“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.