And, of course, there's a whacking great pistol in her right hand. Its cover features a demure Tamil girl with jasmine flowers in her hair and spectacles perched gingerly on her nose, over which she directs a come-hither look with limpid eyes.
"And I'd always think: 'Man, I wish I could read this stuff!'" To that end, he started his own translation and publishing house, Blaft, which earlier this year released the English-language Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. "There would be all these lurid, interesting covers, and I'd learnt enough of the Tamil script to figure out whether they were horror novels, or detective novels, or whatever," says Khanna, who was born in California to a Punjabi father. Inevitably, the covers caught his eye they catch everyone's eye. Rakesh Khanna, a self-described "tea shop junkie" first encountered Tamil pulp while studying at the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. Most often, though, the cover will present a woman she may be seductive, horror-stricken or possessed, but she is always luridly drawn, with a hint of cleavage whenever the artist can manage it. They often contain a gun or a knife, unless the novel's theme is religious, in which case a fierce deity will glare out at the world. The covers of these novels are masterpieces of kitsch art.
And there will be Tamil pulp novels, usually suspended from a clothesline strung between the doorposts like gaily-coloured handkerchiefs hung out to dry. The owner will ration out gossip free of charge. It will sell beedis - thin, hand-rolled Indian cigarettes - and matchboxes. It will often have a telephone, from which, in the years before the cellular era, people without landlines at home could call their friends and family. But it will also offer hard biscuits, stored in large jars of thick glass. It will, of course, fulfil the promise of its name by serving tea, poured from a shiny kettle into small glasses that invariably become too hot to hold. In the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the tea kadai, or tea shop, is a multipurpose establishment. The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction Edited by Rakesh Khanna Blaft Publications Dh66
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