Neville & Clarke's Charles Sobhraj & Mehta's Karma Cola

Never the Twain . . .

Somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst . . .

Rudyard Kipling

No poet has conveyed the impact of Asia on the European sensibility better than Kipling. But his best-known line, which is a cliché indeed, “East is East and West is West”, is baffling. Have not the twain been meeting regularly in the twenty-odd centuries since Alexander the Great overran the Punjab? But then, meeting hardly seems the appropriate word in the light of Neville and Clarke’s biography of the French-Vietnamese murderer of young travellers and Gita Mehta’s sardonic sketches of how India is being sold to the West. The two books – both excellent despite their very different styles – strike one as a text and sermon respectively on the theme of cultural collision and mutual destruction. Perhaps Kipling was right after all?

Nevertheless, the tradition of Western intellectuals visiting the Orient for exotic experiences, aesthetic novelties and religious revelation runs back a long way. Even in the last century there was twice a pronounced cult of the East. The first, running parallel with and partly the inspiration of English Romanticism, left behind as its startling monument Brighton Pavilion, that preposterous pipedream of another era’s ‘mystic east’ wherein plaster and hardwoods are tortured into the likeness of bamboo. Much later and less spectacularly, in the eighteen-nineties, the passion for blue porcelain, Japanese prints and other chinoiseries helped to define the tone of the artistic Decadence. And in the present century there has been a continuous if muted philosophical dalliance with the Orient – Nietzsche and Blavatsky, Yeasts, Hesse and Jung; and in more recent decades the Californian Vedantists Isherwood, Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley. From them, of course, it is only a short step, via Ginsberg, Kerouac and flower power, to the theme of Karma Cola. Whereas earlier interactions meant the gradual diffusion of fairly recondite ideas and objects d’art westwards, that of the last fifteen years or so has seen the passage of large number of people eastward – almost a crusade, but a crusade not to convert but to be converted. Some five million Westerners (the estimate is Mehta’s) have heeded the cry of Eastward Ho and have added to the susurration of sandalled feet to be heard anywhere along the trail winding from Istanbul to Bombay.

For this unprecedented flow no single reason can be assigned. The restless search for the exotic and the means to gratify it; the elaborate networks of land and air communications which now exist in even the poorest countries; a fancied revulsion from materialism: all these no doubt play a part. One of Mehta’s bitter little anecdotes possibly even suggests that some of the British interest has its root in liberal guilt flourishing in the afterglow of empire. As that onetime servant of imperialism, George Orwell, was moved to prophesy in 1943, just as Indian nationalism was gathering force and drawing in disaffected English intellectuals: “We shall be hearing a lot about the superiority of eastern civilisation in the next few years.” On a longer time scale than he perhaps envisaged, how right he was! And one might say, admittedly with the benefit of hindsight, that once the lessons of the Californian gurus had been well vulgarised all else followed with historical inevitability. For what they taught, in essence, was that samadhi is everyone’s birthright. Mystical enlightenment needs no prolonged spiritual or physical discipline; if required, the psychedelics can give a taste (a “gratuitous grace” as Huxley phrased it) of at least the first stages of illumination. From Huxley’s Doors of Perception (1954) we can now see that there is a smooth line of descent to the Maharishi’s bargain basement bliss, “Om” between business deals, bouncing around on your bottom in Switzerland pretending you are levitating, and the even wilder excesses of ‘spirituality’ lovingly detailed by Mehta. Whereas the older searchers took from the East only what they could assimilate and rejected the rest (especially the quietism of Buddhism) their children and grandchildren have gleefully thrown overboard their entire cultural and intellectual baggage. Of these millions of Western travellers, seekers and junkies how in Asia, most will one day return whence they came. An indeterminate number, however, will fall prey to disease, drugs or mental deterioration. Some small fraction will meet the more grisly fate of being lured to their deaths as sacrifices to skull-garlanded Kali by bogus sadhus or Anand Marg execution squads. And a few – a dozen or so – had the misfortune to meet, in 1975-6, Charles Sobhraj.

