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.