Shantaram, Man of Peace

by Pa Rock
Reader

Of the couple of thousand books that I have read during my lifetime, few have given me more pleasure than Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.   Roberts, who was sentenced to a long prison sentence in his native Australia as a young man, escaped and fled to Bombay, India, where he lived a colorful life in exile – running a free medical clinic in a large slum, and later conducting criminal activities for the local mafia.  He was eventually recaptured after a decade on the run and served out the remainder of his sentence.

Shantaram, while fiction, is obviously based on the author’s life-on-the-run while living in Bombay.  The central character, whose life closely mirrors that of the author, has enough adventures in the nine-hundred-plus pages of the novel to easily fill two or three seasons of a tightly-packed television show or a couple of very good action movies. 

The novel makes the city of Bombay come alive in a way that no tourist brochure or slick travelogue possibly could.  As a reader, I roamed the alleys and pathways of the slums where I fought fires, cholera, rats, and wild dogs. I walked the meanest streets and the most opulent avenues of the city with a cast of characters real enough to reach out and hold.  I spent time in the bowels of a prison whose stench and awfulness were almost beyond description.   I strolled the lonely beaches of Goa at sunset and climbed treacherous snow-covered mountain trails in Afghanistan with mujaheddin fighters.   I experienced unrequited love, heroin addiction and withdrawal, crime, violence, pleasure, the death of friends, the promise of birth, and the joy of a dancing bear.

The prose of this book is beautiful, delicious even, and every page is bejeweled with phrases and insights on life that beg to be lifted and incorporated into a religion.

Shantaram is a wonderful novel, and Gregory David Roberts is a wonder.   I hope that he is well – and writing.