Why this book:  For several years, one of the members of our reading group has been insisting that we read this book, but we have resisted because of its size – it is 930 pages long.  Finally we relented and selected it for a post-Christmas book – to give us the vacation window to read it. So glad we finally agreed.

Summary in 4 Sentences: This is a novelized autobiographical account of about 5 years in the life of the author, living in Bombay, India after having  escaped from a maximum security prison in Australia.  The author lives by petty street crime on the streets of Bombay, eventually becoming a medic in Bombay’s slums, until he is invited to join one of Bombay’s most powerful crime syndicates.  The author is tough and street-wise, intelligent, thoughtful, and wise – but haunted by his own personal demons.  His experiences and many adventures are fascinating, but what truly makes this book extraordinary is his commentary on what he does and sees, and how his experiences affect him as he comes to better understand himself and others, the world,  good and evil, love and hate, joy and sorrow, and what is worth living and dying for.

My Impressions: Wow!  What story! What a book!  It is indeed an epic – a rollicking adventure, a roller coaster ride,  beginning with his arrival in Bombay with little money and a fake passport as one of Australia’s most wanted criminals – all the way to the book’s conclusion, with the author still in India, a scarred survivor, a much wiser and more mature man, contemplating his future.

In between, he is constantly aware that if anyone looks carefully into his past, his cover will be blown and he’ll be extradited to Australia and returned to the “punishment cell” in the maximum security prison where he hd been routinely tortured.  He learns to live by facilitating drug deals for western tourists who can relate to a “white westerner,” more easily than to locals.  He lives on the streets for a while and then moves to a small cardboard/plywood hut in the Bombay slums where he uses his background in first aid to treat the poor, and becomes a highly respected healer among the inhabitants of the slum.  In the interim, he learns the culture, learns the local dialect as well as Hindi, the official language.

Then his talent and his skills are noticed by the bigger fish in the world of crime, and he is invited into counterfeiting and money laundering, and eventually passport and document forging, as his skills and reliability make him a trusted member of one of Bombay’s most powerful mafia syndicates.  He finds this mafia group to be a good fit – he likes the men he meets and works with, he is making good money, and the connections of this group protect him from the police and possible compromise of his illegal status. Also, he is drawn to this group because of his respect and eventual love for the mafia Don, a well-educated and thoughtful man who draws a line on what kind of crime he will commit: No prostitution, no drug dealing, no pornography, no trafficking.  Violence only when “necessary.”

There is a love interest in the story, which provides a romantic tension throughout the book.  Not only is our protagonist an intelligent, and appealing but troubled character, but so is Karla, the woman to whom he is drawn and who is drawn to him – intelligent, appealing, intriguing, but also damaged and haunted by her own demons.

Shantaram is an epic story, and includes many sub-stories in the author’s journey:  His time as a healer in the slum, several horrifying months in a Bombay prison, becoming addicted to heroin and the horrors of cold-turkey withdrawal, rescuing a woman from a powerful prostitution cartel.  He eventually gets caught up in a scheme which takes him to Pakistan, hiding from the Pakistani police and later fighting for his life with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Russians.  He also gets involved in a battle over territory between warring criminal factions in Bombay.  And much more.  There is plenty of macho testosterone in the book, but it is always tempered by the author’s humility and vulnerability, and his love and loyalty toward the key men and women in his life.  His love for the people of India and Bombay are infectious and reinforced throughout the book.  There is something in this book for everyone.

What gives this epic its backbone is the appeal and self-awareness of the protagonist and his efforts to understand and grow from the good and the evil he not only observes but participates in. He is physically and mentally tough, and yet not afraid to be vulnerable and honest with us the readers about his own fears and weaknesses, and his struggles to overcome his own demons.  He struggles with the reality of his life of crime while trying to evolve as a human being.  He is still drawn to traditional civil and moral values, but also comes to realize that good and evil, right and wrong, luck and fate, love and honor are complicated, and cannot be adequately understood simply within the basic structures we are taught in civil, law-abiding society.  The honor of strong loyalty to friends, and the shame of betrayal are themes throughout the book – fundamental values which clearly form the backbone of his own moral hierarchy. There is a saying that his boss the mafia Don frequently uses, which troubles our protagonist, but to which he constantly returns: Sometimes we must do the wrong things for the right reasons. 

Shantaram can be appreciated on so many levels – as an amazing adventure story, as great insight into Bombay culture in India, as a look into the culture of honor in criminal activity, and as a love story about two very intelligent, but wounded people who love each other but don’t know how to deal with it.  And there is so much wisdom and insight into values and what motivates people. It doesn’t surprise me to learn that Roberts studied philosophy in college before his life went south, before despair drove him to drugs, criminal activity, and he found himself in prison and then on the lam in India.

Concluding Mystery: There is an abiding question about this book:  How much of this story is true?  Reading about the author on-line, clearly, much of it is.  But Roberts won’t share how much, nor which parts – insisting that it’s simply a novel based roughly on the broad outlines of his life and experiences during that window of time.  How much is true? That uncertainty is part of the appeal of this book and the author.

