To be on the police Most Wanted list is something of a status symbol in Babloo's circle, as his book clearly shows. But Babloo also seems inordinately proud of being the object of Dawood's wrath. They tried to bump him off, he says, first in Dubai and again in Nepal. But having failed, he claims they tipped off Interpol. Here he doesn't forget to give us another instance of his patriotism—he claims that he helped the intelligence agencies in the assassination of the dreaded Mirza, a former Nepalese minister, and also another terrorist in Bangladesh.
While Babloo's book is bloodcurdlingly candid about his criminal exploits—the meticulous tracking of likely targets, the physical torture to intimidate them and even the bumping off of close associates, including a woman, for going against him—he says nothing about his personal life and loves. I ask him about an open secret in his circle: his marriage to a starlet from Indore, Archana. Is it true that she was on the same flight to Singapore and managed to evade the waiting policemen at the airport? Babloo refuses to be drawn out: "I am not a married man," he insists.
But about his own family he isn't so reticent. "When I fled from Lucknow to Chandraswami's ashram," he recounts, "they cut ties with me." But after his imprisonment in 1995, his mother took to visiting him sometimes. "But now she's dead," he says unemotionally. He confesses, however, to a soft spot for his youngest sister—he has five sisters apart from the colonel brother. "On my birthday last week, she had a kirtan for my speedy release," he says. And it was his brother-in-law who did the honours at Babloo's book launch, which he couldn't attend despite the court granting him a two-hour parole for the event. The police couldn't provide enough security, explains his publisher, who went to Lucknow for the launch, with not only copies of his now briskly-selling book but also a birthday cake for Babloo in the shape of a book.
I get the impression that Babloo was not too disappointed at missing his hour of glory in Lucknow: nothing could possibly hurt his vanity more than the prospect of arriving at his own book launch as a prisoner on parole. "I have no guilty conscience about anything I've done," he asserts, "and my only request to you is don't use a photo of me behind bars." Not that he's too happy with the photograph on his own book jacket. "I look like a blind man," he complains to his publisher, "change it".
