It’s people, of course, who shape the story. And before saying more about Lin, another character stands out. Prabaker is the semi-educated guide Lin meets upon arriving in Bombay. “Prabu,” by his nickname, is India’s “American Joe.” He personifies the innocence, savvy, cultural mixture, privation and quirks of his country. He grew up in a village but has come to the city without a formal education to live in a slum and try to make a living in cash. He has learned the businesses of the streets -- drug deals and prostitution, as well as small commissions on myriad legitimate transactions – but his heart remains in his village with hopes of someday marrying. Most endearing is his speech. Raised speaking Marathi, he learned English on the streets and deploys it on foreigners with earnestness and a touch mischief.
In one scene Prabaker is taking Lin to his village by train. In order to get Lin a seat for the long, crowded ride, Prabaker hires a porter to push people out of the way. Lin follows the porter to an empty seat and Prabaker comes behind, enduring a tangle of shoves and knocks.
“Well, what the hell did you think you were doing? I gave you money for the tickets. We could’ve sat down in first or second class, like civilized people. What are we doing back here?”
He looked at me, reproach and disappointment brimming in his large, soft-brown eyes. He pulled a small bundle of notes from his pockets, and handed it to me.
“This is the change from the tickets money. Anybody can buy first-class tickets, Lin. If you want to buy tickets in first class, you can be doing that all on yourself only. You don’t need it a Bombay guide, to buy tickets in comfortable, empty carriages. But you need a very excellent Bombay guide, like me, like Prabaker Kishan Kharre, to get into this carriage at V.T. Station, and get a good seat, isn’t it? This is my job.”
Lin arrives at Prabu’s bucolic family village where he finds refuge from the hustle of the city and the violence of his past. It is from there the book’s name comes. The village women give Lin the name “Shantaram.” It means, the text tells us, “man of peace, or man of God’s peace.”
Lin returns to Bombay after this inner healing and takes up residence in a slum, where he navigates the city’s dangers and temptations in setting up a free health clinic. This sounds like the end of a book and it could well be, but that is only novel number one of Shantaram. There is also the story of his involvement with a Bombay mafia, and then there is the tale of his missions with the mujahideen in the Afghan war with the Soviets.
A recurring motif is that our flawed hero is pushed to his physical, emotional and spiritual limits in a fight for his life (in prison, at war, in a gang fight) only to be carried through by a new friend or twist of fate. I guess that is a theme in many novels. In terms of the psychological intensity of the protagonist’s descent and redemption, I’m reminded of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. That said, Lin’s tribulations in the slum and in a notorious prison are not quite so confined to the soul – the action in Shantaram would be well suited to the big screen – but the drama is no less gripping. Always in the background of Lin’s suffering is the unnerving thought that maybe an episode just like this occurred in Robert’s life, at the hands of a prison bullies or during his own addiction to heroin.
The fights, the battles, the addictions, the killings, the diseases in Shantaram are violent. That may sound obvious given the nature of such occurrences, but in modern fiction (especially movies) I’m highly suspicious of violence being gratuitous, a substitute for the craft of storytelling and a pandering to a crass culture. However, for the first let’s say 600 pages of Shantaram, the blurb about Robert’s history trumped my suspicion. Here’s what I heard him saying through his descriptions of gouged eyes, lacerated skin, veins gushing blood and knife wounds described with the precision of a medical case study. “I grew up in an Anglo family in Australia that was at least anchored to, if not enmeshed in, the bourgeois world,” he is saying, “but my heart was broken, my marriage ended, my will taken over by addiction and I was banished from that world. I found myself a world that had been previously unimaginably: unimaginable in its cruelty, unimaginable in its grotesqueness and uninhibited in its display of evil and kindness.
“I want you to imagine this world,” Roberts says for 933 pages in Shantaram, “and I will not quit lulling, prodding and shocking you until there is at least a crack in your bourgeois sensibility that so casually assumes capricious violence is aberration in an otherwise efficient world.”
Oh but I’m wallowing, and Shantaram does not. The book is, as the blurb on the front cover from Pat Conroy says, “a work of extraordinary art.” There is tragic love and acts of honor. There is humor. The scene that may stick with me longest, the one during which chuckled along for four pages, goes back to our gentle friend Prabu. A group of street performers have brought a dancing bear named Kano to the slum neighborhood where he and Lin are living. But, the beast is not there for passive entertainment; it has been sent with a message. Prabu explains about the bear handlers: “They have it a message for you, Lin. But there is a vachan, a promise, before they will give it the message. There is a … you know … a catches.”
“A catches?” [Lin replies.]
“Yes, sure. This is English word, yes? Catches. It means like a little revenge for being nice,” Prabaker grinned happily…. “Lin, they won’t tell who is sending it the messages,” Prabaker said, suppressing his own laughter with some difficulty. “This is a big secret, and they are not telling it. They have some instructions, to give this message to you, with nothing explanations, and with the one catches for you, like a promise.”
“What catch?”
“Well, you have to hug it the bear.”
“I have to what?”
“Hug it the bear. You have to give him a big cuddles, like this.”
He reached out and grabbed me in a tight hug, his head pressed against my chest. The crowd applauded wildly, the bear-handlers shrieked in a high-pitched keening, and even the bear was moved to stand and dance a thudding, stomp-footed jig. The bewilderment and obvious reluctance on my face drove people to more and bigger laughter.
In the universe of Shantaram, this little moment is both believable and surprising. It is vividly funny.
Appropriately, as the book concludes, Kano the dancing bear returns for another wacky incident. Prabu is gone by the end of the book, having died in a gory car accident, but the final scene features his son and mother. The mother calls Lin by the name of peace she gave him, “Shantaram,” and the implication is that Lin will forgo his life of violence and return to serving in the slum.
I’m apt to remember a philosophy of a novel, its implicit theology. And, there is one in Shantaram. A mafia-don-cum-guru character provides it. It goes along the lines of this: The universe tends toward complexity. Humans have free will to act in accordance or against this tendency. Going with it is moral good; contradicting it is evil. There’s a bit more to it, but it is not substantial enough to inspire a reaction from me. Instead, my guess is that for me the abiding concept of the book will be the Borsalino hat test. The Borsalino, we learn in an exchange between Lin and bon vivant French friend of his, is a stylish rabbit-fur hat that for a time identified European gangsters. To determine if a Borsalino was genuine the gangsters had a test. They rolled it up tight enough to pass through a wedding ring. If the hat could pass through and regain its original form, it was a real Borsalino. The significance, the Frenchmen explained, is that sometimes people are put through a kind of Borsalino test.
Shantaram describes a series of Lin’s Borsalino tests. It seems to be inspired by Robert’s. And, while reading the book, I felt as if I went through a few of my own.
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