Born Hotchand Bhawnani Gurmukh Sobhraj, in April 1944, Asia's premier serial slayer was the illegitimate son of a Vietnamese peasant girl and a wealthy Indian merchant living in Saigon.
Soon after his birth, Sobhraj's father married an Indian woman in Pooma, and his mother retaliated by wedding a French military officer when Sobhraj was four years old. The land of Indochina was in turmoil at the time, with French colonial troops fighting a hopeless rear-guard action against Viet Minh communist rebels, and Hotchand Sobhraj witnessed countless acts of violence before his step-father took the family to France in 1953.
Sobhraj hated Europe and the Catholic boarding school in Paris where he soon became the butt of racial jokes and insults. (The school's lasting mark was a name change - to "Charles" - after Sobhraj's clever impersonation of comedian Charlie Chaplin.)
At first, he expressed his displeasure through tantrums and persistent bed-wetting, twice running away to Saigon in his teens. Sobhraj's father sent him back each time, but finally agreed to pay his passage for a trial visit home. The ticket never came, and Sobhraj turned to robbery, landing briefly in jail on his second try.
He finally reached Vietnam on his own, but the family reunion was tense, and Sobhraj was soon packed off to live with relatives in India after wrecking his father's car. When he turned up in Saigon again, uninvited, Charles's father threw in the towel, sending him back to France. In Paris, Charles was locked up twice for auto theft, emerging from jail the second time with a short-lived desire to "go straight."
He married, found a job, but the straight life quickly palled. Jailed again for writing forged checks on his sister's account, Charles was freed when she dropped the charges. He continued bouncing checks thereafter, saving up some 30,000 francs before he took his wife to Bombay , setting up shop as an international con man and smuggler, specializing in the theft of passports..
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