Note on PTSD:  There are some interesting insights about PTSD in this book.  There are several characters in the story – and I would include the author among them – whose nefarious and occasionally irrational actions are clearly driven by a reaction to previous trauma.   The author’s inability to deal with his own sense of hopelessness and occasional self-loathing leads him back to heroin.  Others commit much worse crimes because they simply don’t care, or are looking for something to break through their emotional numbness, or else are driven simply by anger, hatred, and/or a desire for revenge.

There are some great quotes sharing the author’s personal wisdom and philosophy.    Here are a few:

p. 9 I was what Karla once called the most dangerous and fascinating animal in the world: a brave, hard man, without a plan.

p. 96  “I want everything,” Ksrla replied with a faint, wry smile. “You know, I said that once to a friend of mine, and he told me that the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.”

p. 167 If fate doesn’t make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don’t get the joke. 

p. 186  The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, Didier once said, is that it works so well.  

p 189  “There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor,” Abdullah said in his quiet tone.

p. 207 Abdullah: “Most of us – me and you, my brother – we wait for the future to come to us.  But Abdel Khader Khan dreams the future, and then he plans it, and then he makes it happen.”

p. 215 (On Abdullah)  He was the kind of man who tough criminals call a hundred percenter: the kind of man who’ll put his life on the line if he calls you his friend; the kind who’ll put his shoulder beside yours, without question or complaint, and stand with you against any odds.

p. 243  Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men, Khader said to me once. I wasn’t sure if that was true, or if he simply wanted it to be true, but I did know from experience, that despair and humiliation haunt the poor.

p. 294 Madjid:  “Suffering, you see is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot.  And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering.”

p. 384  There’s no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, Didier once said to me, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons.  

p. 203 Silence is the tortured man’s revenge.

p. 432  The worst things that people do to us always make us feel ashamed.  The worst things that people do always strike at the part of us that wants to love the world.  And a tiny part of the shame we feel, when we’re violated, is shame at being human.

p. 451  There’s a little arrogance at the heart of every better self. That arrogance left me when I failed to save my neighbor’s life.

p. 454  Karla: “It isn’t a secret, unless keeping it hurts.”

p. 455 Vikram: “This is India.  This is the land of the heart.  This is where the heart is king, man. The fuckin’ heart.”

p. 472.  Khaderbai:  “We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime.”

p. 595. Each dead man is a temple in ruins and when our eyes walk there, we should pity, we should pray.

p. 596 I didn’t know the that good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.

p. 607 I envied his (Anand’s) peace and his courage and his perfect understanding of himself.  Khaderbhai once said that if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom.

p. 661 But friendship, for him (Nazeer), was measured by what men do and endure for one another, not by what they share and enjoy.

p. 707  Khaderbai:  “The Big Bang expansion happened from a point called a singularity – another of my favorite five-syllable English words- that is almost infinitely dense, and almost infinitely hot, and yet it occupies no space and no time, as we know those things.”

p. 709 Khaderbai: “Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons.  The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong – that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.”

p. 712  She (Karla) said I was interested in everything and committed to nothing.  

p. 740 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 a truth other than your own, and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever.

p. 741  Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women…..what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is their will to protect the land and the women.

p. 759 I didn’t know then, as I do now, that love’s a one-way street.  Love, like respect, isn’t something you get; it’s something you give.

p. 791 There wasn’t any glory in it (war.)  There never is.  There’s only courage and fear and love.  And war kills them all, one by one. Glory belongs to God, of course; that ’s what the word really means.  And you can’t serve God with a gun.

p. 805 Didier:  “The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly and with the eyes open.”

p. 831.  She’d confused honor with virtue.  Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honor is concerned with how we do it.  You can fight a war in an honorable way – the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason – and you can enforce the peace without any honor at all. In its essence, honor 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.

p. 837 The mafia was theirs, not mine.  For them, the organization always came first.  But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood.  I worked for the mafia, but I didn’t join it….I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it.

p. 851 I cut the last  mooring rope of grief, and surrendered to the all-sustaining tide of destiny.  I let him go. I said the words, the sacred words:  I forgive you…

p. 858  Fate always gives you two choices,  Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one you do.

p. 870 Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash, the poet Sadiq Khan once wrote.  But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth.

p. 871 I discovered something that I should’ve known, as Modena did, right from the start.  It was something simple: so simple that it took a pain as great as Modena’s to shake me into seeing it. He’d been able to deal with that pain because he’d accepted his own part in causing it.  I’d never accepted my share of responsibility – right up to that moment – for the way my marriage had failed or for the heartache that had followed it. That was why I’d never dealt with it.

p. 873  Didier:  I love money, but I hate the smell of it.  The more happiness I get from it, the more thoroughly I have to wash my hands afterwards.

p. 882 She (Karla) once told me that heroes only come in three kinds: dead, damaged, or dubious.

p. 905  The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of this own soul.  The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.

p. 915 Abdullah: There is no man, and no place, without war, The only thing we can do is choose a side, and fight.  That is the only choice we get – who we fight for, who we fight against.  That is life.

p. 918  “Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.” Karla murmered.  “Fuck you, Karla,” I replied laughing.

p. 929 Nazeer:  Good gun, good horse, good friend, good battle – you know better way that Great Khan, he can die?