Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.

Anger softened into sorrow, as it always does, as it always must.

‘There is no man, and no place, without war,’

‘Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting,’

It is always a fool’s mistake, Didier once said to me, to be alone with someone you shouldn’t have loved.

I felt empty: the kind of emptiness that’s sad but not distressed, pitying but not broken-hearted, and damaged, somehow, but clearer and cleaner for it. And then I knew what it was, that emptiness: there’s a name for it, a word we use often, without realising the universe of peace that’s enfolded in it. The word is free.

every human will has the power to transform its fate. I’d always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realised that life is stranger and more beautiful than that.

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.