Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

I’d escaped from prison almost two years before, but the fact of the fugitive life is that you have to keep on escaping, every day and every night.

Every day, when you’re on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.

‘Oh, good! I never mind about the foreplays, Mr. Lindsay. I am an Indian fellow, and we Indian fellows, we don’t worry about the foreplayings. We go straight to the bumping and jumping. Oh yes!’

It was at once his most endearing and most irritating quality, that he always told me the whole of the truth.

Civilisation, after all, is defined by what

we forbid, more than what we permit.’

I told him you were—I’m not sure how to say it in English—I told him you were not completely right on your head.’ ‘Mentally retarded. You told him I was mentally retarded?’ ‘No, no,’ he frowned, considering the options. ‘I think that stupid is more of the correctly word.’ ‘Let me get this straight—you told him I was stupid, and that’s why he agreed to help us.’ ‘Yes,’ he grinned. ‘But not just a little of stupid. I told him you were very, very, very, very, very —’

What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied and unavoidable question everywhere in India.

‘Well, Lin, you see, some of those driving fellows are going to places that is nobody wants to go to. Little places, they are, with a few people only. So, they put a sign for a more popular place.’ ‘You’re telling me that they put a sign up saying they’re going to a big town, where lots of people want to go, but they’re really going somewhere else, where nobody wants to go?’

Hah! Amusing exchange!

The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, Didier once said, is that it works so well.

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

His fast heartbeat was regular and strong: a powerful current with which to charge his recovery.

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

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.

Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.

curses—May you have ten daughters, and may they all marry well!—a