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 realized, even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, that I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It was a long story that led me there, beginning on the day I escaped a maximum-security prison in Australia and fled to Bombay, a fugitive with a false passport and a hunted heart. The first thing I noticed was the smell - a blend of hope and greed, gods and demons, spices and sea - and then the heat that clung to my skin like a second, sweating self. It was a city of millions, and in that first hour, two of them found me: a smiling, irrepressible guide named Prabaker, who became my brother, and a woman with eyes of spectacular green named Karla, who became my destiny.

Prabaker led me to the India Guest House, a cheap hotel in the tourist district of Colaba, and from there I found my way to Leopold's, a sprawling café that served as the unofficial headquarters for the city's expatriates, gangsters, and travelers. It was a world of shadows and whispers, where deals for drugs, gold, and passports were made over sweet tea and cigarettes. I found a kind of home there, among the outcasts. There was Didier, a witty, cynical Frenchman who was gay, Jewish, and a criminal, “more or less in that order,” and who taught me the city's secret languages. And there was Karla. We sparred with philosophies and desires across the marble-topped tables. “Love is the opposite of power,” she told me once, her gaze unwavering. “That's why we fear it so much.” I didn't understand her then, but I knew she was as wounded by the world as I was, and I began to fall for the fierce, lonely courage in her.

My life as a foreigner dabbling in the city's underbelly ended when I was robbed of everything I owned. With no money and nowhere to go, Prabaker made an offer. “You will live with us,” he said, and he took me to his home in the sprawling slum of twenty-five thousand souls. On my first day, a fire raged through the flimsy huts of plastic and bamboo. As others fled with their meager possessions, I saw my neighbors - men I'd just met - running toward the flames with buckets of their precious drinking water. In that instant, I stopped being a fugitive hiding from the world and became a man fighting for a small part of it. I ran with them, into the fire. The act made me one of them, and in the aftermath, treating the burned and wounded with my large first-aid kit, I became their unlikely doctor, their Linbaba.

My work in the slum brought me to the attention of Abdel Khader Khan, a powerful mafia don known to all as Khaderbhai. He was a poet, a philosopher, and a lord of crime who saw me as a son he never had. He took me under his protection, and I began to work for him, learning the black-market currency trade from a quiet, battle-scarred Palestinian named Khaled and the gold-smuggling business from a veteran gangster named Madjid. I found a new brother in Abdullah Taheri, a handsome, lethal Iranian fighter who moved with a dancer's grace and a killer's resolve. I was part of a new family, a brotherhood of crime, and for a time, I felt safe. But in Bombay, safety is just the eye of the storm.

A woman betrayed me. I never learned who, but someone powerful arranged for my arrest. I was thrown into the notorious Arthur Road Prison, a place of torment where convict overseers ruled with bamboo canes and sadistic cruelty. For four months, I was beaten, starved, and infested with body lice. I was chained to a gate and flogged until my skin was flayed from my back. They tried to break my will, but the memory of my escape - over the front wall, in broad daylight - kept a flicker of defiance alive in me. When I was skeletal, half my normal weight, and close to death, Khaderbhai sent my friend Vikram to buy my freedom. The price was ten thousand American dollars, and the silence of the corrupt officials who'd discovered my true identity from an Interpol fingerprint file.

The prison had broken something in me, and I couldn't return to the slum. I began working for Khaderbhai in earnest, running passports to Africa and smuggling gold. Then he asked me to join him on a mission to his homeland, Afghanistan, to supply guns and medicine to the mujaheddin fighting the Russian invasion. “I am asking you to go with me,” he said, his golden eyes filled with a father's love, and I couldn't refuse him. We rode on horseback over the high, frozen mountain passes, fighting local warlords and our own gnawing hunger. We were betrayed. In an ambush, Khaderbhai was killed. I held his body in my arms, and my world lost its father. We were attacked again, by mortars and a Russian helicopter gunship. I was wounded, and only Nazeer, Khader's loyal bodyguard, saved me, dragging my unconscious body through the snow to the Pakistan border.

I returned to a city of ghosts. Prabaker, my laughing, loving friend, had been killed in a taxi crash while I was away. Abdullah had been gunned down by police who'd been fed false information that he was a terrorist killer named Sapna. With my friends and my father-figure gone, I collapsed. I fled to an opium den, seeking the oblivion of heroin. For three months I floated on the dead sea of the drug, a willing prisoner in a sensory deprivation tank for the soul. It was Karla who found me. Khaderbhai, before he'd left for Afghanistan, had known I might fall, and he'd asked her to watch over me. She sent Nazeer to pull me from the den, and she nursed me through the hell of withdrawal.

In the fragile peace of my recovery, she confessed that she had been working for Khader all along. It was she who had first brought me to his attention. Every kindness, every test, every step of my journey had been part of his intricate plan to recruit me. He'd even left me to suffer in prison, as a final trial of my will. I'd been a pawn in his game, and the knowledge was a blade of ice in my heart. I told her I hated him, but it was a lie. I'd loved him too much. I walked away from her, and from the life I'd known in his service.

I returned to the slum, to the wedding of Johnny Cigar, my friend, and Sita, the sister of Prabaker's widow. There, in the lamplight, I saw Prabaker's son for the first time. The boy was a perfect image of his father, and when he smiled, it was Prabaker's own world-embracing smile. He ran to me, and I lifted him into my arms. My friends gathered around me, their faces full of love and welcome. My hut was empty, waiting. My neighbor offered me his own bed. Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities. In that moment, with the boy's arms around my neck, I made a choice. For this is what we do. We drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. We push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.