Shantaram

832 Pages·2003·3.65 MB·English

by  Gregory David Roberts

SHANTARAM
SHANTARAM

Gregory David Roberts
St. Martin’s Press New York
SHANTARAM. Copyright © 2003 by Gregory David Roberts. All rights reserved. Printed in the United
States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For
information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberts, Gregory David.
Shantaram : a novel / Gregory David Roberts.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-33052-9
EAN 978-0312-33052-1
1. Australians—Foreign countries—Fiction. 2. Fugitives from justice—Fiction. 3. Australians—
India—Fiction. 4. Bombay (India)—Fiction. 5. Criminals—Fiction. 6. Clinics—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.4.R625S53 2004
823'.92—dc22
2004050316
First published in Australia and New Zealand by Scribe Publications 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
CONTENTS

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
PART TWO

CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PART THREE
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
PART FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
PART FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For my mother

CHAPTER ONE

IT TOOK ME a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love
and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant,
while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through
the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was
still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It
doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when
it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you
make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.
In my case, it’s a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who
lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet
who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that
prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country’s
most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India,
where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a
counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I
went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around
me died. They were better men than I am, most of them: better men whose lives
were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of
someone else’s hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, too many of
those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.
But my story doesn’t begin with them, or with the mafia: it goes back to that
first day in Bombay. Fate put me in the game there. Luck dealt the cards that led
me to Karla Saaranen. And I started to play it out, that hand, from the first
moment I looked into her green eyes. So it begins, this story, like everything else
—with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.
The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the
different air. I could smell it before I saw or heard anything of India, even as I
walked along the umbilical corridor that connected the plane to the airport. I was
excited and delighted by it, in that first Bombay minute, escaped from prison and
new to the wide world, but I didn’t and couldn’t recognise it. I know now that
it’s the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it’s the