Shantaram - a book review

Shantaram.

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving can become the story of your life.”

When the first page stares at you with these words, it becomes hard to put down that book. Add to that an Australian author who has lived in the slums of Bombay, and you almost expect to be taken on a ride into a spiritual dimension. The story of Shantaram is a story of adventure and courage, a fictionalized account of the life of author Gregory David Roberts who escaped an Australian prison and moved to Bombay to spend almost a decade of his life in the slums and underworld of this city.

The narrator is a man called Lindsay, who escapes an Australian jail and arrives in Bombay on a fake passport. Here he befriends taxi driver Prabakar, who finds him a place to live in a slum away from the eyes of the law. This slum is to be the home of Linbaba, as Lindsay is called, for the next few years. While he runs a makeshift first-aid centre in the slum, he also engages in criminal activities like smuggling and counterfeiting, and eventually starts gun-running to Afghanistan. For those of us who are ignorant to the underworld this book serves as text book in crime.  Lin’s experiences in Bombay range from falling in love with the beautiful Karla, who introduces him to the world of prostitutes, to meeting the motherly Rukhmabai of Sundargaon, who christens him “Shantaram”, or man of peace. Interspersed amid the numerous characters like Rukhmabai, Prabakar, Karla, and Kader is the blood, sweat and tears that go with a life of extreme poverty - all narrated with genuine affection, passion and generosity. This love and generosity towards the characters and circumstances is what sets Robert’s work apart. What could have been a mere narrative of poor people’s lives is transformed into an extraordinary piece of fiction.

I was initially daunted by the shear size of the book, weighing in at 936 pages it is comfortably wider than the width of my forearm and my forearms may not be as wide as Gregory David Roberts’ but they are pretty wide. At a time where stories have never seemed more disposable it is a relief to find one that merits all that time and paper. I recently found out that this is the first volume of a projected four based on his own life. Johnny Depp has agreed to play the lead role in the screen adaptation of Shantaram.

Shantaram is not just a book; it is a sojourn, a spiritual journey into life that shows that even the most complex and powerful systems have at their core a simple and beautiful pattern.