Desi Pulp At Its Best

Chitra Narayanan

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This book grips you with intense nostalgia — for the good ol' James Hadley Chase thrillers, which sent you on an adrenalin-raising chase with gangster protagonists in tales of murder, double-cross, intrigue and blackmail.
 
Hindi pulp fiction king Surender Mohan Pathak, before he hit gold with his original works, made a good living out of translating Chase’s novels in the vernacular. Along the way, he seems to have picked up a tip or two. For his own thriller, starring bank robbers who pull off an unlikely heist is as gripping and fast moving as any Chase plot.
 
Mayaram Bawa, aka Ustad, is the master schemer, who brings together a team of five, including wanted criminal Vimal, or Sardar Surender Singh Sohal to give his real name, who has escaped jail and is now lying low, to rob a bank. The heist, an amazingly ingenious operation, involving ladders flung across buildings and a night long safecracking operation, is described in great detail. But that is only the warm up — it is post the loot that the book gets really exciting as Mayaram double crosses the others, and Vimal launches into a hunt to get him.

From now on, the action is all blood, gore and suspense in the best Chase tradition, moving rapidly from Amritsar to Chandigarh to Delhi to Karnal. To complicate matters, there is another dreaded henchman Harnam Singh Garewal, a character straight out of the Ajit (saara shahar mujhe loin ke name se jaanta hai) typecast, who is out looking for Mayaram. 

Set mostly in Punjab of the late 1970s (a time when it was fashionable to sport Sunil Dutt hairstyles and chaps made trunk calls!) and peopled with whisky swigging characters who go by the name ‘Matar-Paneer’, it’s full of delectable desi flavour. Among the many twists in the tale are truth inducing injections by which means one set of villains get to know what the other bunch of scoundrels are up to.

Oh, and there’s the pretty moll too — though unlike Chase, whose female characters were all unfailingly treacherous and have a role to play in sending the protagonist to doom, Pathak’s moll appears to have a good heart.

Translator Purohit has done a great job — he’s kept the local colour and flavour intact and captured the wonderful nuances of the Punjabi language and people.

Sitting in railway stations and leafing through lurid titles like Khoon Se Ranga Chaku (a knife dripping with blood), I had often longed to read desi crime fiction, but was not sure my Hindi was up to it. Now thanks to Blaft, which after translating Tamil pulp to English has tured to Hindi, here’s a chance to relish local crime fiction — eagerly waiting for the next in the Vimal series! Keep them rolling Blaft.

The 65 Lakh Heist is published by Blaft (2009, Pages: 211 Price Rs 195)