“We are from Chennai and have always found these books at tea stalls fascinating. It was Rakesh who said people should be reading that stuff. But none of us could read Tamil and we would ask our driver to translate the titles,” says Lalchand. “We started it as a project just a year and a half ago.” The person who has finally translated it all for the trio is Pritham K. Chakravarthy, a theatre activist who was translating academic books and was finally pleased to have something fun to work with. It is a funny name. The first half sounds like a Punjabi boy’s name and the other half is reminiscent of a Bengali surname but the person is a south Indian woman.

“When we were going through the books, there was so much to choose from as we went all the way back to 1967. We spoke to people who worked on these tales and tried to select stories from different genres,” says Lalchand. In the translator’s note, Chakravarthy says, “As a schoolgirl in mid-sixties Chennai, I grew up on a steady diet of Anandha Vikatan, Kumudham, Dhinamani Kadhir, Thuglaq, Kalaimagal. These magazines were shared and read by all the women at home. There were other publications, less welcome in the traditional household, with more glamourous pictures and lustier stories. These we would regularly purloin from the driver of our schoolbus, who kept a stack of them hidden under the backseat. I doubt he knew the active readership he was sponsoring on those long bus rides.”

... contd.