Chills and Thrills

Daylight Robbery (skillfully translated by Sudarshan Purohit) brings together an old card shark who has one last job left in him before he retires,a beautiful woman who is as materialistic as they come,a security officer who can’t quit gambling and Vimal,a man so overwhelmed by desperation that he is involved in a bank robbery.

“The English translations have got me a new segment of readers. Being printed on white paper has also given me new recognition,” says Pathak,70. He has written over 250 novels in Hindi since the early 1960s and with an output of four crime novels a year,he may just be one of the most prolific writer in India.

“All my mystery and crime thrillers follow one format,the whodunit. There’s a murder,there are five or six suspects,one hero,who,by the process of elimination,will expose the killer. It’s not at all difficult to write this,but to write it with style and flair,now that is a task,” smiles Pathak who began his writing career by translating James Hadley Chase and Mario Puzo into Hindi.

When he saw his fellow writers pen crime thrillers in Hindi,Pathak felt that it was a good time to start. In the early 1960s,the only books that sold were pocket crime thrillers and with the books priced as low as Re 1,the publisher raked in the profits but the writer barely made any money. “I had my government job at the Indian Telephone Industries Ltd so I could afford to write. My first 50 novels went unnoticed but suddenly in the 1980s,people began talking about the characters and the readership grew,” says Pathak.

His first character was a journalist called Sunil but that series has never quite caught the imagination of the Hindi heartland the way his Vimal books have. “Vimal is a smart,dashing,fancy character with memorable dialogues. People would remember them and use them in their own lives,” chuckles Pathak.

Although he is partially blind and wears a hearing aid,Pathak still writes in long hand and churns out thrillers in no time. “It takes me two months to prepare the plot,a month to transcribe it,and a month to revise it and publish it,” says Pathak. “I may not be a good writer,but I am committed one.”

While he might have sold lakhs of copies of his books,Pathak rues the condition of Hindi fiction in the country today. “Nobody reads anymore,my Hindi readership consists of existing readers and not new readers,” he says. That’s why the English translations give him a reason to smile.