Farrukh Dhondy invents a serial killer, but it’s nothing to do with Charles Sobhraj, the only serial killer he knows, he tells Rrishi Raote.
Why? I ask Farrukh Dhondy. “Because I’m a writer,” he says, “I earn my money from professional writing.”
No, why this book? “As a writer one constantly wants to move on. You don’t want to do the same thing again… I think, life’s too short.”
Yes, but why this particular book? “I thought I had a quick book brewing in my head — because books are not born in the conscious will, they are probably born in the subconscious somewhere. I was fascinated by the idea of somebody who could kill people. We’re not all murderers and trying to think yourself into the mind of somebody who can actually take somebody’s life is… interesting.”
Dhondy isn’t taking Charles Sobhraj’s name, until I do that for him. There’s no way to avoid it, because this book, in more than a few respects, mirrors the career so far of Sobhraj, full of theft, trickery and murder. Its pedigree is in the title itself: Sobhraj is the asli Bikini Killer, so named because he’s alleged to have killed a number of young Western travellers in South-east Asia during the 1970s, before moving on to India, Nepal and elsewhere.
“I once tried to write a script about his life,” Dhondy says, “but it’s extremely difficult... I could not say he went and murdered somebody like this and that. If you use Charles Sobhraj’s name you can only write external facts, you can’t say that he killed people because he’s not been convicted and he will certainly object. Now, the newspapers always say he killed lots of people, but he’s not sued the newspapers.” This book is fiction, Dhondy says — he simply doesn’t know enough about Sobhraj’s life, and didn’t do much research — and he reiterates the point.
But it’s not all arm’s-length and pure writerly invention. Dhondy has been in touch with Sobhraj off and on since 1997.
“He called me,” Dhondy explains, after Sobhraj was released from Delhi’s Tihar Jail and moved to Paris. “He wanted to publish his memoirs.” Dhondy was then with the BBC’s Channel 4 in London. “He came and I thought there might be something in it: if he turns up with his memoir, if they are confessions of a serial killer it would be very interesting to put on television — scoop — but they weren’t. The memoirs were on his time in Tihar and they were boasts, about how he was the boss of Tihar Jail, for example.”
It wasn’t all work. “Once or twice, I met him because he was in trouble. He called me in London and said I’ve run out of money, I spent it all on gambling, could you give me some cash to get back to Paris, then I’ll be okay. I said okay, I’ll lend you some money.” Of course, Dhondy never got it back. “I didn’t expect to.” An incident very like this one appears in the book. “There’s a lot of incidental circumstances,” says Dhondy, “but I’m entitled to that because that’s my own life rather than [Sobhraj’s] life.”
About halfway through the book, the story takes a turn for the bizarre, when Dhondy’s Sobhraj-like protagonist Johnson Thhat leaves Thailand with his female accomplice Ravina (totally made up, Dhondy says) for the subcontinent. After an attempted drugging and robbery of a busload of French tourists goes wrong, Thhat winds up in Tihar and there makes contact with a Muslim terrorist. (So far, so Sobhraj.) But this fictional terrorist has international links, and Thhat uses what he is able to trick the man into revealing as a bargaining chip in his constant effort to avoid deportation to Thailand, where (like Sobhraj) he would be subject to the death penalty. The story becomes a very up-to-date sort of thriller in which Arab extremists, Afghan militants, the RAW and American intelligence lurk around every corner and real-life events like the IC-814 hijacking, the Parliament attacks and so forth show up for quickening context.
Back in London in 2002, Dhondy says Sobhraj “told me that he had some evidence that Arabs, possibly Iraqis, were buying nuclear materials. I said if you can actually prove that then you have overthrown the liberal ideology that says that George Bush and Tony Blair told lies... I introduced him to Boris Johnson and the political editor of the Spectator (a UK magazine) and they talked to him and they put him on to the Daily Telegraph. But he couldn’t prove it. I don’t think his emails or whatever amounted to the kind of proof that the British newspapers wanted.”
At another point, Sobhraj came to Dhondy trying to sell a short film of himself at an Afghan camp. “It was incoherent, there was no story. It was just Charles Sobhraj in an international camp — so what? What he was doing there, he wouldn’t tell me. He just said sell the footage, can you get me some money? I said, I’ll try, thought about it, couldn’t.” This week, Sobhraj announced from prison in Nepal that he would sue Dhondy’s publishers for “millions”.
It’s curious that despite the consistent awfulness of Johnson Thhat, the reader keeps going until the final twist on the very last page. “I didn’t have a real killer to study, but I invented one on the basis of ‘Snake’, D H Lawrence’s poem. You see something moving in the undergrowth. It comes to drink in your pool. You’re fascinated by it. Instinctively you say, I’m going to stay away from that, it’ll poison me. Then you want to pick up a stick and beat it. Then you don’t. You want to talk to it. So I hope that the whole book is a continuation of that fascination.”
THE BIKINI MURDERS
Author: Farrukh Dhondy
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Pages: vi + 272
Price: Rs 395
