Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

we make things worse, sometimes, the more we try to make them better.

I think wisdom is very over-rated. Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of it. I’d rather be clever than wise, any day.

There’s a kind of luck that’s not much more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that’s not much more than doing the right thing in the right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself, completely, to the golden, fate-filled moment.

One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

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

‘There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor,’

I was too young, then, to know that dead lovers are the toughest rivals.

‘The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering.’

The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.

Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch as the skin of a woman’s thigh.

Like all the fugitive kind, the more successful I was, the longer and further I ran, the less I kept of my self.

I don’t know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us or our endless ability to endure it.

I knew it wasn’t true, but love seldom concerns itself with what we know or with what’s true.

That smell meant we were home, safe, protected by our collective wretchedness from the dangers that haunted poor people in the cleaner, grander city streets.

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have—to hold on tight until the dawn.

smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.

Mistakes are like bad loves, Karla once said, the more you learn from them, the more you wish they’d never happened.

Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.

Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words. I

Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart, Khaderbhai once told me, and every risk we take contains a mystery that can’t be solved.

Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end.

None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn’t enough.

When greed meets control, you get a black market.’

She’s playing hard to get. And brother, I’m hard but not getting any. I swear, I’m about to fuckin’ explode!’

Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, it’s the other way around.

Happiness is a myth, Karla once said. It was invented to make us buy things.

But the lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight.

Somewhere in the five or more millennia of its history, the culture had decided to dispense with the casual, nonchalant glance.

A Dutch mercenary in Kinshasa once told me that the only time he ever stopped hating himself was when the risk he faced became so great that he acted without thinking or feeling anything at all.

You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.

At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they’re dead and gone.

‘that a good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.’

Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name.

The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it’s a woman, and a city.

One of the agonising truths for a battle medic is that you pray as hard and almost as often for men to die as you pray for them to live.

There was a deep silence where her mind used to be, and a blank, uncraving emptiness where once her cruel and scheming life had ruled.

The confusion, I think, was hers, not mine. She’d confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it.

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.

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.

Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

‘There is no man, and no place, without war,’ he replied, and it struck me that it was the most profound thing he’d ever said to me. ‘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.’

Every human heartbeat, he’d said many times, is a universe of possibilities

The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.