Even if you have never picked up a Pathak paperback, you couldn’t have missed the instances when his chapters of crime turned unsavourly real — strangely, these were among the few times his name appeared in national newspapers. The tandoor murder case figured in Mavaali, a Pathak novel, before Naina Sahni became its unwitting epilogue in 1995. Eleven years later, on a May day, a man claimed he was a suicide bomber and made off with Rs 40 lakh from a Delhi branch of UTI Bank — inspired, yet again, by Pathak, this time by one Zameer Ka Qaidi.

The forays of pulp-fiction writers into mainstream media, thankfully, are not always on crime pages. Ask Ekta Kapoor. When she plans the character assassination of a saas or a bahu in the innumerable serials of Balaji Telefilms, she would call up one more person apart from Tarot card reader Sunita Menon: the writer Ved Prakash Sharma, whom she would fly down from his palatial bungalow in Meerut to her studio in Mumbai. “Tulsi’s second death and resurrection were my ideas,” says Sharma, 52, lighting up a cheap cigar, “Until last year, Sharma would ideate on the sets of all our serials,” confirms Nivedita Basu, creative head, Balaji Telefilms, “His inputs gave a small-town twang to our stories.” He has also written the “dialogue, story and screenplay” of Akshay Kumar’s Khiladi films, with Sabse Bada Khiladi winning him the Videocon Award for Best Story in 1996.

Sharma is the king of Hindi pulp fiction, having written 157 murder mysteries, including Vardi Wala Gunda that reportedly sold 8 lakh copies. Most of his novels have been brought out by his 21-year-old publishing house Tulsi Paper Books, one of the seven major publishers involved in the trade. While Tusli Paper Books sold 4 lakh copies last year, most of them Hindi potboilers apart from a plethora of pocket books, Delhi-based Raja Pocket Books sold 2.5 - 3 lakh copies. The economics work like this: if a book costs Rs 40, Rs 18 is the publisher’s cut and Rs 17 goes for overhead expenses, while Rs 5 goes as royalty to the author. And the main bazaar is the dingy shops at railway stations.  

... contd.