Lucknow, Sept. 9: The pink T-shirt, tight denim trousers and Rayban sunglasses were enough to complete her makeover from teenage bandit queen, rifle slung over her shoulder, to the college girl next door.

But the disguise failed to fool the police informers who immediately recognised her as legendary dacoit Nirbhay Gujjar’s moll. As Sarala Jatav waited for the train to Mumbai at Etawah station around 4.30 pm yesterday, she suddenly found herself surrounded by four policemen.

Luck had finally run out on Nirbhay’s “Helen of Troy” ?the woman who had captivated his heart since she was a child and aroused in him a passion that broke up his marriage and then his gang.

“Sarala lent glamour to Nirbhay’s gang, and yet pushed it to the brink of disintegration. She has been arrested in connection with 20 dacoities in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan,” Etawah senior superintendent of police, Chaudhary Daljit Singh, told reporters as he presented her to the media today. “We are not sure about her age; she could be 16 or 17,” said officer Sarabjit Singh.

How did she fall into Nirbhay’s clutches? “I was about 11 when Nirbhay Gujjar came to our house to kill my father. But when he saw me, he offered my father a deal: he could hand me over and save his life. My father did,” Sarala said.

That was in 2000, the police said, after Nirbhay’s wife Munni eloped with a gang member, Munni Pandey. Nirbhay tracked them down and shot both dead. He killed Sarala’s uncle Lalu Jatav, a farmer whom he suspected to have had helped Munni elope. Then he turned his wrath on Sarala’s father Sambhu.

Sarala’s captor soon became her captive. Nirbhay had in the meantime married another woman, Neelum Gupta, but as Sarala began growing up, the dacoit chief’s infatuation also grew.

He began an affair with her and, to hide it, married her off to Shyam Jatav, a 16-year-old he had kidnapped near Delhi, trained into a marksman and appointed a key gang member.

Soon after the marriage in 2003, Shyam came to know of the affair. Neelum, too, was madly jealous of Sarala, “the most beautiful woman in the ravines”, and had begun hating Nirbhay because of the relationship. Last year, Neelum persuaded Shyam to run away with her.

Late in August this year, with his gang reduced from 72 members to six, a desperate Nirbhay tried to strike a surrender deal with the Madhya Pradesh government. It fell through, forcing him to return to the ravines.

“By now, Nirbhay had become very weak. It was too risky to run around the ravines with such a pretty woman by his side; so he decided to send Sarala out to a safehouse somewhere,” additional director-general of Uttar Pradesh police, A. Palnivel, said.

Last week, Nirbhay let the word go around that Sarala had died of snakebite in the jungles. He probably thought it would help Sarala avoid detection as she travelled to Mumbai. But Sarala has a different story. “I was asked to begin a new life with another gang member. But I did not like him; so I was escaping to Mumbai.”