I finally managed to finish 933 pages of Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (ISBN 1 92076920X). Now I commend it to you. It is the first book by this author and claims to be autobiographical, although interestingly enough it is catalogued as Fiction. Mind you, Roberts is an Australian so that seems quite reasonable.
However, throwing caution to the wind and assuming it is, indeed, factual, Shantaram is a detailed and fascinating introduction to Bombay, India. In particular this book is set in the Bombay most visitors are unlikely to experience, never mind understand.
Shantaram picks up the author’s life as he touches down in Bombay on a false New Zealand passport, having formerly escaped an Australian prison whilst serving a sentence for heroin addiction motivated armed robberies. Our anti-hero is on the run and has chosen Bombay as a refuge. By a combination of his open and accepting personality and some small good fortune Roberts slowly becomes an established part of Bombay. He befriends locals, learns the languages (and more importantly the culture) and eventually takes up residence in a Bombay slum where he quickly becomes a free medic for his neighbours.
Things really become interesting as Roberts develops from a fairly discreet street fixer into a member and eventually trusted lieutenant of a branch of the Bombay “mafia”. Along the way he spends some time in a Bombay prison, works as a smuggler, counterfeiter and black marketeer, and tops it off with a smuggling trip into Afghanistan in the middle of the war with the USSR.
This book was lent to me because of the detailed descriptions of the sophisticated identity document counterfeiting operation the author became involved in. However, while the details of those and other criminal activities were interesting, ultimately I was most impressed by the insights into Indian culture and life, and most of all the culture and daily life in the slum Roberts lived in for some time.
The slum is revealed for something far more than what I ever imagined. It is quite clear from the outset this is exactly the sort of pestilential hell hole we have all seen on TV – plastic sheets and cardboard boxes for structures, streams of excrement running down the middle of the street and poverty and sickness throughout. But, at least in the author’s experience, the occupants and their dwellings were spotless, hospitable and unified with an informal social structure. Even more fascinating, a place in a slum was actually much sought after and a step up for the many thousands who live literally on the street. Daily life in the slum was hard, but also full of laughter and love and life – food was cooked well and many people spent most of their day happy.
A further surprising gem was many of the slum inhabitants had relatively good jobs and sources of income, leaving their slum dwelling every day to go to work. They simply couldn’t afford to live elsewhere, but were not necessarily without income. And the piece de resistance was, I think, that despite a major part of the slum dwelling existence involving criminal activity and theft of essentials, within the slum itself nobody stole from anybody else – security being impossible anyway when your door consists of air or a sheet – nobody stole.
Roberts has a readable turn of phrase and a vivid descriptive style, albeit tending towards the over dramatic at some points. He also periodically descends into doleful introspection laced with considerable guilt about his (many and varied) sins – however these are usually placed at the end of many chapters and easy to skip over. Predictably he spends a good deal of tree pulp assuring the reader of the honourable and admirable aspects of organised career criminals. I personally didn’t empathise with that sort of line – its old news and it always has been and always is self serving fiction.
Despite these criticisms I do recommend this book for two reasons – firstly it is genuinely a good (if somewhat overlong) read and secondly because it should make you look at Indian culture, and particular aspects of third world culture, in a different and perhaps more sympathetic light. At least it had this effect on me, and expanded my understanding of a place and people I formerly had little knowledge of or interest in.
It certainly makes me want to go there.
