Shantaram

Gregory David Roberts

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.

Realising that, understanding it, made me see the hard edges of the way I’d treated the boy, Tariq, himself a stranger in my raw and ragged fragment of the city. Ashamed of the cold selfishness that had stolen my pity, and pierced by the courage and loneliness of the little boy, I listened to his sleeping breath, and let him cling to the ache in my heart. Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have—to hold on tight until dawn.

They’d lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn’t like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing the white wilderness of snow. You can’t kill love. You can’t even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

I was numb, in those first years after the escape: shell-shocked by the disasters that warred in my life. My heart moved through deep and silent water. No-one, and nothing, could really hurt me. No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.

The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They’re wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, then they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn’t a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.

No-one but Karla called it rape. He said that Karla had led him on, and Karla’s aunt took his part. The fifteen-year-old orphan from Switzerland left her aunt’s home, and never contacted her again. She moved to Los Angeles, where she found a job, shared an apartment with another girl and began to make her own way. But after the rape, Karla lost the part of loving that grows in trust. Other kinds of love remained in her—friendship, compassion, sexuality—but the love that believes and trusts in the constancy of another human heart, romantic love, was lost.

Lin, a man has to find a good woman, and when he finds her he has to win her love. Then he has to earn her respect. Then he has to cherish her trust. And then he has to, like, go on doing that for as long as they live. Until they both die. That’s what it’s all about. That’s the most important thing in the world. That’s what a man is, yaar. A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you can do that, you’re not a man.

I let the raining silence close her eyes for the last time. She slept. I knew we didn’t have her story. Not the whole of it. I knew the small daubs of colour she’d excluded from her summary were at least as important as the broad strokes she’d included. The devil, they say, is in the details, and I knew well the devils that lurked and skulked in the details of my own story. But she had given me a hoard of new treasures. I’d learned more about her in the exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months before it. Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.

I hesitated. Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, it’s the other way around.

This social work seems to suit you, Didier commented through an arch smile. You look so well and so fit—underneath the bruises and scratches, that is. I think you must be a very bad man, in your heart of hearts, Lin. Only a wicked man would derive such benefit from good works. A good man, on the other hand, would simply be worn out and bad tempered.

Lettie had once said that she found it strange and incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers, and Mafiosi as men of honour. The confusion, I think, was hers, not mine. She’d confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she give it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.

No problem, waiting, Lin, Prabaker replied, airily. The people are waiting more than one hour already. If you are not with us, they would still be waiting, but waiting for nothing only. Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn’t it? Now the people are waiting for something. Waiting for you, they are. And you are a really something, Lin-Shantaram, if you don’t mind I’m saying it to your smoky face and sticking-up hairs. But firs you must make it motions, and then washing and then breakfast. And we have to get going—some young fellows are waiting down there on the jetty, and wanting to see you make your motions.

I mean that you are making things to be more difficult than they are, or need to be. The facts of life are very simple. In the beginning we feared everything—animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky—everything except each other. Now we fear each other, and almost nothing else. No-one knows why anyone does anything. No-one tells the truth. No-one is happy. No-one is safe. In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate. And now you have it.

What characterizes the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty or the capacity to feel shame for it? I thought the question acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterizes the human race. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

I think that our brother Khaled is right, in a way, Farid began quietly, almost shyly. He turned his large, dark brown eyes on Khaderbhai,. Encouraged by the older man’s nod of interest, he continued, I think that happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is a so strange and power thing that it makes us to be sick, much happiness. The—how do you say it, bhari vazan?
The burden, Khaderbhai translated for him. Farid spoke a phrase rapidly in Hindi, and Khader gave it to us in such an elegantly poetic English that I realized, through the haze of the stone, how much better his English was than he’d led me to believe at our first meeting. ‘The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering.’
Yes, yes, that is it what I want to say. Without the suffering, the happiness would squash us down.

It’s easy—suffering is hungry isn’t it? Hungry, for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means, not suffering. But everybody knows that.

I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

If you have skipped the quotes listed above, go back and read them. If you think there are too many, read some now, come back another day and read more and do this until you've read them all. I put them up there for a reason; they are a better review of this book than anything I could write.

That being said, Shantaram is a great read. The author was a bank robber in Australia who escaped from prison in broad daylight over the front wall and landed on Australia's most wanted list. He fled to Bombay where he became a foot-soldier for the mafia and ended up living in a slum running a free health clinic. His life alone warrants reading his book.