Shantaram: Post 6

I have been reading the same book all semester. I want to read more books. I want to read other books. But I have started this one so I must finish it. Everytime I start to lose faith in this book something pulls me back in, a character you thought was gone returns or some catastrophe will happen to Lin. The latest thing that has kept me interested is the return of the Lins Love interest.

This is a girl named Karla. According to her she is from Germany but grew up in Switzerland. I say according to her because Lin is skeptical of this. She has an almond skin tone and dark black hair. She speaks in a sort of riddles and is always dropping some sort of philosophical knowledge on Lin. Lin has not seen her since the night he went to jail and he has made it his mission to find her again. About a month after his release he gets a tip off from a friend that she has moved up the coast to a small village, Goa. Lin immediately barrows a motorcycle and heads up the coast to find her.

No one in the town seems to have seen her so he decides to resume the search the next morning so he rents a villa. He decides to go for a midnight walk down the beach, after fully moved in. He is sitting on the beach having a smoke and eating some mellon when Karla finds him. At this point I began to question the authenticity of this book, it is supposed to be an autobiography and I believe most all of it, just here he loses me. I just don’t find that she would also be walking down the same beach at midnight plausible. But who am I to question his life.

After spending a week with Karla in Goa, Lin must return to Bombay to continue his work. Karla doesn’t want him to go nor does she want to go with him. She proposes to him an ultimatum: stay in Goa with her or go to bombay and never see her again. She refused to negotiate. This prompted Lin to make a very hard choice. He goes back to Bombay to resume working for Khaderbhai’s mafia.

These parts seem more realistic to me. The parts where he is learning the trade and the nitty gritty stuff about the black market. Occasionally something absurd will happen and I will question his legitimacy, Most recently Lin and some of his friends get into a rumble in a hotel room with some Nigerien assassins.

This being the last blog post I feel obligated to recommend this book to you the reader. If you have time or are a fast reader this a book you will enjoy. If you enjoy complex characters and a crazy plot line then I also think you should like this book. Like I said in the beginning of this post I have read the same book all semester and I think that it has held me back a little bit there are other books I want to read but I truly enjoy reading this one.

Shantaram: Post 5

Our Friend Lin after teaching young Tariq english, continues as the local slum doctor. He spends the night with his friend Karla whom he loves but is not sure how she feels. On his way home he gets picked up by the police and thrown in jail. He spends three weeks in the holding tank in the Colaba police station.

He describes the tank as holding “Forty men with an acceptable level of discomfort … I discovered that there were, in fact, two hundred and forty of us” (405). Lins condition just continues to get continually worse as he is moved to Arthur Road prison, without a trial and without being told why he is still incarcerated.

The Road as the called it was about as corrupt as possible. The “Overseers” are convicts living out life terms. Who took out their anger on any prisoner they deemed worthy. The conditions of the prison were also deplorable, overflowing latrines, water worms and blankets filled with body lice. All these start to take a toll on Lin. Being a bit of a prison veteran somethings he is not phased by but he still at night thinks of his family and friends he had left behind. Also his friends and the people of the slum. This period spent in the prison shows a lot of reflection about how he developed a niche within the community and what would happen to the community when he disappeared. He starts to think he was set up that someone wanted him in here. At one point two of the men he is in prison with are to be released in the coming days, Lin gives them a message to tell Abdel Khader Khan, a big gangster in Bombay that Lin is close with. These men get caught and beaten in front of Lin. They get four more months in prison. And Lin is beaten and starved for the remaining time in The Road. For three months he lives this hell.

One day his friend Vikram comes to pay his bail. Someone in The Road with him knew Khader Khan and when that man was released he went and told Khan about Lins incarceration. While Lin, Vikram and the guards talk about a fair price for his release, it comes up that the guards had known about Lins former time spent in jail as soon as he was fingerprinted six months earlier. Lin’s mind starts to race, how did they not deport him? Why didn’t they say anything? The prison uses that as leverage as a way to get more money for his release. It ends up costing just over 10,000 US dollars to get him out.

