Meeting Shantaram

This was written in November 2005, shortly after I ran into "Shantaram" as described.

When you are in Colaba, you go to Leopold’s. At least for a chai, if not a drink. It’s a place to meet people or just be alone in a crowd, watching and being watched. And if you’re lucky, you might meet a famous author.

After a day of playing tourist in my favourite city, Mumbai, I dropped in at Leopold’s in just such a casual fashion. Beer gleaming golden before me on the marble-topped table, I looked around – you always look around when at Leo’s, as regulars call it. A pony-tailed head, partly seen, caught my eye. Pony tails for men have apparently gone out of fashion – this was the only one in the place. The head, hair slicked back tight, looked familiar.

Could it be, I wondered. Not 20 minutes ago, I had strolled through the back streets of Colaba wondering which of the many old buildings could have housed the wicked, mysterious Madame Zhou, Shantaram’s nemesis.

A reckless, holiday feeling took me to his table. “Excuse me, are you Shantaram?” I had meant to say his real name, but this worked – he blushed, grimaced and laughed. It was indeed Gregory David Roberts.

He grinned cheerfully for the camera and when I asked if I could meet him again with a copy of the book to sign, he said he would be at Leo’s the next day too. Four thirty, he said.

He was a little late, but with the many activities he’s juggling, that’s not surprising. Roberts stepped out of a taxi, waved vigorously at someone, and walked into Leopold to an appropriately coincidental toot from one of the faux-vintage trumpets for sale on the pavement just there.

A flourish of words
Roberts usually sits at “his” table, against the far wall under a couple of evocative old beer posters. But he stops at ours today for the promised signing. A bold hand, a flourish of words and an extravagance of curlicues covers the title page; he writes so hard the pen stabs through the paper.

A journalist is going to call him any moment for a phone interview, he says. She does, in a minute. She asks standard “celeb” questions – where he eats, what he reads, what he’s writing next. He talks about working to help the slum people among whom he lived. He’s setting up a mobile clinic for them, helping build a village school and a pucca house for the parents of the tourist guide who is one of the main characters in Shantaram. But he won’t say which village: “If I tell you, and if you print it, and hordes of people visit there, and perhaps one of the visitors harms someone from the village – I don’t want to be responsible for that.”

But the journalist he’s talking to has not read the book, so a lot of what he says means little to her. He laughs ruefully about this, later. “I have people coming up to me and saying ‘I haven’t read your book but I hear it is wonderful’,” he chuckles.

The story of Shantaram is in the process of being made into a film, with Johnny Depp playing Roberts. What does he think of that choice? “I chose him,” he says. “Several actors called me, interested in the lead role after they read or heard about the book, and of them all I picked Johnny.” A fitting choice; I can’t think of anyone who could become the character, either. Roberts writes with a Mont Blanc pen that Depp gave him.

The script? He’s worked on that himself as well. And in the pipeline is a sequel to Shantaram, but before that is to come a book of poetry, and after that a novel based on the poems in that book.

Roberts says he sleeps very little – about three hours a night – as a consequence of having so much to do. There is, of course, mountains of email – he reads everything but cannot reply to all of it.

He has ordered coffee – “Milk, very hot. Verry hot, okay?” he tells the waiter – and it arrives, milk-and-water, presumably hot enough, in a mug and three little sachets of Nescafe. Roberts is on the phone by now, so I tear open the sachets for him.

Among other things he’s doing to help people in this little pocket of Bombay is set up micro businesses and put part of the profits back into the community. There are already two barbershops in the Fort area, in South Bombay near Colaba. There’s also a shop customising Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycles.

It was a Bullet that Roberts hired in Goa to look for Karla. But so many of the people in the book are fictional. Qasim Ali. Khaderbhai. Prabaker the tourist guide. They are composites of the many people Roberts met and grew to know and like. And Karla, the woman Roberts falls for? I don’t ask about her, or about the dangerously attractive Abdullah Taheri, or the many events in Shantaram that seem so tantalisingly familiar, the more so because the locales, the air, the smells, the emotions are only too well known to those of us who have lived in Mumbai.

The book tugs at one’s emotions in more ways than one. “Layered” – as Roberts terms it – into four parts, each part has its own strata of structure, and each chapter follows a certain rhythm. This degree of organisation is in fact necessary when trying to even fathom, let alone portray, the polyglot chaos that is India, and especially Mumbai.

The only way one can make sense of the chaos is to turn philosopher – which might explain why many Indians are only too willing to hold forth on life, the universe and everything at most given times. Roberts too has a theory about things.

“Society is judged human or civilised based on how it treats women, indigenous people, poor people and convicts or criminals,” he says. “If society treats them in a humane, dignified, in a respectful way – only then can you say it is a civilised society.”

Awful things
Roberts wasn’t treated this way when he was down and out and poor, living in the slum. Many awful things happened to Shantaram – prison in New Zealand and then in Mumbai, where he was subject to severe torture and humiliation, and fighting in adverse conditions in Afghanistan. Then followed prison in Germany, where his story, his manuscript, was seized and destroyed by prison guards. Twice.

For a writer, that last seems the most terrible. But when I ask him what was the worst of all the things that happened to him, he says: “The hardest thing is to forgive. Not forgiving others – that comes. Once you decide to do it, you free your mind of the hatred, then you can forgive.”

But he has not forgotten the injustices he himself did to others, long years ago – something he speaks about in the book as well.

“The hardest thing,” he says, “is to look in the mirror and forgive yourself for the things you do to others.”

There is a wealth of compassion in his eyes; at the back is the knowledge that sometimes forgiving oneself is not just difficult, it is impossible.

