Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

No matter how far from the earth their destiny leads them – onto mountain peaks or ocean crests – they’ll always dig and plant and grow, even if that only happens in their dreams.

We men of violence, a world champion boxer once told me, we warriors, we fall hard when we love. And there’s no armour that can protect a heart, once it’s opened to love.

fighters always wound the warrior within, every time they raise the gun.

And that’d be enough, a torment like that – all the torments of lost loved ones, lost hope, and even the loss of love itself – to give up and surrender to the endless sleep, if there wasn’t a meaning to human life, and if we didn’t have a purpose. But there is, and we do: the meaning is our destiny – the destiny of our brave, flawed, beautiful species – and the purpose is in doing whatever great or little we can to help in achieving it. The wonder and sustaining solace of it all is that were not alone: we’re never alone if we live and we journey onward to new cities, new adventures and new dreams in the search for meaning, and purpose, and love.

The voice, Afghan matchmakers say, is more than half of love. But I didn’t know that then, and my heart rushed in, where even matchmakers might’ve feared to tread.

The legends say that the loved one is instantly recognised because she’s loved in every gesture, every expression of thought, every movement, every sound, and every mood that prays in her eyes. The legends say that we know her by her wings—the wings that only we can see—and because wanting her kills every other desire of love.

Love survives in us precisely because it isn’t wise.

The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. There’s nowhere else in the world where that’s quite so true.

The world and I are not on speaking terms, Karla said to me once in those early months. The world keeps trying to win me back, she said, but it doesn’t work. I guess I’m just not the forgiving type.

‘You learn something or you feel something completely new, when you break your heart that way,’ she said. ‘Something that only you can know or feel in that way. And I knew, after that night, I would never have that feeling anywhere but India. I knew—I can’t explain it, I just knew somehow—that I was home, and warm, and safe. And, well, I’m still here …’

‘Yes. You’re a good listener. That’s dangerous, because it’s so hard to resist. Being listened to—really listened to—is the second-best thing in the world.’ ‘What’s the first best thing?’ ‘Everybody knows that. The best thing in the world is power.’ ‘Oh, is it?’ I asked, laughing. ‘What about sex?’ ‘No. Apart from the biology, sex is all about power. That’s why it’s such a rush.’ I laughed again. ‘And what about love? A lot of people say that love is the best thing in the world, not power.’ ‘They’re wrong,’ she said with terse finality. ‘Love is the opposite of power. That’s why we fear it so much.’

Leopold’s was a place for people to see, to be seen, and to see themselves in the act of being seen.

I am guilty of many crimes—of most crimes, to say the truth—but I have never claimed a cleverness that was not my own.’

I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don’t despise.’

She loved the guy. She did it for him. She would’ve done anything for him. Some women are like that. Some loves are like that. Most loves are like that, from what I can see. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independence. After a while you start throwing people out—your friends, everyone you used to know. And it’s still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take you down with it. I’ve seen that happen to a lot of girls here. I think that’s why I’m sick of love.’ I couldn’t tell if she was talking about herself, or pointing the words at me. Either way, they were sharp, and I didn’t want to hear them.

We watched him out of sight, and then Karla pulled at my arm, leading me along the path once more. I allowed myself to be led. I allowed myself to be drawn by the soft pleading of the waves, and the roulade of her voice; by the black sky, and the darker night of her hair; by the sea-tree-stone smell of the sleeping street, and the perfume sublime on her warm skin. I allowed myself to be drawn into her life, and the life of the city. I walked her home. I said good night. And I was singing quietly to myself as I went back along the silent brood of streets to my hotel.

And I’d learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better.

There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabaker told it to me, just as I’m telling it to you now.

The smile was composed of one part surprise, one part mischief, and one part contempt. Somehow, those elements combined in an effect that was disarmingly charming.

He is now a good man, in the very worst sense of the word.’

Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it’s exactly like love in three ways: it’s pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect it.

‘I think that we all, each one of us, we all have to earn our future,’ she said slowly. ‘I think the future is like anything else that’s important. It has to be earned. If we don’t earn it, we don’t have a future at all. And if we don’t earn it, if we don’t deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that’s probably what love is—a way of earning the future.’

‘If you could be happy, really happy, for just a while, but you knew from the start that it would end in sadness, and bring pain afterwards, would you choose to have that happiness or would you avoid it?’

In the beginning we feared everything—animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky—everything except each other. Now we fear each other, and almost nothing else. No-one knows why anyone does anything. No-one tells the truth. No-one is happy. No-one is safe. In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate. And now you have it.’

‘Is that it now? Are you going to stay here forever?’ ‘There’s no such thing as forever,’ she answered in her slow, deliberate way. ‘I don’t know why we use the word.’

If you have to ask the question, you have no right to the answer.

the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.’

‘It’s good to know what’s wrong with the world,’ Karla said, after a while. ‘But it’s just as important to know that sometimes, no matter how wrong it is, you can’t change it. A lot of the bad stuff in the world wasn’t really that bad until someone tried to change it.’

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.

And it was all there, in her lovely face. The lines, high on her cheeks, were the dams she used to keep the tears in her eyes. Unspoken, unanswerable questions parted her full, red lips, whenever she was alone, or absorbed in her work. Determination stiffened the defiant thrust of her cleft chin. And her forehead was always slightly creased in the centre, between the brows, as if she was grasping, in those soft folds of skin, the monstrous and pitiable understanding that no happiness exists without its woe, no wealth without its cost, and no life without its full measure, sooner or later, of sorrowing and death.

a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.

‘I take everything personally—that’s what being a person is all about.

‘I don’t know what scares me more,’ she declared, ‘the madness that smashes people down, or their ability to endure it.’

‘Happiness is a myth,’ Karla snapped back angrily. ‘It was invented to make us buy things.’

There are few things people can do with their eyes that hurt more, and I hated to see it.

suffering is hungry, isn’t it? Hungry, for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means, not suffering. But everybody knows that.’

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.

Karla always tells the truth … even when she’s lying… she said that to me once … I always tell the truth, even when I’m lying

To make sure none followed where you led I used my hair to cover our tracks. Sun set on the island of our bed night rose eating echoes and we were beached there, in tangles of flicker, candles whispering at our driftwood backs. Your eyes above me afraid of the promises I might keep regretting the truth we did say less than the lie we didn’t, I went in deep, I went in deep, to fight the past for you. Now we both know sorrows are the seeds of loving. Now we both know I will live and I will die for this love.

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.

News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.’

Are we ever justified in what we do? That question ruined my sleep for a long time

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ he scoffed. ‘Everyone in the whole world is superstitious.’

One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.

The devil, they say, is in the details, and I knew well the devils that lurked and skulked in the details of my own story.

The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.

Silence is the tortured man’s revenge.

‘It isn’t a secret, unless keeping it hurts.’

depression only happens to people who don’t know how to be sad.’

But I didn’t know that then. I washed my hands in the cold, uncaring sea, and my conscience was as silent and remote as the mute, unreachable stars.