Sobhraj’s home ground lay further east in Bangkok, of all the great Asian cities the one most ravaged by indiscriminate Westernisation. Amid its tawdry glitter Sobhraj, at the time he began his murders, was a prosperous gem dealer and it was the chance of making easy money from smuggling that brought to his flat many a traveller. Criminologically speaking, Sobhraj’s murders have no especially notable features. The motive he himself put forward, that he was executioner for a Hong Kong syndicate hired to make an example of some amateurs, can be dismissed. Sobhraj offered it to Neville as if neither believing it himself nor expecting others to do so. Though some of his victims had drug connections others were just what they seemed to be: a Dutch couple, drugged and burnt alive, were conscientious tourists; and another girl was certainly on her way to Kathmandu to become a Buddhist novice. The killings were in fact classically psychopathic. The murders of a psychopath have been compared to a thirsty man drinking petrol: as his final inhibitions break down he tries to quench his longings by killing but succeeds only in exacerbating them; thus his crimes tend to be repeated at an accelerating pace and to grow ever nastier. (Sobhraj’s main sequence of murders occurred over a few months, starting with drowning a drugged girl but ending with two savage mutilations and burnings.) His personality too fits exactly the diagnosis of psychopathy: the boyish charm, the cloying and creepy politeness, the endurance and self-discipline, the puritanism towards drugs, women and emotional display, the deep fixed conviction that all others are manipulable insects, the almost mesmeric power of will and finally the abruptly surfacing ruthlessness.

As the case of Capote and In Cold Blood showed, the fact that a writer stands to gain so much in pocket and reputation from supping with the devil makes any biographer’s relations with a self-confessed murderer somewhat ambivalent. Whoever their subject, biographies tend to sound the celebratory note – why write one otherwise? Neville is nearly the same age as Sobhraj, knows the overland trail very well, and shares some of his contempt for the law of which he too has fallen foul. Just ten years ago in Play Power, an indulgent survey of the counterculture which surely must make him blush today, a younger and sillier Neville was furnishing young travellers with information about buying false identification and selling their passports in Tangier for $200. It is not surprising that he betrays a certain infatuation with the sheer adventurousness of Sobhraj’s career and the dynamism and resourcefulness of his personality. Indeed, he admits to having begun his research with the expectation that he would find at best a Robin Hood intent on redistributing tourists’ riches, or at worst a victim of colonialism being hounded from jail to jail. But he also has the grace to admit that what did find was something evil, and the honesty to record that his role well be interpreted as being that of a bandit’s groupie.

Since the culminating murders which have made Sobhraj infamous are much less interesting than his life and times, Neville and Clarke have refrained from too much analysis of motive (which is quite likely a mystery to Sobhraj himself) and have concentrated on his background and significance. It is here that they show great talent in marshalling a mass of intractable and confusing detail as they give a vivid and moving account of the mysterious workings of genes, environment and accident in the young Sobhraj, a particle swept about by the forces shaping modern southeast Asia.

His life in Saigon from 1944 on, when he was born to the Vietnamese mistress of a prosperous expatriate Indian tailor and moneylender, was full of dislocation, violence and identity crises. The city, in Japanese hands during the war, passed to the Viet Minh until the French took over and headed into the long shambles of colonial war. Sobhraj passed his childhood in the backstreets of a booming war town, torn between his rich father and cold mother (now married to a French soldier) in, successively, Saigon, Marseilles, a Paris boarding school, Dakar, Paris again – where as a teenager he began his criminal career by robbing housewives at gunpoint – and then back to Saigon, now filled with the American presence. Here there was a brief interlude when, newly recognised as the merchant’s son, he might yet have been redeemed; but in a city where there were such rich if erratic pickings the lure proved too great.

He was back in Paris for the summer of ’68 where he learnt a little Maoist rhetoric handy in quieting his wife and victims on the tourist trail – “people are beginning to wake up about the State” – but really his ambitions and values had solidified into the more traditional ones of sharp suits, posh hotels and ‘business’. Himself torn between Europe and Asia, he began to commute around and between the two with ever-increasing facility, taking planes like taxis. The airline networks which brought the tourists in their thousands also enabled Sobhraj to establish and alibi in Bangkok while murdering in Kathmandu.

