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.
