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Shantaram

Gregory David Roberts

INDEX:

Book Jacket Information

Praise for Shantaram

PART PART PART PART PART ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Disclaimer

Shantaram

Gregory David Roberts

Book Jacket Information:

_Shantaram is a novel based on the life of the author, Gregory

David Roberts. In 1978 Roberts committed a series of armed robberies while addicted to heroin, and was sentenced to nineteen years' imprisonment. In July 1980 he escaped over the front wall of Victoria's maximum-security prison, in broad daylight, thereby becoming one of Australia's most wanted men for what turned out to be the next ten years.

His journey took him to New Zealand, Asia, Africa and Europe, but his home for most of those years was Bombay-where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for one of the most charismatic branches of the Bombay mafia.

_Shantaram deals with all this, and more. It is an epic, mesmerizing tale of crowded slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison torture, mafia gang wars and Bollywood films, and spiritual gurus and brutal battlefields. It weaves a seamless web of unforgettable characters, amazing adventures, and superb evocations of Indian life.

This remarkable book can be read as a vast, extended thriller, as well as a superbly written meditation on the nature of good and evil. It is a compelling tale of a hunted man who had lost everything-his home, his family, and his soul-and came to find his humanity while living at the wildest edge of experience.

Nothing like this has been written before, and nobody but Greg

Roberts could have written it now.


***

Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne, and has lived in

India, New Zealand, Germany, and Switzerland. He speaks four languages and has traveled widely in Asia, Africa and Europe. He is now a full-time writer and lives in Melbourne.


***

Praise for Shantaram

"Shantaram is a big and big-hearted book... It's got everything you could ever want in a novel-memorable characters, tortured romances, wild comic capers in exotic locales; stories of heroism and cowardice, love and betrayal, sin and redemption...

"This vast tapestry of tales is sewn together with the skill of a master storyteller... Roberts has one hell of an imaginative gift...

"What, in the end, strikes you most about this swashbuckling and ultimately life-affirming romp of a novel is that it is also the kind the aesthetic triumph we once called-without blushing-a masterpiece."

- Cameron Woodhead, The Age

"It is a tale, by turns gripping, hilarious, moving and instructive. It evokes the raucous tangle of modern India superbly."

- Frank Campbell, The Australian

"Shantaram is not so much a mirror as a mirror ball, spinning with relentless drive, dazzling but ungras-pable. And, again, audacious. Gloriously audacious."

- Nicola Robinson, The Sydney Morning Herald


***

For my mother


***

May all those you love find the truth in you and be true to your love.


____________________

Shantaram

Part One

Chapter One

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 realized, somehow, through the screaming in 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.

In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better men than I am, most of them: better men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.

And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.

But my story doesn't begin with them, or with the mafia: it goes back to that first day in Bombay. Fate put me in the game there.

Luck dealt the cards that led me to Karla Saaranen. And I started to play it out, that hand, from the first moment I looked into her green eyes. So it begins, this story, like everything else- with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.

The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air. I could smell it before I saw or heard anything of India, even as I walked along the umbilical corridor that connected the plane to the airport. I was excited and delighted by it, in that first Bombay minute, escaped from prison and new to the wide world, but I didn't and couldn't recognize it. I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It's the smell of gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay. It's the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood-metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. Karla once called it the worst good smell in the world, and she was right, of course, in that way she had of being right about things. But whenever I return to Bombay, now, it's my first sense of the city-that smell, above all things-that welcomes me and tells me I've come home.

The next thing I noticed was the heat. I stood in airport queues, not five minutes from the conditioned air of the plane, and my clothes clung to sudden sweat. My heart thumped under the command of the new climate. Each breath was an angry little victory. I came to know that it never stops, the jungle sweat, because the heat that makes it, night and day, is a wet heat. The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Bombay, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.

Then there were the people. Assamese, Jats, and Punjabis; people from Rajasthan, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu; from Pushkar, Cochin, and Konarak; warrior caste, Brahmin, and untouchable; Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Parsee, Jain, Animist; fair skin and dark, green eyes and golden brown and black; every different face and form of that extravagant variety, that incomparable beauty, India.

All the Bombay millions, and then one more. The two best friends of the smuggler are the mule and the camel. Mules carry contraband across a border control for a smuggler. Camels are unsuspecting tourists who help the smuggler to get across the border. To camouflage themselves, when using false passports and identification papers, smugglers insinuate themselves into the company of fellow travelers- camels, who'll carry them safely and unobtrusively through airport or border controls without realizing it.

I didn't know all that then. I learned the smuggling arts much later, years later. On that first trip to India I was just working on instinct, and the only commodity I was smuggling was my self, my fragile and hunted freedom. I was using a false New Zealand passport, with my photograph substituted in it for the original. I'd done the work myself, and it wasn't a perfect job.

I was sure it would pass a routine examination, but I knew that if suspicions were aroused, and someone checked with the New Zealand High Commission, it would be exposed as a forgery fairly quickly. On the journey to India from Auckland, I'd roamed the plane in search of the right group of New Zealanders. I found a small party of students who were making their second trip to the sub-continent. Urging them to share their experience and travellers' tips with me, I fostered a slender acquaintance with them that brought us to the airport controls together. The various Indian officials assumed that I was traveling with that relaxed and guileless group, and gave me no more than a cursory check.

I pushed through alone to the slap and sting of sunlight outside the airport, intoxicated with the exhilaration of escape: another wall scaled, another border crossed, another day and night to run and hide. I'd escaped from prison almost two years before, but the fact of the fugitive life is that you have to keep on escaping, every day and every night. And while not completely free, never completely free, there was hope and fearful excitement in the new: a new passport, a new country, and new lines of excited dread on my young face, under the trey eyes. I stood there on the trample street, beneath the baked blue bowl of Bombay sky, and my heart was as clean and hungry for promises as a monsoon morning in the gardens of Malabar.

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