there was this Canadian young woman, Mabel, that had taken an interest in Neil. Tony was never going to be a romance writer. So, Mabel was likely going to unsuccessful in getting Neil to commit himself for several hundred pages, and the reader by then would have given up.
But, there was a way out – and this involved writing about the fun detective work Neil was engaged in with regard to tracing his own paternal and maternal genetic lineage. Tony was going to get Mabel involved in it, and let the two of them figure things out from that point.
And then he was, perhaps in alternate chapters, add one more layer of complexity – that of a stone age women, who hypothetically carried the mitochondria that would end up, or rather, a sort of an imperfect copy of which would end up in Neil. And the story would sort of progress on two fronts – one more or less locked in time to the present, involving Neil and Mabel and the crazy world of today, while the other front would have the ice age cave woman gradually morphing through time, to end up a few generations ago into north-eastern Bengal, preparing the seeds that would eventually end with Neil himself, while Neils story would be very close to Tony’s own.
How is that for a story that had no plot, to end up having a hell of a complex one ?
The thing is, Neil did not know if it was normal for a cave dweller, ten thousand years ago in French Riviera, was expected to have hides of wooly rhinoceros. He did not know if the time, and the place was both right, for the now extinct animal. He did not even know if French Riviera area had any natural caves.
He did not know how much body hair folks had those days before the invention of fabric and clothing. He did not know at what age young women of the late stone age were consider to have reached the age of consent. Neil did not know a whole lot about ice age Europe. But, Tony suspected his maternal as well as paternal ancestors passed exactly through that land at that time.
And he was intrigued about it.

Ahh well, time to go to sleep.

Chapter 1 : The uncertain life of Dusty

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Tony thought of writing a novel, one without a plot. The only thing he could decide on, for now, was the that it would likely follow the life and thoughts of a single person, and that his name would be Niel Dusty.
It became clear to Tony, early in his wanderings through the pages of this novel, that the person had an uncanny similarity with his own younger self.
However, the book did not start with Dusty. Not having a clear plot, it started out with a sap sucker. And here is how it started.

The south western sky grew darker as the sun went down over the Pacific ocean. Branches on row of trees at the edge of a field swayed gently in the breeze. A red breasted sap sucker stopped drilling the bark of one of the trees, looked at its work keenly, clinging to the vertical side of the trunk, its stiffened tail feathers pressed against the bark. It shifted sideways, hopping a few inches at a time, and considered drilling another hole in the bark. Fresh sap would well up where the skin of the bark has been ruptured. A few insects might be attracted to it, and get trapped in the thick sticky glue. The sapsucker would return to consume the nourishing sap as well as any insect trapped there. The bird turned its head and watched the darkening of the sky as the sun went down. It was time to call it a day. With a sharp call, it announced its departure, launched itself into the air, and flew off to the far off conifer forest by the edge of the low hills.
Neil looked out of his window from the dining table. Across his backyard and the open space behind where the power lines cut across the land, he could see the edge of the peat bog, and across it, the lowlands of the river delta, and far off into the distance, the faint lines of the pacific ocean. It was a while since he had seen a sap sucker up close. He had walked up to the trees where he could see rows of drilled holes on the bark, a clear sign of work by a sap sucker, and tried to check the sap collecting at the punctures. He had even tried tasting it. Actually it was kind of sweet. No wonder it attracted insects. The bark was in a way proving to be a conveyor belt for nutrients to travel up the trunk, all the way to the leaves. This was as if a chain of thousands of tiny heart were pumping the tree’s lifeblood one cell at a time, all the way to the top. There, leaves could then draw energy from the sun, and break down the sap by photosynthesis into essential ingredients to nurture the tree and help it grow and stay strong.
One of the forgotten scientists of his homeland, J.C. Bose, a century ago, had proven that plants responded to artificial stimuli, essentially proving that plants were living creatures.
Meanwhile the sap sucker would puncture a few holes in the bark, causing the sap to start oozing out, before the tree would trigger an automatic healing process by cauterizing, or closing up of the open wounds, and the sap would stop oozing out from there. If left in open air, the solvent would evaporate, and the sap would solidify, turning into resin, or amber, trapping tiny insects into them, sometimes for thousands or even millions of years, for man to sometimes stumble across some of them and discover ancient insect species frozen in time.

At this point, Tony stopped writing and sat back to think it through. He had no experience in writing a book. He wondered, if he might show these first few paragraphs to someone. Anyhow, he decided go with the flow for now. He pulled his laptop closer across the glass top dining table, and proceeded for now.

Neil watched the scene outside his window. The sap sucker was gone, and the sky was turning darker orange by the minute. Sun was going to set. Layers of clouds had been outlined by the setting sun, turning them deeper orange. Small flickers of light danced across the darkening scene below the horizon, representing moving vehicles, street lights, or someone shuttering a lighted window in the distance. Before him was the flat lands of the delta of Fraser river as it met with the Pacific ocean. To the east and away from the ocean, was a gentle rise in the land that was known as Sunshine Hills. That was where Neil had a small home  in a cul-de-sac. He looked across the darkening landscape through his window, and the reflection of Mabel, on the double layered window glass. It was there, in his home that he sat facing Mabel across his dining table.

“How is the world coming to an end?” Mabel asked in her calm, carefully delivered voice. Mabel had a calm and composed way of dealing with issues that faced her. She never appeared flustered. In fact, Neil had once called her the queen of England, jokingly, because of the composure she always displayed. She was among the first of the Canadian women he had come to know. She did not have outward sophistication in her attire, unlike the queen of England of later her daughter in law – Diana. But Mabel had composure and substance.
He had come to know three women since he came to Canada that might be potential mates. He was too shy, or too proud, or too slow, to take his relationship any further than casual acquaintance. He had not taken anyone out on a date. He had not even asked. Out of those three, Mabel was perhaps the easiest to talk with. And here she was, sitting across him in his own home. She knew his address, as she had delivered stuff to him. She worked for her uncle’s construction firm. Today, she had called and asked what he was doing, since she was in the neighborhood and might drop in for a coffee.

Tony stopped typing and scratched his head. He was beginning to get into the layout. He decided on at least one thread that had room in the story – his ancestral trail as discovered through his gene mapping analysis. He paid good money for it, and the results that were beginning to emerge at the web site for him. Neil was going to get his life either more interesting, or more complicated, or both, by attempting to contact some of the people that apparently were close to him genetically, but who were not related to Neil as far as he knew and whose existence Neil had no knowledge of. And some of them lived in North America, just like him. He wondered how Mabel would fit into that. It dawned on Tony that he was writing a novel about writing a novel. This was not unique. He had seen movies where the main character was a writer, and the story he wrote got mixed up with his own life. Perhaps that was normal. Perhaps writers drew inspiration and example from their own lives.

Could it be that he could pull in an ancestor, twenty thousand years into the past, to share his life too ? Tony did not feel confident about writing on the life and times of any hunter gatherer clan that traveled the highlands of central Asia during stone age, even if he suspected those clans included his own paternal ancestor.

Perhaps it was going to be fun, writing this story – Tony thought.