It was the real life Catch Me If You Can script that Bollywood completely missed. Mumbai Police inspector Madhukar Zende caught up with escaped criminal and serial killer Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj in a sleepy Goan restaurant by posing as a tourist and sidling up to him with the Dr Livingstone-esque line: "Hello Charles!" Zende had also arrested the "Bikini Killer" earlier in 1971.

PICTURE SPEAK

CAPTIVE: The table at the O Coqueiro

The restaurant, which shot to fame after the arrest, likes to believe that its Chicken Cafreal had something to do with Sobhraj's nemesis. The erstwhile tourist-killer loved the spicy, wine-marinated chicken dish brought to Goa by East African immigrants. Sobhraj may have once again been caught by police-in a casino in Kathmandu last year where he has now been sentenced to life imprisonment-but he will never leave the O Coqueiro restaurant in Porvorim, Goa.

When the restaurant reopened on November 14 after a two-month renovation, motorists did a double take when they saw a silhouette of the master criminal in his trademark beret and thick glasses buried in a book, seated cross-legged on a wicker chair on the portico. "If you want to see the real Sobhraj, you'll have to go to Nepal,'' grins Shailesh Sanzgiri, vice-president of the Alcon Hotels (Goa) Pvt Ltd. "We have the next best thing-his statue.''

Two months ago, the restaurant commissioned Umesh Pandit of Goa Potteries to bake Sobhraj's terracotta likeness. The book symbolises the criminal's high IQ and the chains are in keeping with his just-caught status and the crime-doesn't-pay adage. He is seated just 10 ft away from where he was apprehended that night in 1986.

The statue hasn't found its way to Goa tourism's must-see checklist, but the criminal's presence is the restaurant's star eyeball grabber and a popular photo op. The statue is perilously popular. Visiting children recently jumped on it and broke its foot. But there are no Sobhraj mugs and T-shirts yet, and rightly so. "We have to be careful not to glorify him,'' Sanzgiri adds. Besides, the very market-savvy Sobhraj, who charged the media upwards of $5,000 per interview, wouldn't let a small thing like life in a Kathmandu jail interfere with a share of the profits.

Charles Sobhraj as a tourist attraction? Perhaps that's poetic justice for a serial killer who made his livelihood by preying on hapless travellers at resorts.

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