Once out Lin begins to work under Khader Khan in his mafia ring. Lin learns all about under the table currency exchange, passports and gold. while Lin learns these new trades, he moves out of the slums and into an apartment. He starts making an absurd amount of money through this. But now he starts questioning his morality weather this is an acceptable way to make a living.    

Shantaram: Post 4

Lin and Tariq are saved by Lins friend Abdullah. Who was waiting at Lins hut for him. The book then skips the next three months to the point when Lin is returning Tariq to his uncle Khaderbhai. When Lin starts talking to Khadrbhai about the boy and the month they spent together learning english, he starts to think about his daughter he left in Australia and how he taught her to read and write.

When Lin returns to the Slums he finds one of his friends he used to run around with when he was still playing turrorist.  As they reminisce Lin realizes that as much as he thinks he misses that lifestyle he truly doesn’t. They finish their tea and go on their separate ways. Before Lin goes back to his hut he has a cigarette overlooking the ocean.while sitting he starts thinking of love and realizes he hasn’t been with a woman since he has been in India. He then dives into paragraphs of self scrutiny. He describes times when he could have 

“there were opportunities with foreign girls … German, French and Italian girls often invited me back to their hotel rooms for a smoke, once I’d helped them to buy hash or grass. I knew that something more than smoking was usually intended”(372). He then toiled over this idea when Johnny Cigar joins him.

Johnny goes into the philosophical representation of the ocean and how all life came from the ocean. Roberts does a really good job of painting the scene of them sitting on this rock in the dark talking. This could also symbolize how Lin is realizing how involved the community. This being the first community since hes been on the lamb.

Shantaram: Post 3

In the latest instalment of Lins adventures in Bombay, after he returns from the smoking session with the gangster fellow of Bombay he falls asleep only to be awakened hours later by Johnny Cigar. One of the people in the slum community had been slashed with a sword in a gang fight and as Johnny says he is bleeding very swiftly. So Lin as doctor must rise and stitch this man up, a skill he says he learned in prison from stitching stab wounds after riots. He gave the young man 26 stitches in the middle of the night and collapsed back on his bed to fall back asleep.

In the morning he begins to teach the nephew of the one of the gangster fellows english. The young boy is to follow Lin wherever he goes for the next 48 hours and if Lin thinks that he is not doing a sufficient job at teaching this boy english he can return the child to his uncle.

He takes the boy to his friend Karla's house because she has his clothes. the boy falls asleep in on the couch there as Lin talks to Lisa one of their mutual friends. As they talk and wait for Karla Lin looks at the boy, Tariq, and he starts to reflect about his own family he left back in australia. How the more he runs away the more of himself he leaves behind. He now has very little of his true self left considering that he can't use his real name or even say what country he is actually from. This towards the end of the chapter starts to bring lin down. so he decides that it is best he goes back to the slums with the boy.

On the way there they are attacked by dogs, Lin is fending them off with a large stalk of Bamboo as I read, I am not sure of the out come yet.  

Shantaram: Post 2

Lin has found his niche within the slum as a doctor. He has no formal medical training just basic first aid and some other minor training, just this makes him more knowledgeable in this field than anyone else in the Colaba slums. With just a large first aid kit one of his friends in New Zealand gave him before he fled, he begins to treat the people of the slums. Through some of his black market connections he has made by selling tourists drugs he gathers more medicines and other instruments needed to support a proper medical clinic. However to acquire these medicines he must travel into the slum of the lepers, for the lepers are the best at stealing medicines. They give him a canvas bundle containing different antibiotics and tell him that every month they will deliver another bundle to his hut so that his “clinic” can continue to operate.

At this point Lin wonders to himself why people are so nice to him and why he doesn’t have to pay for any of this. He decides just to keep working, getting commission from tourists to buy/sell goods on the black market and treating the people of the slums. Many just rat bites or minor cuts but occasionally he treats infections or large lacerations caused by barbed wire.

With this job Lin becomes an important part of the community and he starts getting involved with local matters. One day a man in the slums named Joseph got drunk and began  to beat his wife. Qasim Ali, the leader of the slum, Lin and a couple other men of the slums tend to the issue. They made Joseph drink and smoke until he passed out on the ground outside of his hut the other slum dwellers returned to their huts however Lin and the other men stayed.

