Perl and the Last of the Neanderthals
This is Volume-III of Perl’s Script: the comic adventures of Perl and Hari, the indefatigable technologist-entrepreneur-restaurateur-detective duo. They run a software company called Ruby Storm, a restaurant called The Tomb, have a pet talking buffalo called Jagan and are 'scientific detectives' on the side.
There’s a Neanderthal in my bed!
Like most women on their wedding night,
Gloria Kryptopoulos comes to this routine, non-startling conclusion. But Gloria
is not most women. She has a PhD in Anthropology, and her husband, a senile
buffalo farmer, doubles as research specimen. Where the average susceptible
young bride is filled with a kind of shrinking horror, this moment of epiphany
affects Gloria the way an overflowing bathtub had a compatriot of hers, several
centuries ago – a gent by the name of Aristotle. Like him, she springs up,
uttering something unintelligible in Greek, and spends the next twenty years of
her life trying to prove her hubby is the last surviving Homo Neanderthalensis,
a leftover from a lost tribe of Neanderthals.
Flash-forward several years. Gloria is
about to make public her epoch-making research findings at an international
anthropological conference, when her research specimen-husband is kidnapped –
by a jealous colleague with a permanently jaundiced view of life after having
been dropped on his head as a baby.
Enter the Perl and Hari: software
programmers, restaurateurs, scientific detectives. Gloria is impressed with
their tracking down of a kidnapped buffalo. She hires them to track down her
kidnapped buffalo-farmer husband.
Their search takes them to the glassy
caverns of AARS, lined with bound back-volumes of Playboy, in the staid
business districts of
It does not take them long to realize that
they have not one, but three mad anthropologists to contend with, and that the
answers lie deep in the virgin rainforests of Borneo.
And what do leading critics think of
Neanderthal?
Telangana Herald: We’re really, absolutely sure it’s a book of some sort…
Farm & Ag Review: The author displays a remarkable breadth of expertise in livestock
farming, turning this time to the care and upkeep of Neanderthals, which we
have been given to understand is a prehistoric breed of milch cattle.
Daily BJ: OK
– archeological sex. Now we’re getting somewhere. This fellow finally seems to
be learning that sex is what our readers want to read.
This is what the critics say about
Neanderthal. And do you know what we say about critics? Read the book, kids.
The last one to read it is a mad anthropologist.
Excerpt:
DDT – for that is how Prof D.D. Tyagi was know to his students - turned out to be a thin dark gent with a mop of unruly white hair, a lopsided grin, and a curious manner of looking out of the corner of his eyes and licking his lips, which made him look like a sexual pervert. This he in fact was not. It was just the unfortunate side-effect of having been dropped on his head as a baby, while his mother took a quick swig of rum from her husband’s liquor cabinet. A legion of female students who had managed to get their doctorates unmolested- a rarity in Indian academic circles- would have attested to his moral rectitude.
Gloria of course did not know
this, but it still did not bother her. She liked sexual perverts. She enjoyed
slapping them. She loved the stinging sensation on her palms, and the shock of
enlightenment on their faces. It was little pleasures like that that made life
interesting.
She sat before DDT with bated
breath, her slapping hand twitching, barely hearing what he was saying.
“So, my dear Gloria,” said DDT
leering genially, “my dear friend Aristopoulos says you wish to study our rural
communities?”
“Yes,” said Gloria absently,
discreetly squeezing out a drop of glycerin on her hand from the little bottle
in her handbag. It added a pleasing wet, sucking sound to the slap.
“The question of course,” said
DDT, “is how rural? We have sort-of rural, really rural, and really, really
back-of-beyond rural.”
“Yes?” asked Gloria.
“Yes. We have places just a short
car ride out of Delhi that could pass for rural. The people there are
marginally more uncouth than in Delhi, which is actually pretty impressive
because people in Delhi are already astonishingly uncouth – you must have
noticed that already.”
“Yes - the taxi driver on the way
from the Airport to this place was fairly bizarre. I had to enlighten him
spiritually.”
“But, on the other hand - these
‘sort-of rural’ places are contaminated by the modern world. The TV, the
fridge, the detergent soap… this reduces their scientific value.”
“I suppose…” said Gloria, looking
mysteriously into his eyes.
“Then we have the ‘really rural’
- which is a lot better. Those kinds of places are at least a day’s journey
away. No TV, fridge but they still use detergent soap. Still valuable
scientifically, but a soap washed villager is somehow unsatisfying. You don’t
get that strong rural aroma that makes all the difference.”
“Hmm,” purred Gloria.
“But what is truly interesting is
the really, really back-of-beyond rural, where they are still living in the 3rd
century.”
“Ah?”
“B.C.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Yes. Very interesting. But you
would have to travel deep into the hinterland for that. It’s a long journey,
and not very safe – especially for a lone woman.”
“That’s nice.”
“So what would you like, my
dear?” asked DDT kindly. “Plain vanilla rural, or really, honest-to-goodness
rural?”
“Oh…really, really rural.”
“Really, really, really rural?”
“Oh yes,” said Gloria earnestly.
“Really-truly obnoxiously rural. As rural as it gets.”
