Low-power wireless mesh networks provide a solution for the seamless wireless coverage of complex physical environments due to their ability to route around physical obstructions and sources of interference. For example, networks such as SmartMesh-IP, WirelessHART and 6TiSCH deliver industry-grade reliability with low routing power consumption. However, conventional low power mesh networks suffer from high latency. The root of this problem is the need to reduce receiver power consumption by duty cycling the radio receiver using time-synchronized wake-ups or preamble sampling. We tackle this problem by introducing CaIN, a near field mesh network that transmits information using strong Capacitive and INductive effects that can be detected by a passive receiver front end, thereby side-stepping the need for intermittent receiver usage. Given that near field effects are limited to a few wavelengths, we implement our proof-of-principle transceiver in the VHF frequency band at 40 MHz, achieving a unique performance profile including: 20 kbps link layer throughput, sub-𝜇W receiver power consumption, sub-ms wireless wake-up and 17 m per-hop range. Building upon these properties, we realize a novel mesh network with a worst-case latency of under 40 ms for a 3 hop network. To promote replication and further work, we have made the hardware and software of our reference implementation open source.