Tag Archives: Mabel

Who is an Aryan?

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“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.”
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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.

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.
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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.