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Its title is a give away. As is the collage on the front cover —of fear-filled wide eyes and never-ending bare legs. For those who still don’t get it, there is a teaser on the back. This, brings out an uncanny similarity between Dhondy’s protagonist Johnson Thhat and Charles Sobhraj.
Dhondy doesn’t deny Sobhraj’s influence though the novelist insists it isn’t his story. ‘Sobhraj has never been convicted for any of the murders he was accused of, barring the one in Nepal. But Thhat is a serial-killer,’ says the England-based author. While in India, he will release The Bikini Murders and re-release Poona Company in Delhi and Mumbai. The latter, published in 1980, has young Dhondy recounting his growing-up years in a Parsi neighbourhood of the 50s in Pune through nine connected stories. The Bikini Murders is special to Dhondy. After dabbling in many forms of writing-including film scripts, columns, novels and a biography-the 64-year-old makes his debut as a crime-thriller writer with it. ‘I didn’t have substantial material for a thriller earlier,’ he admits. But Sobhraj’s association has played catalyst to this.
After his Tihar jail stint, Sobhraj had approached Dhondy to help in finding an agent to publish his memoir. It never got printed. The agent rejected Sobhraj’s memoir for ‘too much boasting and too little truth’. But Dhondy got meat for his cross-continental crime saga. Imagination took over soon after.
In ‘The Bikini Murders’ Thhat is arrested in a Kathmandu casino. But retired inspector Pradhan, who has been hot on his trail for 25 years, senses something amiss. Did Thhat mastermind his own long imprisonment? Pradhan tries to piece the puzzle together from Thhat’s account: his career in crime as a teenager in France; drawn into diamond smuggling; his ‘chemistry’ with Ravina, with whom he robbed and killed tourists in Thailand and India before being caught.
The crime thriller genre has hardly been explored by Indian authors, so far. ‘Indian authors are too caught up in gazing at their navel. They hardly look beyond their immediate family and surrounding for stories,’ says Dhondy.
The author remains evasive about his next book. ‘There is a novel brewing in my mind. There are a couple of commissioned books.’ This is all he divulges. But he talks enthusiastically about his upcoming film projects, ‘Ramayana’ by Sanjay Khan, and ‘Carpet Boy’ by Giles Nuttgens. ‘Films are easier to talk about. Books are intimate. You never know how they will end,’ he adds.
