Buy any Sharma thriller — how about the risqué Kyunki Woh Beewiyan Badalte Thay or Aaj Qatl Ho Kay Rahega, or even Mera Beta Sabka Baap or Ek Thaparh Hindustani? — before boarding that 15.55 Shalimar Express from New Delhi railway station and you, in all probability, can finish it before you reach the author’s hometown Meerut City an hour and a half later. As the train pulls out of the station and you open Kyunki Woh Beewiyan Badalte Thay — why buy anything else? — the preface reads, “Saavdhan! Is upanyas ka ant pehley parh ke khud kay dushman na banein…. Isey silsileywaar parhein, aapkey dimagh ki kasrat hogi (Beware! Don’t flip to the end of the novel and be turn into your own enemy… Read it in the correct order and your intellect will get the workout it needs).”

Don’t guffaw at the exaggeration; it is the very leitmotif of their works that often first featured on the pages of Manohar Kahaaniyaan before graduating to paperbacks. And their acerbic dark world is similar to that which subsequently subsumed the multiplex, albeit in a more cerebral avatar. And their expressions have fed into the popular vocabulary. Years before Ram Gopal Varma made Company or “D Company” became a byword for Dawood Ibrahim’s network, Pathak had used the word “company” to refer to the underworld. “I coined phrases for the underworld in my novels. I called it company since I thought it worked like a well-oiled machinery, much like a corporate house,” says Pathak.

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