The print run of their thrillers is often 50,000 copies-plus, but they don’t figure on bestseller lists. They are the unacknowledged literary celebrities of small-town Hindistan. Meet the most prolific duo of Hindi potboilers who between them have written over 400 novels.

Imagine. Two-hundred-and-forty-five novels. This, dear reader, is more than the combined output of James Hadley Chase and Agatha Christie, but even those who swear by the yellowed detective fiction of second-hand bookshops might not have heard of their author — Surender Mohan Pathak. His Technicolor book jackets screaming Peela Gulab or Safed Khoon, or Neeli Tasveer would not be gracing the mahogany bookshelves of elite India. To get hold of them, you have to shovel past the porter shouting Shalimar Express teen bajke pachpan minat pe revana hogi, wait outside the tea-stained, grimy bookshop at a railway station, holler above the din of trains for Scandal Point and slip in Rs 30 — not too bad for 300-odd pages of coarse paper on which is crammed a tale of murder, moderate lust and a sleuth, a book that gets Pathak an advance of Rs 4 lakh. And with four novels a year, it is a cool
Rs 16 lakh for a 69-year-old author who is partially deaf and blind since birth.

Away from the over-hyped hypermart of Indian writing in English, yeh chalta hai, this noir world of Hindi pulp fiction, with its waking dead, mutilated bodies and roughly estimated turnover of Rs 15-20 crore a year. And there, Pathak, Ved Prakash Sharma and “Keshav Pandit” form the trinity, the gods of small titles, the unacknowledged, best-selling writers of small-town Hindistan.

... contd.