Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn’t a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.

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

I never knew how much goodness there was in a man or a woman until I owed them more than I could repay.

No love, is no life.

he was searching for a friend in a crowd of strangers.

praising people behind their back is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can’t defend yourself against is the good that people say about you.’

The saying, pride goeth . . . before a fall . . . is condensed from the second collection of the Book of Proverbs, 16:18—Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.

There’s a theory that snoring at night in sleep is a subconscious defence reflex—a warning sound that frightened potential predators away from the mouth of the cave when our lower-Palaeolithic ancestors huddled in vulnerable sleep.

Anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there.

life is a feature of all things. We could call it a characteristic, which is one of my favourite English words. If you do not speak English as your first language, the word “characteristic” has an amazing sound—like rapping on a drum, or breaking kindling wood for a fire. To continue, every atom in the universe has the characteristic of life. The more complex way that atoms get put together, the more complex is the expression of the characteristic of life. A rock is a very simple arrangement of atoms, so the life in a rock is so simple that we cannot see it. A cat is a very complex arrangement of atoms, so the life in a cat is very obvious. But life is there, in everything, even in a rock, and even when we cannot see it.’

‘Life, and all the other characteristics of all the things in the universe, such as consciousness, and free will, and the tendency toward complexity, and even love, was given to the universe by light, at the beginning of time as we know it.’

The Big Bang expansion happened from a point called a singularity—another of my favourite five-syllable English words—that is almost infinitely dense, and almost infinitely hot, and yet it occupies no space and no time, as we know those things. The point is a boiling cauldron of light energy. Something caused it to expand—we don’t know yet what caused it—and from light, all the particles and all the atoms came to exist, along with space and time and all the forces that we know. So, light gave every little particle at the beginning of the universe a set of characteristics, and as those particles combine in more complex ways, the characteristics show themselves in more and more complex ways.’

Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name.

‘Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong—that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.’

Eden in the soul, where acceptance of punishment and acknowledgement of wrong and right roll away the troubles that lodge like stones in the barren field of an exiled heart.

It was just that all the hope had been so empty, so meaningless. And if you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.

They’d lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn’t like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can’t kill love. You can’t even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blown away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then, what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the women.

The end mirrors the beginning.

Of the hundred things that I wish I’d never said or done in my wicked life, that little quirk of honesty is right up there, near the top of the list.

For all that he was a wise, brave, and kindly man, that sadness was so deep in him that no man risked its touch.

I didn’t know then, as I do now, that love’s a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn’t something you get; it’s something you give.

it’s better to die fighting than to die like a rat in a trap.

All the cleverness in all the world couldn’t stop my stomach from knotting around its prowling fear. When you know you’re going to die, there’s no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom.

Whatever you do in life, do it with courage, and you won’t go far wrong

‘My dear friend, you can stand to eat a meal—if you must—and you can stand to make love—if you are able—but it is impossible to stand and drink whisky. It is the act of a barbarian. A man who stands up to drink a noble alcohol like whisky, in all but a toast to some noble thing or purpose, is a beast—a man who will stop at nothing.’

He was, at heart, a humble man, and that humility made him an honourable man.

Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it.

assassin grief, he’d once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly, on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But

But you can’t bite down on assassin grief, and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can’t miss.

You can only ever be yourself. The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.

That’s what I’ve always been. All my life. Negative space. Always waiting for someone, or something, or some kind of real feeling to fill me up and give me a reason . . .’

It’s bad, loving someone you can’t forgive.’ ‘It’s not as bad as loving someone you can’t have,’

I felt that I was drowning in a sorrow that was bigger than the heart that tried to hold it.

Maybe it’s not possible to break laws without boasting about it to someone. Maybe it’s not possible to be an outlaw without being proud in some way.

Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one you do.

That is how a man destroys his own soul—he loses the last limit to his evil.

My people, the people of my blood, we do not want to hate, because when we do hate, it is with the whole of the soul, and it can never forgive the hated one.

Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash,

But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth.

did accept that blame, and I felt my heart expand and unfold as it released its burdens of fear, resentment, and self-doubt.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end.

Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in 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, sufferin...

I love money, Didier once said to me, but I hate the smell of it. The more happiness I get from it, the more thoroughly I have to wash my hands afterwards.

I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.

heroes only come in three kinds: dead, damaged, or dubious.’

Love is a special thing in the world.

I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts.

That was the source of their purity: above all things, they were true to themselves.