When he became conscience again he begged for water but they only have him more alcohol, the thirst eventually overcame him and he continued to drink. After three bottles they began the real punishment. Johnny Cigar, a respected member of the community, began to beat him with a shaft of bamboo. In between each stroke he asked Joseph why he had beat his wife. soon the other men join in. Berating him with questions and sticks while Lin watched.

This is the first time Lin has witnessed slum justice and he is quite taken aback by it. This section continues to show through his writing the ways that Lin feeling almost entirely like a local. The way he writes this autobiography is more like a narrative. With the his friends and the other people in Bombay as characters. Characters will disappear from his life and reappear without any warning. Some characters are always present. In this portion he internally struggles with the pride of being a slum dweller. He can no longer can go to the bars to meet the people he used to hang out with when he was still a tourist. Well physically he could, they wouldn’t kick him out of the bar but his pride will not allow him to. He feels uncomfortable with his friends seeing him in the state he lives because of the sharp contrast between the ways they live. This also makes him feel more like an authentic slum dweller.

Occasionally Lin will have moments when he reflects about his family he left behind in Australia. He misses his wife and daughter but he knows he cannot go back and probably will never see them again so he battles internally with that sadness and it comes through from time to time. He only really opens up to another person once in the book thus far. He is sitting with some of the most powerful gangsters in Bombay, whom are all his friends, and they are smoking a hookah with a marijuana hashish blend in it. It might be the hash or that he feel comfortable with these people but he confesses that he is actually from Australia. This group of powerful men get together once a month to get stoned and discuss topics such as loyalty, love, betrayal and other philosophical things. Since it is Lins first time there they let him decide the topic. He decides to talk about suffering and the different ways people suffer and the reasons why good people suffer more than bad people. This creates a forum to explain his suffering to other people.   

Shantaram: Post 1

Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

This book is an autobiography of Gregory David Roberts, who was a heroin addict and convicted armed robber in Australia. Doomed to waste away in prison he decided to escaped with a friend. After two years on the lamb, he got a fake passport and he flees to Bombay (now Mumbai), India. This is where the book starts. He goes by the name on his fake passport Lindsay, Lin for short. Once in Bombay the story seems to have less focus on Lin and more about the people around him.  

After living in Bombay for a couple of months one of his newly made friends, Prabu,  invites Lin to come live in his village with him for the next three months.

At the train station on the way to the village north of the state of Maharashtra, Lin has one of his first experiences with “real India”. This excerpt is from a scene just after Prabu had paid a very large man to carry their luggage into one of the cars.

“‘He has famous knees, that fellow … I convinced him to help us, because I told him you were -- I’m not sure how to say it in English -- I told him you were not completely right in the head.’

‘You told him I was mentally retarded?’

‘No, no … I think stupid is more of a correct word.’

‘Let me get this straight -- you told him I was stupid, and that’s why he agreed to help us.’

‘Yes’ he grinned ‘but not just a little stupid. I told him you were very, very, very, very, very --’

‘All right. I get it.’

‘So the price was twenty rupees for each knees. And now we have it this good seat’” (Roberts 103).

Lin goes on to Live in the village with Pabu where the locals teach him the native tongue of Marathi. After his stint in the village he travels back to Bombay now nearly fluent and feeling like a real Indian.

Once in the city he realizes that his visa on his fake passport is nearly up and that he can no longer stay in a proper hotel. So he moves to the slums to live with Pabu and his friends, Johnny Cigar and Qasim Ali Hussein. Through this he starts to meet more people on the underbelly of the city.

The images of the slums that Roberts paints are amazing. You can tell in his writing at this point of the story that he has become to feel more like a local then a foreigner. This change is really an aspect of the first two hundred pages of the book that makes the story feel more realistic.

He really captures the vile beauty of the slums quite well. He goes in depth explaining how that even these people living in these deplorable huts still seem to find happiness in the simplest things. And that is the real beauty of it.