Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts

Shantaram is based on the story of the author’s life, and what part of the story is fact and what is fiction is debatable. Some of it is on record, such as his imprisonment and escape from prison, and some are impossible to verify.

The book begins with his arrival in Mumbai with a fake passport - a wanted man on the run after escaping from the Australian prison where he was jailed for robbing to finance his heroin habit. Leaving his friends, family and past behind, he makes Mumbai his home, serving as an unofficial doctor in the slums, making his living by guiding foreign tourists to the best sources of hash, and eventually joining the Mumbai mafia. He becomes fluent in Hindi & Marathi, spends 6 months in a remote Maharashtrian village, learns the ropes of all the black markets thriving in Mumbai, makes friends in the expat community, falls in love, and even fights in Afghanistan. Yet this book is about so much more than the story.

There are fascinating descriptions of not only the interesting people he befriends  and the dramatic (and many times violent) events that happen to him, but also of his musings on love, loss, guilt and life philosophy. Please allow me to show you this heartwarming excerpt.

A man opposite me shifted his feet, accidentally brushing his foot against mine. It was a gentle touch, barely noticeable, but the man immediately reached out to touch my knee and then his own chest with the fingertips of his right hand, in the Indian gesture of apology for an unintended offence. In the carriage and the corridor beyond, the other passengers were similarly respectful, sharing, and solicitous with one another. At first, on that first journey out of the city into India, I found such sudden politeness infuriating after the violent scramble to board the train. It seemed hypocritical for them to show such deferential concern over a nudge with a foot when, minutes before, they'd all but pushed one another out of the windows. Now, long years and many journeys after that first ride on a crowded rural train, I know that the scrambled fighting and courteous deference were both expressions of the one philosophy: the doctrine of necessity. The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example, was no less and no more than the amount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied and unavoidable question everywhere in India. When I understood that, a great many of the characteristically perplexing aspects of public life became comprehensible: from the acceptance of sprawling slums by city authorities, to the freedom that cows had to roam at random in the midst of traffic; from the toleration of beggars on the streets, to the concatenate complexity of the bureaucracies; and from the gorgeous, unashamed escapism of Bollywood movies, to the accommodation of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tibet, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and Bangladesh, in a country that was already too crowded with sorrows and needs of its own. The real hypocrisy, I came to realise, was in the eyes and minds and criticisms of those who came from lands of plenty, where none had to fight for a seat on a train.

I wish the world saw us with such respect and understanding. Hell, I wish we saw ourselves this way.

This is a book that you want to read slowly, chewing on and savouring the contents, from deep philosophical discussions to clever lines such as “Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting”. At other times, you find yourself devouring pages-long descriptions of things that you would never have expected to cross your mind, much less fascinate you. Such as knife fight strategy, passport counterfeiting, the working of the currencies black market, getting into and out of heroin, survival in a slum, and power dynamics between prison inmates.

The author narrates his story with endearingly self-deprecating honesty about his thoughts and reactions at each point. There is a poetic beauty to the way he uses metaphors of the surroundings to reflect his inner turmoil, and a touching intensity in his descriptions of the people around him. He has insisted, in interviews, that all the characters in the book are fictional, but after reading about them you feel that they must definitely be based, at least loosely, on real people, simply because of the impact they have on the reader. Or at the very least they must represent the influences and impressions of his time in Mumbai.

Bottom line - I would definitely recommend you read this book - at a leisurely pace. Preferably buy it, or borrow it from a library that doesn't send you weekly reminders for returning it.