SHANTARAM - Gregory David Roberts

India Today, May 17, 2004.

When you are handed a 900-page work of fiction, at first you may wonder at the impertinence of such a thing - who even has time for these doorstoppers anymore? Australian writer Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram is such a book – huge, heavy and difficult to hold up. But once you read the author’s bio (husband, father, philosophy major turned heroin addict and criminal) and the blurb (“[Roberts] does for Bombay what Lawrence Durrell did for Alexandria and Melville did for the South Seas”) it’s an entirely different type of book. Huge, heavy and impossible to put down. To support his addiction, Roberts held up building societies, credit unions, and shops, but always - if reports are to believed - very politely, in a 3-piece suit and only with a toy gun. The ‘Gentlemen Bandit’, as he came to be known, was finally caught in 1978, and sentenced to 19 years in Victoria’s maximum-security prison. Within two years however, he escaped in broad daylight, and for most of the ten years before he was recaptured in Germany, he spent incognito, in Bombay. Shantaram is Roberts’s Indian adventure and reads like a travelogue, thriller and discourse on the nature of good and evil rolled into one. It is a thinly veneered autobiography, confession, apology, and eulogy to the country and people in whom even he, The Bad Guy, was able to find friendship, love and sanctuary.

When fugitive ‘Lindsay’ - taking the name from a stolen passport - arrived in Bombay, it was love at first sight. Or rather, at first smell. “I could smell it… even as I walked along the umbilical corridor that connected the plane to the airport…. the blue-skin smell of sea… the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals… of perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. Karla once described it as the worst good smell in the world.” Linbaba, as he came to be known on the hard streets of the city, arrived “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”. India, whether he knew it then or not, was going to be a painful, beautiful journey back to self. Almost immediately after his arrival, fate delivered him into the arms of Prabakar – an odd, lovable tout who takes him under his wing, and introduces him to his first inner circle - Deirdre, Ulla, Vikram, Lettie and Karla the beautiful Scandinavian woman with whom he falls deeply in love. With Prabakar as guide, Lin lives out the existentialist ideal, allowing himself to drift into a brand new life. From the incredible world of Colaba’s hippies, thugs, gangsters and prostitutes (with backdrop the historic Leopold café), to the less pleasant illegal ‘slave markets’ in Dongri and the city’s other horrific realities, this book documents the Bombay in minute detail. Eventually, inevitably, Lin becomes mixed up in the mafia as gunrunner, forger, smuggler, and counterfeiter, resupplies a unit of mujaheddin guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan, but also sets up a free diagnostic clinic in the slums, and (brace yourself) acts in Bollywood movies. It’s impossible to imagine a life more extraordinary.

It is a totally gripping story and though the narrative can be gratuitously sentimental and overly florid, there’s no denying its force. It is a superb insight into India and Indianness, full of the clarity of the outsider-insider. But still, to empathise with a violent criminal is confusing. (But he’s a slum doctor who was lovingly renamed Shantaram by sweet old ladies in an Indian village for his peaceable ways!). And the question crosses your mind – is this whole book project some sort of elaborate con? Given the skill set of the author it’s not entirely unthinkable. But you remind yourself it’s “literary fiction”, and you read this: “It took me a long time… 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… even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them... 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.” And it’s clear the writer has opened a vein. And then all’s forgiven.

© Tara Sahgal