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And it’s these – shame and dishonour, guilt and regret – that are the eyes through which Lin, the protagonist in Shantaram, looks at the world he discovers in Bombay. He was a man of honour, a warrior, who then committed cowardly crimes that harmed others, and by doing so he ruined the temple in his heart. In escaping from prison he rediscovered his courage and his will to live. His journey to Bombay, his struggle there to love and to be loved in return, and his drag-footed walk along the shoreline of his Fate are the fragments of his shipwreck survival. But the magnificent and terrible truth
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will explain. Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion. Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing.’ ‘I still don’t get it. I don’t see how possible things don’t exist.’ ‘Let me put it another way. The agents of creation, the energy that actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us, cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. The
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sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.’
People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.
What characterises the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it? I thought the question acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterises the human race. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions.
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