Hemantha Kalam - 94 'Calculative, Callous and Charming?'

It was sometime in June-July 1990. We boarded the luxury bus of the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC or Karnataka Rajya Rasta Saarige Samsthe) and settled down comfortably to do the approximate 560 kms of journey before us. I would have preferred a train but my colleague dear Mr. Nagaraj had advised that bus journey would be as comfortable. Being in the prime of the youth it didn’t really matter for me though.

At about 5.00 pm the bus started from the Majestic Bus Centre in Bangalore and rolled out smoothly. It was a journey that I was looking forward to. My knowledge of Kannada language at that point of time was zero. So I was oblivious of the mild conversations taking place in Kannada, Konkani and Tulu languages among the other passengers. As always I was drinking in the passing out scenes that appeared through the bus window till it became dark and I couldn’t see clearly anymore. It was monsoon season and once we passed Peenya, it started drizzling slowly and by the time we reached Hiriyur it graduated into a steady downpour. It was cosy in the clean bus. KSRTC buses by comparison have been cleaner than buses of their peers elsewhere in the country. At least they used to be, as I haven’t travelled by KSRTC buses after 1994.

I think we stopped on the outskirts of Davanagere for dinner and slowly all the passengers, including me, dozed off. When we woke up it was about 5.30 am and we had reached Panaji or Panjim as it is referred to in the state. We got into a lodge (how sad that I don’t remember the name of the place) whose rooms looked like those out of a colonial house and had a little nap just in time to wake up for the breakfast.

Post breakfast we hit the market on our work. The next day we boarded a ferry to cross the beautiful Mandovi or the Mahadayi River. It was the first time for me to visit Goa and also board and ride a mechanised ferry. In my native state of Andhra Pradesh I had crossed rivers on manually oared ferries but this was an experience for me where I saw motorbikes and cars being ferried across. I was enjoying this new experience and in less than 10 minutes, we hit the other bank. If I remember the other side was Bardez and from there we needed to travel to Mapusa for our work in an auto-rickshaw for about eight kilometres and the time taken was about 15-20 minutes.

While on our way, I was savouring the beautiful sights of the river Mandovi to our right and the terrain was rocky which is typical of the west coast. When we were passing a particular stretch at Porvorim, the auto-driver made sure that we didn’t miss a restaurant and pointed it to us saying “look at that O’Coqueiro restaurant which has now become very famous. Know why? That’s the restaurant where CS was arrested in April 1986 (apparently on his 42^nd Birthday) after his daring escape from the high secure Tihar Jail, India, just within a few days of escape.” (https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/offtrack/story/20041213-goan-restaurant-uses-statue-of-tourist-killer-charles-sobhraj-to-promote-tourism-788874-2004-12-13)

The incident, for no reason, has been filed in my memory.

Now during this compulsory home stay for over 14 months, for lack of any other entertainment, I have taken up to watching varieties of programmes on the Netflix and a couple of such are ‘The Serpent’ series and the Hindi film ‘Main aur Charles’; made with CS as the central subject.

Well, CS is none other than Charles Sobhraj. It is understood from several sources on the internet that he was born in 1944 at Saigon (presently Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, as Charles Gurumukh Sobhraj, the son of Sobhraj Hotchand Bhaonani, a Sindhi international tailor from India and a French-Vietnamese lady Tran Loang Phun. It appears that he didn’t get much of his biological father’s attention right from his childhood and this might have had an impact on him.

In any case, Charles Sobhraj became notorious for the several murders that he apparently committed in several countries that included India, Nepal, Thailand and other crimes in countries like Greece. He is known as ‘The Bikini Killer’ as the corpses of many of his victims were apparently found in their bikinis and ‘The Serpent’ due to his ability to slip through the fingers of the law.

Apparently, several countries had look out notices and warrants issued for his capture. While Police from several countries were kept busy in working towards his capture, one person was persistent - a Dutch Diplomat in Bangkok Mr. Herman Knippenberg – and who seems to have worked tirelessly in gathering evidence against Charles Sobhraj, who then was operating from Pattaya, Thailand as a gem dealer.

Eventually Sobhraj’s luck appears to have run out and he had been arrested in India to spend time in Indian Jails for about 21 years between 1976 (when I was just getting out of college) and 1997.

It is strongly suspected that his flamboyant escape from Tihar Jail was a well orchestrated one and facilitated too. Theories have been afloat that Thailand had issued a notice for his capture and extradition, eventually leading to a death sentence. However, the notice/warrant has a life of only 20 years and if he can escape being extradited to Thailand after serving his sentence in India, he can escape death. It is firmly believed that his escape from the Tihar Jail and eventual re-capture in Goa was a carefully calculated scheme by him making the police just roles in his drama. As desired by him, he got his punishment extended and by the time he was released after fully serving his sentence, the Thai warrant apparently lapsed.

After release from the Indian Jails he seems to have taken a French citizenship. Evidently he is an excellent negotiator who sold his photographs, his story, his time for interviews and whatever, at very lucrative if not stupendous prices. Books have been written about him and films have been taken with him and his life experiences as subjects.

Yet, for some reason, known only to him, he returned to Nepal in 2003 where the notices and cases against him have not been fully closed and he has been arrested and presently is serving his time in a Kathmandu Prison ever since. Meantime he has raised a family it appears.

His story appears to be having all the ingredients to raise anyone’s intrigue – charm, trust, greed, intellect, intelligence, efficiency, inefficiency, luck, dogged determination and grit. And what more, it is international!

How many of the crimes attributed to him were actually committed by him would, perhaps, be known only to him. However, apart from being a hyperglot (it is believed that he know some 14 languages) and suave, that he was calculative, callous and charismatic seems to be beyond any doubt or debate. The internet is filled with content of such stories about him and so does the film and the Netflix programme.

Well, what do you say? Till then,

Krutagjnatalu (Telugu), Nanri (Tamil), Dhanyavaadagalu (Kannada), Nanni (Malayalam), Dhanyavaad (Hindi), Dhanyosmi (Sanskrit), Thanks (English), Dhonyavaad (Bangla), Dhanyabad (Oriya and Nepalese), Gracias (Spanish), Grazie (Italian), Danke Schon (Deutsche), Merci (French), Obrigado (Portuguese), Shukraan (Arabic and Sudanese), Shukriya (Urdu), Sthoothiy (Sinhalese) Aw-koon (Khmer), Kawp Jai Lhai Lhai (Laotian), Kob Kun Krab (Thai), Asante (Kiswahili), Maraming Salamat sa Lahat (Pinoy-Tagalog-Filipino), Tack (Swedish), Fa'afetai (Samoan), Terima Kasih (Bahasa Indonesian) and Tenkyu (Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea), Malo (Tongan), Vinaka Vaka Levu (Fijian)

 

Hemantha Kumar Pamarthy

Chennai, India