Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.

Rude means that we like to do it, even when people tell us not to,

to counter external threats, it responded with the antibodies of courage, solidarity, and that desperate, magnificent love we usually call the survival instinct.

Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men

I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.’

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

I can’t stand politicians. A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there’s no river.’

‘We are the not-people,’ Prabaker said happily, ‘And these are the not-houses, where we are not-living.’

trouble is the only property that poor fellows like us are allowed to own.’

Mould and mildew scarred every building, even the newest. I’d come to think of it as beautiful, that decline and decay, creeping across the face of the grandest designs: that stain of the end, spreading across every bright beginning

Not-smiling can be very attractive. Gimme an honest frown over a false smile, any day.

interested in everything, and committed to nothing.

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

The taut bow of her lips dissolved on mine in concessions of flesh to flesh. There was such sad tenderness in it that, for a second or two, I floated free, and was adrift in its inexpressible kindnesses.

‘I don’t want anyone to be in love with me. It hasn’t been good to me, the romance thing.’

Her eyes were brave, and yet she was afraid.

It’s one of the five hundred things I love about Indians: if they like you, they do it quickly, and not by half.

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

Your heart lost in the dream of a woman’s face, your soul lost in the dream of her body. Love

Some women cry easily. The tears fall as gently as fragrant raindrops in a sun-shower, and leave the face clear and clean and almost radiant. Other women cry hard, and all the loveliness in them collapses in the agony of it.

There’s a special anger we reserve for people who won’t let us do them a good turn.

We can’t really know what a pleasure it is to run in our own language until we’re forced to stumble in someone else’s.

our duty is to work, and to suffer

‘Suffering, let me see. I think that suffering is a matter of choice. I think that we do not have to suffer anything in this life, if we are strong enough to deny it. The strong man can master his feelings so completely that it is almost impossible to make him suffer. When we do suffer things, like pain and so, it means that we have lost control. So I will say that suffering is a human weakness.’

Only, is it not true that some of our strength comes from suffering? That suffering hardship makes us stronger? That those of us who have never known a real hardship, and true suffering, cannot have the same strength as others, who have suffered much? And if that is true, does that not mean that your argument is the same thing as saying that we have to be weak to suffer, and we have to suffer to be strong, so we have to be weak to be strong?

You’d know where real suffering comes from. It’s the same place where love and freedom and pride are born. And it’s the same place where those feelings and ideals die. That suffering never stops. We only pretend it does. We only tell ourselves it does, to make the kids stop whimpering in their sleep.’

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

I think that suffering is the way we test our love. Every act of suffering, no matter how small or agonisingly great, is a test of love in some way. Most of the time, suffering is also a test of our love for God.

I think that there are two points about suffering that we should remember, and they have to do with pleasure and pain. The first is this: that pain and suffering are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is also possible to suffer without feeling pain.

The difference between them is this, I think: that what we learn from pain—for example, that fire burns and is dangerous—is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people. If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle. We do not learn from it what makes us stronger or better or closer to God.’

Suffering is exactly like happiness, but backwards. One is the mirror image of the other, and has no real meaning or existence without the other.’

Take my hand, as an example. If I open my hand out like this, stretching the fingers and showing you the palm, or if I open my hand and put it on your shoulder, my fingers stretched out like this—that is happiness, or we may call it so for the sake of this moment. And if I curl my fingers, and close them tightly into a fist, just so, we may call that suffering. The two gestures are opposite in their meaning and power. Each one is completely different in appearance and in what it can do, but the hand that makes the gesture is the same. Suffering is happiness, backwards.’

there are some things we human beings will never understand, the things only God can understand, and that suffering may well be one of them.

the universe, as those of the Parsee faith see it, is a process of struggle between opposites—light and darkness, hot and cold, suffering and pleasure—and that nothing can exist without the existence of its opposite.

suffering is a condition of the unenlightened soul, locked within...

that suffering, of every kind, is always a matter of what we’ve lost. When we’re young, we think that suffering is something that’s done to us. When we get older—when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another—we know that real suffering is measured by what’s taken away from us.

‘Is easy—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

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

Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child.

I always tell the truth, even when I’m lying

The momentary fantasy of belonging, that little dream of home and family, hardened and cracked in my eyes.

The truth was that I belonged nowhere and to no-one. Surrounded by people and hungry for solitude, I was always and everywhere alone. Worse than that, I was hollow, empty, gouged out and scraped bare by the escape and flight. I’d lost my family, the friends of my youth, my country and its culture—all the things that had defined me, and given me identity. 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 let myself believe that it was meant for me, or that at least some part of it was born in feelings that were mine. I knew it wasn’t true, but love seldom concerns itself with what we know or with what’s true.

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.

They were all, we were all, strangers to the city. None of us was born there. All of us were refugees, survivors, pitched up on the shores of the island city. If there was a bond between us, it was the bond of exiles, the kinship of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed.

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.

The evil men are the power—the rich men, and the politicians, and the fanatics of religion—whose decisions rule the world, and set it on its course of greed and destruction.’

Nations neglect no men more shamefully than the heroes of their wars.’