What on opening to Shantaram!

“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 of 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 an universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”

With such an opening and similar passages spread throughout, it becomes a hard to put down book. Add to that an Australian author who has lived in the slums of Bombay, and you almost expect to be enriched by some sort of karmic philosophy. Philosophy and spiritual journey or not, this certainly is no karma in a bottle. The story of Shantaram is a story of adventure and daring, allegedly a fictionalized account of the life of author Gregory David Roberts who was a heroin addict who committed a series of armed robberies. He became known as "The Gentleman Bandit" because he wore a three- piece suit and spoke politely. In 1978 he was caught, tried and sentenced to 19 years in a maximum-security prison. While incarcerated he wrote a book which was confiscated, shredded, rewritten and destroyed again: 600 pages and six years' work were lost.

Then Roberts escaped, apparently by climbing over the prison's front wall, between two gun towers, in broad daylight. He was designated Australia's "Most Wanted Man", spent the next 10 years on the run and wrote his massive book all over again. He calls it "a novel written in blood and tears".

The narrator is a "revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime and a poet who lost his soul in prison". He has ghastly experiences in a torture chamber and on battlefields and in other prisons, "chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed and starved".

Part travelogue, part love letter, part autobiography, Shantaram is a vivid, entertaining but slightly grandiose tale of Lin, an ex-junkie and convicted robber who escapes from an Australian prison then hides in the most alien of places: the hot, filthy, decadent, seaside metropolis of Bombay.

This hero is brutal, passionate and romantic, an action man who sometimes pauses to meditate on the nature of good and evil and describes his extraordinary world with vivid, occasionally florid magniloquence. This vast volume is a remarkable achievement and if it really tells the story of the author's life, truth is definitely stranger than fiction.

Shantaram is no wide-eyed backpacker's Lonely Planet travel guide. Instead, it could double as a guidebook for a fugitive who needs to disappear, counterfeit passport in hand.

Or it could just be a fun read for someone committed enough to stay with this lengthy, impossibly heavy book.

Lin is introduced as he steps off a plane with a new identity. Only the punishing Bombay heat is there to greet him. He is instantly intrigued by the city just as it is by him. He is gawked at by locals for being a gora, and he can't get enough of the never-ending cacophony of the city's life pulse.

Prabaker, an energetic and sometimes irritating city guide, is the first to greet the newly free runaway. He also is one of the book's most innocent and refreshing characters. It is on one of his city tours — filled as much with slums as tourist sites — that Lin meets the mysterious green-eyed beauty Karla Saaranen.

Karla is Lin's love interest and his gateway to Bombay's underworld of German prostitutes, ruthless madams, corrupt police officers, deadly henchmen, Bollywood money launderers, Iranian smugglers and Afghani mafiosi.

It is under the stewardship of one such Afghani don and philosopher that Lin rises among the ranks of an underworld he struggles to moralize in maddeningly unnecessary philosophical passages. It is at these points that the book bogs down.

Despite occasional flubs, much is covered gracefully during the decade time span. Lin briefly lives in a 5,000-year-old village where he earns the name Shantaram, which means man of peace. He starts a medical clinic in a slum, gets beaten up countless times, fights with the mujahadeen in Afghanistan and acts in a few Bollywood films.

Roberts based much of the plot on his own life. He escaped from an Australian prison after being convicted of a string of robberies and spent 10 years hiding in India. Eventually, he was extradited, finished his 19-year term and wrote this book.

Roberts' behemoth is Bollywood-like in its strengths and flaws. Its visceral, cinematic descriptive beauty truly impresses. Although Shantaram gives too much of itself, its redemption lies in its bleeding-heart love letter to a Bombay few ever see.

Courtesy of Peter Deyell