Plot & Themes

What made it stick: One of the most absorbing first-person narratives in recent literary fiction — Roberts’s autobiographical novel of an escaped Australian convict in 1980s Bombay is simultaneously a thriller, a love story, a philosophical meditation, and an act of witness to a city and a class of people rarely seen in Western literature.

The plot: Lin (Gregory David Roberts) flees Australia after a prison break and lands in Bombay, where a small-time guide named Prabaker draws him into the life of the city. Lin establishes a free medical clinic in a slum, becomes entangled with the Bombay mafia under the enigmatic Khader Khan, falls hopelessly in love with the mysterious Karla, and ends up running guns in the Afghan war — all while evading Interpol and trying to understand what kind of man he is and wants to become.

What it’s about:

“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.” — forgiveness as the organizing principle of the book’s ethics
The purity of the slum — “to survive in such a writhe of hope and sorrow the people had to be scrupulously and heartbreakingly honest. That was the source of their purity: above all things, they were true to themselves.” — poverty as a moral stripping-away
Love and loneliness as the same wound — “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.” — every major relationship in the book is also an attempt to escape a self-made prison
Honour vs. virtue — the distinction that lets Lin respect criminals: “Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it.”
Complicity and its costs — the arc of the novel is about what happens when you keep saying yes to one more compromise, one more moral exception, until you’ve become someone you don’t recognize
“‘Love is the opposite of power. That’s why we fear it so much.’” — Karla’s axiom, which the novel keeps testing

— Drafted from external sources; review and edit to make your own.

Kindle Highlights

Highlights

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. — location: 26 ^ref-48857

The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, through barriers of time, into its own future. I liked it. — location: 184 ^ref-18721

The past reflects eternally between two mirrors—the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say. — location: 702 ^ref-34837

No-one, and nothing, could really hurt me. No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man. — location: 718 ^ref-28875

‘Love is the opposite of power. That’s why we fear it so much.’ — location: 771 ^ref-29329

‘Well,’ he puffed, ‘a man has to draw the line somewhere. Civilisation, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.’ — location: 1041 ^ref-45786

Prison wasn’t hell, but there was no heaven in it, either. In its own way, that was just as bad. — location: 1137 ^ref-46219

Most loves are like that, from what I can see. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independence. After a while you start throwing people out—your friends, everyone you used to know. And it’s still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take you down with it. I’ve seen that happen to a lot of girls here. I think that’s why I’m sick of love.’ — location: 1265 ^ref-9568

Then, speaking quietly and slowly, Prabaker told me about the place he called the people-market. — location: 1611 ^ref-29995

What does it take to harden a man’s heart? How could I see that place, look at those children, and not put a stop to it? Why didn’t I contact the authorities? Why didn’t I get a gun, and put a stop to it myself? The answer to that, like the answers to all the big questions, came in many parts. I — location: 1620 ^ref-28362

Ask any man with a long-enough experience of prisons, and he’ll tell you that all it takes to harden a man’s heart is a system of justice. — location: 1633 ^ref-58366

There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. — location: 1650 ^ref-44757

Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it’s exactly like love in three ways: it’s pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect — location: 1814 ^ref-16177

A lot of the bad stuff in the world wasn’t really that bad until someone tried to change it.’ — location: 1959 ^ref-17611

Kishan Mango Kharre launched us on the last leg of our journey by striking the dumbly patient ox more often, and with a good deal more vigour, than he’d done before I tried to intercede on its behalf. — location: 2390 ^ref-27677

Prabaker told me that his family and his neighbours were concerned that I would be lonely, that I must be lonely, in a strange place, without my own family. They decided to sit with me on that first night, mounting a vigil in the dark until they were sure that I was peacefully deep in sleep. After all, the little guide remarked, people in my country, in my village, would do the same for him, if he went there and missed his family, wouldn’t they? — location: 2481 ^ref-16471

I suddenly knew how much crying there was in me, and how little love. I knew, at last, how lonely I was. — location: 2502 ^ref-446

And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled. I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. 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. — location: 2505 ^ref-2858

Her story, told to me by many voices, month after month, became all the stories, even my own. And her love—her willingness to know the truth of my heart and to love me—changed the course of my life. — location: 2513 ^ref-5021

It was Shantaram, which means man of peace, or man — location: 2736 ^ref-7619

Whatever the case, whether they discovered that peace or created it, the truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain. Shantaram. The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be. — location: 2740 ^ref-55112

