Shantaram

Shantaram Gregory David Roberts

INDEX:

Book Jacket Information

Praise for Shantaram

PART PART PART PART PART ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Disclaimer

Shantaram

Gregory David Roberts

Book Jacket Information:

_Shantaram is a novel based on the life of the author, Gregory

David Roberts. In 1978 Roberts committed a series of armed robberies while addicted to heroin, and was sentenced to nineteen years' imprisonment. In July 1980 he escaped over the front wall of Victoria's maximum-security prison, in broad daylight, thereby becoming one of Australia's most wanted men for what turned out to be the next ten years.

His journey took him to New Zealand, Asia, Africa and Europe, but his home for most of those years was Bombay-where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for one of the most charismatic branches of the Bombay mafia.

_Shantaram deals with all this, and more. It is an epic, mesmerizing tale of crowded slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison torture, mafia gang wars and Bollywood films, and spiritual gurus and brutal battlefields. It weaves a seamless web of unforgettable characters, amazing adventures, and superb evocations of Indian life.

This remarkable book can be read as a vast, extended thriller, as well as a superbly written meditation on the nature of good and evil. It is a compelling tale of a hunted man who had lost everything-his home, his family, and his soul-and came to find his humanity while living at the wildest edge of experience.

Nothing like this has been written before, and nobody but Greg

Roberts could have written it now.

***

Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne, and has lived in

India, New Zealand, Germany, and Switzerland. He speaks four languages and has traveled widely in Asia, Africa and Europe. He is now a full-time writer and lives in Melbourne.

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Praise for Shantaram

"Shantaram is a big and big-hearted book... It's got everything you could ever want in a novel-memorable characters, tortured romances, wild comic capers in exotic locales; stories of heroism and cowardice, love and betrayal, sin and redemption...

"This vast tapestry of tales is sewn together with the skill of a master storyteller... Roberts has one hell of an imaginative gift...

"What, in the end, strikes you most about this swashbuckling and ultimately life-affirming romp of a novel is that it is also the kind the aesthetic triumph we once called-without blushing-a masterpiece."

- Cameron Woodhead, The Age

"It is a tale, by turns gripping, hilarious, moving and instructive. It evokes the raucous tangle of modern India superbly."

- Frank Campbell, The Australian

"Shantaram is not so much a mirror as a mirror ball, spinning with relentless drive, dazzling but ungras-pable. And, again, audacious. Gloriously audacious."

- Nicola Robinson, The Sydney Morning Herald

***

For my mother

***

May all those you love find the truth in you and be true to your love.

____________________

Shantaram

Part One

Chapter One

It took me a long time and most of the world 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 realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But 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.

In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was 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. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better men than I am, most of them: better men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.

And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.

But my story doesn't begin with them, or with the mafia: it goes back to that first day in Bombay. Fate put me in the game there.