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Now, long years and many journeys after that first ride on a crowded rural train, I know that the scrambled fighting and courteous deference were both expressions of the one philosophy: the doctrine of necessity.
‘Where’s he from?’ ‘New Zealand,’ Prabaker replied. ‘New Zealand?’ ‘Yes. New Zealand. In Europe.’ ‘Plenty of money in New Zealand?’ ‘Yes, yes. Plenty. They’re all rich, white people there.’
It seemed to me that the Indian ox, known as the bailie, was surely the slowest harness animal in the world.
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.
The roti, or unleavened flatbreads, were made fresh for each breakfast, and cooked in a lightly oiled wok on an open fire. The hot, pancake-like bread was filled with a dab of ghee, or purified butter, and a large spoonful of sugar.
If an abundance of good food, laughter, singing, and an amiable disposition can be taken as indicators of well-being and happiness, then the villagers eclipsed their western counterparts in those qualities of life.
she’d called a meeting of the women in the village: she’d decided to give me a new name, a Maharashtrian name, like her own. Because I was in Prabaker’s house, it was decided that I should take the family name of Kharre. Because Kishan was Prabaker’s father, and my adoptive father, tradition decreed that I should take his first name for my middle name. And because they judged my nature to be blessed with peaceful happiness, Rukhmabai concluded, the women had agreed with her choice for my first name. It was Shantaram, which means man of peace, or man of God’s peace.
‘Six months in the village, you were. Six months with no sexy business.
It was a wild speech that called them cowards and invoked Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha, the god Krishna, Mother Theresa, and the Bollywood film star Amitabh Bachchan in the same sentence.
man can make his way in the city with his heart and his soul crushed within a clenched fist; but to live in a village, he has to unfurl his heart and his soul in his eyes.
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.
There’s purpose in the narrow, twisting lanes, but no order.
They were armed only with the thin bamboo cane known as the lathi. They carried no clubs, gas, or guns.
His immaculately clean, white clothes seemed to all of us a symbol of his spirituality and moral integrity—qualities we depended on, in that little world of struggle and hope, no less urgently than we depended on the water from the communal well.
In those years, nakedness was like a secret religion in India. No-one but the insane or the sacred was ever publicly naked. Friends in the slum told me with unaffected honesty that they’d been married for years and had never seen their own wives naked.
justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.’
Shafts of golden morning stabbed through rents and gaps in the fragile reed walls of my hut.
say what nigga
The people showed thanks, rather than saying it, and I’d come to accept that.
trouble is the only property that poor fellows like us are allowed to own.’
I don’t want to put any pressure on you. I’m just in love with you, that’s all. I’ve been in love with you for a while, and I finally had to say it. It doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it—or me either, for that matter.’
‘Being so fussy about dressing down, the way you do, is a kind of vanity, you know. It’s fairly conceited, too.’
I couldn’t imagine her living with someone. Breakfast and bare backs, bathroom noises and bad moods, domestic and demi-married: it was impossible to see her in that.
in fact I felt a cruel, secret relief that the former lover was dead, gone, no competition to me. I was too young, then, to know that dead lovers are the toughest rivals.
‘Two months when I first got to Bombay, six months in Prabaker’s village, and now nearly six months in the slum. Fourteen months.’
Bombay, in those years, was the most voluptuously dirty city in the world. It wasn’t only hot and cloyingly humid: in the eight rainless months of the year it was constantly aswirl with grimy dust clouds that settled on and smeared every exposed surface with a catholic variety of filths. If I wiped my face with a handkerchief after only half an hour’s walk along any street, the cloth was streaked with black.
‘Give us a subject, Lin. Life and death, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal,’ Abdul Ghani explained, waving a plump hand in effete little circles with each couplet. ‘We are like a debating society here, you see. We meet every month, at least one time, and when our business and private matters are finished, we talk about philosophical subjects and the suchlike. It’s our amusement.
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.’
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?
Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot. And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering. It is also what leads us to the hero curse,
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,
‘The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering.’ ‘Yes, yes, that is it what I want to say. Without the suffering, the happiness would squash us down.’
Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle.
I recalled other, similar discussions I’d shared with men in prison. Despite their general lack of formal education, or perhaps because of it, many men I’d known in prison had a fervent interest in the world of ideas.
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.
Eve-teasing was the name given to the charge of sexual harassment, under Indian law, and it covered a range of offences from insulting language to physical molestation.
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.
In Prabaker’s way of courtship, a young man didn’t bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: he brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice. He brought her gossip and scandals and intimate secrets. He brought her the truth of his brave heart, and the mischievous, awe-struck wonder that was the wellspring of his laughter, and of that sky-wide smile.
Being alone, in that stillness, was a piercing pleasure. Wealth and power, in a city where half the many millions were homeless, were measured by the privacy that only money could buy, and the solitude that only power could demand and enforce. The poor were almost never alone in Bombay, and I was poor.
There was a time, once, when I’d known such a life: when a woman and a sleeping child were my own, and I was their man.
I thought about them all, and asked myself why those people made a difference. Why them? What is it about them? Such a disparate group—the richest and the most wretched, educated and illiterate, virtuous and criminal, old and young—it seemed that the only thing they had in common was a power to make me feel … something.
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
Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things.
What characterises the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it? I thought the question acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterises the human race. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no
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I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.
It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm.
She wore a salwar kameez—the most flattering garment in the world, after the sari—in
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 most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering.
Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. 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.
I’d been raised in a family of Fabian socialists, and I’d inherited their stubborn, impractical revulsion for social iniquity in all its forms.