When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare. — location: 2995 ^ref-49901

It’s a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust. For people in the safe world, of course, exactly the opposite is true. — location: 3108 ^ref-22138

And it had to be me. Another man, with my first-aid training or better trained, wouldn’t have been forced by crime and a prison-break to live in the slum. Another criminal, ready to live there with the poor, wouldn’t have had my training. I couldn’t make sense of the connection on that first morning. I didn’t get the joke, and fate didn’t make me laugh. But I knew there was something—some meaning, some purpose, leading me to that place, and that job, at exactly that time. And the force of it was strong enough to bind me to the work, when every intuition tried to warn me away. — location: 3318 ^ref-19081

And I walked most nights, while the city slept. I walked, and I forced myself not to look over my shoulder at the gun-towers and the dangling power cord on the high wall that wasn’t there. — location: 3499 ^ref-56198

‘The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man. You and Abdullah are brothers. I know this. Your eyes lie, and tell you that this is not so. And you believe the lie, because it is easier.’ — location: 3819 ^ref-22758

‘No,’ I lied. ‘I’m sorry, but I just don’t agree. I don’t think you can make things true, just by believing them.’ — location: 3833 ^ref-38818

There is another reality, beyond what we see with our eyes. You have to feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way.’ — location: 3836 ^ref-10276

know now that there are beginnings, turning points, many of them, in every life; questions of luck and will and fate. — location: 3900 ^ref-38778

The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone—the noblest man alive or the most wicked—has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. — location: 3912 ^ref-28215

Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black. — location: 4238 ^ref-35950

You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.’ — location: 4501 ^ref-14872

Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men, Khader said to me once. I wasn’t sure if that was true, or if he simply wanted it to be true, but I did know from experience that despair and humiliation haunt the poor. — location: 4776 ^ref-3886

I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.’ — location: 4797 ^ref-28548

What I didn’t tell Karla was that the girlfriend had described me as interested in everything, and committed to nothing. It still rankled. It still hurt. It was still true. — location: 5084 ^ref-37994

‘Maybe not, but you sure as hell can be sick of it. It’s such a huge arrogance, to love someone, and there’s too much of it around. There’s too much love in the world. Sometimes I think that’s what heaven is—a place where everybody’s happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever.’ — location: 5199 ^ref-2202

In the end, what kept men coming to the Palace wasn’t the skill and loveliness of the women they could have there; it was the mystery of the woman they couldn’t have—the invisible beauty of Madame Zhou. — location: 5227 ^ref-43711

It’s one of the five hundred things I love about Indians: if they like you, they do it quickly, and not by half. — location: 5435 ^ref-6782

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. — location: 6059 ^ref-39795

In a sense, the ghetto existed on a foundation of those anonymous, unthankable deeds; insignificant and almost trivial in themselves, but collectively essential to the survival of the slum. — location: 6258 ^ref-39559

It was vassal-love, one of the strongest and most mysterious human emotions. — location: 6383 ^ref-61581

They were all, we were all, strangers to the city. None of us was born there. All of us were refugees, survivors, pitched up on the shores of the island city. If there was a bond between us, it was the bond of exiles, the kinship of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed. — location: 6828 ^ref-64870

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 hold on tight until the dawn. — location: 6833 ^ref-64575

He would be a fine man—the kind of man I once had tried, and failed, to be. — location: 6919 ^ref-21026

When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn’t be of our making, but that wouldn’t occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things. — location: 7220 ^ref-32456

What characterises the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it? I — location: 7266 ^ref-65059

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 love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive. — location: 7268 ^ref-1126

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. — location: 7288 ^ref-6775

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. — location: 7479 ^ref-16641

No-one but Karla called it rape. He said that Karla had led him on, and Karla’s aunt took his part. The fifteen-year-old orphan from Switzerland left her aunt’s home, and never contacted her again. She — location: 7545 ^ref-60251

And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky. — location: 7609 ^ref-965

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. — location: 7943 ^ref-58046

That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words. — location: 8127 ^ref-41015

Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they’re not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve. — location: 8267 ^ref-654

Redemption’s climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame. — location: 11075 ^ref-51027

We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them. I was that point in space and time where Abdullah’s wild violence intersected with Prabaker’s happy gentleness. — location: 12390 ^ref-5557