His career as con-man and robber with his armoury of Mogadons and laxatives is laden with ironies and paradoxes: the street urchin from Saigon hot after prosperity but hiding his wolf’s instincts behind a front of hairy friendship, robbing middle-class travellers themselves disguised as wandering mendicants but often wearing under their fluttering garb money-belts stuffed with hard currencies; the stateless boy becoming the expert juggler of a dozen forged passports; his philosophy a heady brew of Nietzsche, Jung and crackpot ‘sciences’ like characterology; his trading post and (eventually) his killing ground anywhere from the Middle East to Indochina; his accomplices young deracinés themselves demoralised by the ethical blur and endemic corruption of Asia.

Gita Mehta is well aware of the significance of this violent and fascinating story – Sobhraj figures briefly in Karma Cola – and like him she has a foot in both worlds, being both a high-caste Indian and a producer in British television. She has a perspicacious eye and an astringent pen, and she explores her subject with great verve and, in the circumstances, remarkably little bad temper. “They thought we were profound, we knew we were provincial. Everybody thought everybody else was ridiculously exotic and everybody got it wrong”: this is the central confusion to which she several times returns. The consequences of getting it wrong can be as tragic as anything in Charles Sobhraj. She devotes two pages to an American who, aghast at seeing a beggar soliciting alms outside a temple by flaying his six year old daughter with a rope inset with small knives, buys the girl from him. She, even two years later, is still responding to her benefactor by trying whenever possible to fellate him: “she has had extensive experience of holy men,” Mehta comments drily.

Other confusions are blackly farcical. Among would-be mystical adepts a descent into drivelling idiocy is not uncommon. We hear of a girl who, having heard some monks in Kathmandu humming to themselves, deduced that this must be a new mantra and so began to practise it for up to seventy hours at a stretch – unfortunately unaware that her mentors had only taken up humming after being given radios by helpful tourists. She is no less accurate when she turns her fire on subjects on the other side, like the spoilt brat, promoted as a divinity by his followers, who manifested his godhead to the author by demanding tin soldiers as a tribute; and those other older gurus who assurance that all is maya, illusion, is somehow found compatible with gold toilet seats and Rolex watches. (Whether, once the spurious and fraudulent have been siphoned off from Indian mysticism, there is any valuable residue to it is something Mehta refuses – or is unable – to touch on, and this is her one conspicuous failure.)

All this is splendid fun and, in the context of a religion like Hinduism where the exact boundary between play-acting and seriousness is indefinable, pleasantly innocent. The dictum that if you can’t do good, at least refrain from doing evil may not be the highest morality but it does have something to recommend it: sitting in an ashram in Pondicherry is as innocent an occupation as one could ask for, and must even do something for India’s balance of payments. Is it not altogether too zealous to talk about these activities in terms of cultural oppression? Who is the oppressor and who the victim?

The Western visitors to the burning ghats at Benares are, no doubt, all voyeurs at the last show on earth where death is a public spectacle. Some will be astonished, some outraged, to find that each Sanskrit verse recited has its price to the relatives – a flexible price, for the bargaining goes on even as the body burns, and reaches a pitch after the boiling brains have burst open the head. But, counterbalancing that, the Indians go to gawk at the nude Europeans on Goa’s Arjuna beach and to watch the hippie girls suckling the monkeys.

Each side gets a frisson from watching its own taboos calmly being violated by the other. And, as Mehta implicitly acknowledges, the mystic east is being sold from both ends at once. She can get a justifiable laugh out of young Americans who, unable to find a park, mutter about “bad karma” but her own countrymen have had few scruples about vulgarising their most abstruse philosophical concepts: it was an Indian airline, after all, that advertised its tours as “Nirvana: $100 a day”. In the light of these two disquieting books one wonders for just how many that promise has been literally fulfilled.

Quadrant Jan-Feb 1981, 110-112.