Chandu Menon tries to translate an English novel Henrielta Temple written by Benjamin Disraeli into Malayalam. But he quickly realised that readers in Kerala will not understand how the characters in English novels lived : their clothes, ways of speaking, manners were unknown to them. They would find a direct translation from English boring. So he gave up the idea of translation and wrote a story in Malayalam in the “manner of English Novels”. This was his delightful first novel called Indulekha, published in 1889.