JAB THEY WRITE

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.

At Krishna Nagar in east Delhi, Pathak sits back in a leather chair in a study lined with English thrillers, by Jeffrey Archer, Christie, Jack Higgins, Ian Fleming. He has just finished his 246th potboiler, writing it with an old-fashioned Wing Sung fountain pen in illegible cursive writing that will require a magnifying glass to read. “I can’t think of a sentence till I hold a pen in my hand,” he gives a wide smile, resting his arm on sheets of hand-cut paper waiting for No. 247, “Computers are for filing income-tax returns.” If his publisher Raja Pocket Books accepts his latest thriller before April, Pathak will just have to factor in a few more lakhs of rupees on that I-T form. A small discomfort. But Pathak, has figured out a more important formula: “Here is the secret behind writing a murder mystery: take six suspects, make them revolve around a case, then eliminate them one by one,” he says, adjusting his cordless hearing aid. “The rest is the magic of permutation and combination.”

... contd.