I watched him with a tiny germ of envy at the ease with which he opened his communication with God. I felt no urge to join him, but the sincerity of his meditation made me feel much more alone, somehow, in my solitary, unconnected mind. — location: 13176 ^ref-60944

Watching him leave, I was struck with a sudden, clutching instinct to — location: 13543 ^ref-48241

cry out and stop him. It was a foolish thing—an irrational stabbing dread that I was losing him, losing another friend. And it was so ridiculous, so petty in its jealousy, that I bit down on it and said nothing. Then I watched him sit down opposite Habib. I watched him reach out to lift the gaping, murderous face of the madman until their eyes met and held, and I knew, without understanding it, that Khaled was lost to us. — location: 13543 ^ref-46266

It worked, it played out that way, and what it cost was a million Afghan lives. What it cost was one-third of the population forced from their homeland. What it cost was one of the largest forced migrations in human history—three-and-a-half million refugees moving through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, and a million more exiled in Iran, India, and the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. What it cost was fifty thousand men, women, and children with one or more limbs amputated through land-mine explosions. What it cost was the Afghan heart and soul. — location: 13783 ^ref-65188

And that was the elated moment I’d called glorious, in my mind, as I ran into the guns: that stupid waste of lives, that friendly fire. There wasn’t any glory in it. There never is. There’s only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one. Glory belongs to God, of course; that’s what the word really means. And you can’t serve God with a gun. — location: 15465 ^ref-19141

It was a face so hard and unfamiliar that it startled me to recognise it as my own. I remembered the photograph taken by shy Kishmishi, and looked again into the mirror. There was a cold impassiveness in my face—and a determination, perhaps—which hadn’t even begun to gleam in the eyes that had stared so confidently into the lens of Khaled’s camera. I snatched up my sunglasses and put them on. Have I changed so much? I hoped that a hot shower, and shaving off my thick beard, would soften some of the hard edges. But the real hardness was inside me, and I wasn’t sure if it was simply tough and tenacious or if it was something much more cruel. — location: 15556 ^ref-36285

Standing there, invisible to her, I was astonished and bewildered to realise that I felt not angry or vengeful, but ashamed. I felt ashamed that I’d filled my heart with revenge. The part of me that had wanted to—What? Had I really wanted to kill her?—was the very part that was like her. I looked at her, and I knew that I was looking at myself, my own future, my destiny, if I couldn’t rid my heart of its vindictiveness. — location: 15823 ^ref-47443

And it kept me busy, breaking laws for a living: so busy that I managed to hide most of what I felt from the heart that was feeling it. — location: 16232 ^ref-47596

Lettie had once said that she found it strange and incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers, and mafiosi as men of honour. The confusion, I think, was hers, not mine. She’d confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble. — location: 16277 ^ref-42067

I hoped, of course, that Khader’s council, under Salman, would win. But I knew that, if we did win, it would be impossible to claim Chuha’s territory without also absorbing his trade in heroin, women, and porn. It was the future, and it was inevitable. There was simply too much money in it. And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get. — location: 16819 ^ref-10257

Modena, instead, had worked and saved and waited for love to return. And thinking about that—how he’d lived with what had been done to him—and wondering at it on the long walk back to Abdullah and the others, I discovered something that I should’ve known, as Modena did, right from the start. It was something simple: so simple that it took a pain as great as Modena’s to shake me into seeing it. He’d been able to deal with that pain because he’d accepted his own part in causing it. I’d never accepted my share of responsibility—right up to that moment—for the way my marriage had failed or for the heartache that had followed it. That was why I’d never dealt with it. — location: 17092 ^ref-59611

They couldn’t understand what I meant when I talked about the purity of the slum: they’d been there, and seen the wretchedness and filth for themselves. They saw no purity. But they hadn’t lived in those miraculous acres, and they hadn’t learned that to survive in such a writhe of hope and sorrow the people had to be scrupulously and heartbreakingly honest. That was the source of their purity: above all things, they were true to themselves. — location: 17455 ^ref-26615

There is no man, and no place, without war,’ he replied, and it struck me that it was the most profound thing he’d ever said to me. ‘The only thing we can do is choose a side, and fight. That is the only choice we get—who we fight for, who we fight against. That is life. — location: 17969 ^ref-20936

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