Guru Sant Singh Khalsa returned to New Mexico last week, more than seven months after he jumped bail in India, where he says he is wanted as a fugitive from fraud charges.

"India is just bizarre, and the police control everything," the 52-year-old said in an interview Friday at a Santa Fe motel room, where he had a .38-caliber revolver sitting on a nearby dresser. "I realize now that there were other things going on there. They might try to list me as an international terrorist."

California-born Clark Harris converted from Christianity to Sikhism 30 years ago and was given his Sikh name by the late Yogi Bhajan, whose ashram near Española drew thousands of young converts such as Singh Khalsa in the 1970s.

Singh Khalsa's tale began two years ago, when he traveled to Amritsar, capital of the Indian Sikh state of Punjab. Singh Khalsa, who worked as a real-estate agent, said he wanted to have inexpensive dental work done there and, because he had recently divorced, he looked into finding a traditional Sikh bride through a marriage bureau.

On Jan. 12, 2008, he said, he and the marriage broker were confronted by the police and an Indian television reporter posing as a husband-seeker and accused of conspiring to defraud women. Singh Khalsa said he had paid the broker and didn't realize the broker was double-charging the women.

Singh Khalsa said that after two weeks in jail he was released on bond and allowed to travel within India and to take jobs in ashrams catering to spiritual tourists, but was banned from leaving the country.

At first, he was determined to clear his name, he said, but after spending thousands of rupees on lawyers, fees and bribes, and attending a dozen court hearings, Singh Khalsa realized the legal ordeal could continue for years. He said he began to plot his escape when he learned he was being investigated as a spy for the Khalistan or Sikh-separatist movement.

"They certainly didn't want to clear me because they'd lose complete face over that, so they just let things go on and on," he said. "I realized they were never going to give me any kind of fair trial over there. Not only do they linger these things on, but they'll bring whatever witnesses they want. They make up witnesses. It's just a complete thing for their aggrandizement."

Singh Khalsa said U.S. Embassy staff in New Delhi tacitly abetted his escape by issuing him a replacement passport, even though they knew his original had been confiscated by the courts. In April of this year, he took a train to the Sonali border crossing into Nepal and walked across.

"When I got to the border — they have their little customs and immigration booths right by the border — this one Indian immigration guy walked right in front of me," he said. "I thought, 'Oh, man, I'm going to get nailed.' But he didn't say anything. I looked Indian enough with a beard and everything. Some Kashmir Sikhs are pretty white."

An Indian friend later brought his luggage with his replacement passport into Nepal. But he still lacked an entrance or exit visa from India, as well as an entrance visa for Nepal. That took about $1,000 more in bribes to both Indian and Nepalese immigration officials, weeks of delicate negotiations and finally $200 worth of "whores and booze" for a final party for the immigration agents, he said.

On April 14, he boarded a commercial airliner in Katmandu bound for Qatar and, from there, to Washington, D.C. "When the U.S. customs agent said, 'Welcome back to the United States,' I said, 'You don't know how much that means to me.' "

Singh Khalsa said when he returned to Sombrillo to take care of business, he felt that he was persona non grata among the 3HO (healthy, happy, holy) community of American Sikh converts. He said one local leader told him, "We would have rather you just stayed there."

"To tell you the truth, I have been kind of a rebel," he said. "I have sued people in the community. I even almost sued Yogi Bhajan over some business deals. So when I was arrested over there, the feedback I got was they all thought I was guilty of this heinous crime, so they didn't want to have anything to do with it."

While back in New Mexico this summer, he met a traditional Sikh woman, a medical doctor from India living in London, over the Internet and flew to England to meet her. On July 10, they married in a Sikh ceremony in Chicago, where she has relatives. He is now trying to obtain a green card for her so they can resettle in California, where he hopes to open a spiritual-oriented medical clinic.

He declined to identify his new wife because, he said, her first two husbands had left her after taking her dowry, and public knowledge of that would shame her. "Divorce is a big thing in India," he said. "It's all about the family and ... they'll hold it against them forever. It's really shameful. It's always the woman's fault if there's divorce."

Singh Khalsa told his story while sitting at a table in a cheap motel on Cerrillos Road on Friday evening before heading west to visit his parents. He said his father helped him cover the $30,000 he spent during his two-year ordeal.

He said that although he is not worried about any official attempt to extradite him, he thinks there is a possibility that the Indian government or someone linked to it might try to sabotage him in the United States or even kidnap him and return him to India. He carries the revolver and said he is careful to keep his whereabouts confidential.

"I think probably I broke some U.S. laws by bribing these officials (via) the Foreign Corruption Practices Act, but I can't possibly see the State Department trying to prosecute me for that," he said. "No jury is going to convict me for getting out of there."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.