How a Bangalore techie translated a Hindi bestseller
Surender mohan Pathak has a groove on the second finger in his right hand. Having written over 268 novels in long hand with a fountain pen, he could well flaunt it as a medal of service. And it is the first thing that struck 33-year-old software-engineer Sudarshan Purohit when he called on the 69-year-old king of Hindi pulp fiction in Delhi to discuss his new project: a translation of perhaps his most popular book so far, Painsath Lakh Ki Dakaiti, or The 65 Lakh Heist.

The story of how this 1977 bestseller has come to be accessed by English-reading pulp aficionados across the country, from the south to the north, goes like this. The Chennai-based publication house, Blaft, got out its Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction a year ago, and Purohit, who is based in Bangalore, wrote on his blog that it would be nice if someone did something like this for Hindi pulp fiction. The next day, Rakesh Khanna of Blaft asked him if he’d like to work on it himself. Says Purohit: “I’ve done some translation work before, for Hindi movie subtitles and some BBC television programmes, but this was somewhat larger in scale. I decided to take the plunge.” Then in thriller style, the process began.

The selection of which Hindi pulp novel would be translated was fairly easy. The publishers decided to go with the best in the business. It was Pathak’s reputation of writing taut, well-structured and, importantly, well-selling thrillers which his publisher said were written in the “English thriller” style.

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