Picture taken by Rahul Goswami.




(First posted on anothersubcontinent.com.)

'Not a city for losers'

For Mid-Day’s anniversary issue, July 1998. Bombay had been renamed Mumbai, but Shobha was not yet Shobhaa.

If Mumbai is the city of glitz, then Shobha De is its virtually undisputed queen. Her novels wouldn’t be the compelling reading they are if they were not set in this chaotic, pulsating city. And the Shobha syndrome wouldn’t have affected any other city as much as it has this maverick place.
Is the place, then, part of the personality? A chat with the pop writer reveals what she thinks of the city, and why she loves it so much.

How much is Mumbai a part of Shobha De?
Let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t have been me, for better or worse, in any other city in India. I don’t think I would have written the way I do, would have had the opportunities I got, the same kind of options and choices — which to me is really what defines the spirit of the city; that you can be who you are, what you are, and the only limits you set for yourself are those that you impose, and your imagination imposes. It’s a city that respects professionals, with no gender bias, and that in itself is saying a lot. I mean, I can’t imagine a Shobha De in, say, Allahabad, or even Delhi.

For whatever it is that I represent, it wouldn’t have been possible in any other city, no other city interests me as much. This has been the city of my formative years, of my organic growth, it defines me in every which way and I hope I define it too.

Wouldn’t this have happened if you had settled in any other city?
Definitely not. There are aspects of other cities that intrigue me, that I’d like to tap into at some point in my writing. But in all my novels Mumbai has not been merely a locale, it’s been a character. It’s a visible, throbbing, real presence, as important as the people I’m writing about within its context.

And it’s perhaps the only city that does not bore me for a minute. I like it in all its moods. I like it in whichever avatar it presents itself to me. There’s nothing I find even offensive about it. I’m more forgiving because I understand the city. Any other city gets my hackles up: when I go to Delhi I’m instantly on red alert. With Calcutta, of course, there’s a sentimental and emotional reason for my liking the city and accepting it. Technically it is my maike so when I go there I go into my Bengali bohuma mode – and mood.

But if there was a second city option I think for me it would be Pune. Bangalore collapsed into its own black hole and no longer is what it once was. There was a very young spirit to Bangalore which is no longer there – it’s like any other overcrowded polluted city. Pune retains its Maharashtraness, which is what I respond to on a very subliminal level. Though it is now becoming a Sindhi enclave, much to my regret, even so when I go there I feel very much a Maharashtrian. Whereas in Mumbai I don’t feel I belong to any particular community, the atmosphere here is so amorphous. You just feel a ‘Mumbaiwaali’, which is no slot other than the uniqueness of being a Mumbai person.

Why has Mumbai succeeded so much as a city?
It takes its chances, it has a cutting edge to it – it pushes you to your limits. It’s not a complacent city, it’s not a city that’s tolerant of failure. It’s not a city for losers, which is the tough part, because it’s very make-or-break, and it’s not kind to those who don’t make it. You don’t really stand much of a chance unless you’re perceived as successful. Which is why people try harder, which is why the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and well today. People cannot afford to be lazy, or smug, because there are always ten others standing right behind, ready to trample over your body and dance over it in their rush to get ahead. So it keeps you on your toes, and I like that quality. I would hate to be in a rut, because to me, complacency is death.

How much is Maharashtra a part of Mumbai’s psyche?
This is a cliché but needs to be said over and over again: Mumbai in no way metaphorically or even physically has any but a tenuous link to Maharashtra. Mumbai is really many cities within a city and many cultures within these seven islands that are so loosely linked. It exists on so many different levels, seamlessly and simultaneously. That is what makes the city so fascinating for someone who observes social change – that it is unpredictable at all times. There’s no one label you can stick on it. I like its diversity, its plurality. I like its energy, its ferocious spirit of enterprise, its evil underbelly, its rough edges. I like it because it’s crude and vulnerable at the same time.

And its gloss?
The gloss, I think, is largely exaggerated. I don’t really perceive it. There’s more grit than gloss. And that is again one of the tricks that Mumbai has successfully pulled off on the rest of India – an image of glamour and gloss which is grossly exaggerated.

Does Mumbai have what you could call a literature of its own? Is there something like a city’s literature?
I don’t think Mumbai has been exploited at all, in literary or even cinematic terms. When I see films made out of New York, or Rome, or Paris, or San Francisco, where the city comes alive in all its beauty, maybe its grottiness, but still it’s palpable. You can sense the city. I don’t think we’ve managed to tap into that. It has happened in regional writing, in Marathi or Gujarat, but not in English, and for some reason we’ve shied away from exploiting the potential of the city. Even our cinema doesn’t reflect that. What it does reflect is a Punjabi version of Mumbai. Most of the film makers are from the North and they come with a certain vision of Mumbai which they then recreate in their studio sets, but it’s not Mumbai at all, it’s Haryana with a Mumbai veneer; which is very disappointing. The mean streets of the city are never exploited. Its bazaars, its buzz, its contradictions, its strange landscape which is bizarre by any standards – we have the neo-Gothic, and the Marwadi Gothic and the Parsi Gothic and the wadas. Even the architecture of the city is so eccentric. It has not been captured, either in writing or in cinema.

Do you think it’s because nobody has really tried or is it because of the city’s elusive quality?
With a skilled pen, the elusive quality should not be difficult; it should be inspirational. The elusive quality should be the challenge. It is, for me, but then my forte is different, I’m not a descriptive writer. For me it’s dialogue and people, and having a ear for conversation and for characterisation rather than long, descriptive, narrative passages. So though I try I don’t think I’ve succeeded to the extent that the city deserves. In the hands of a far more descriptive novelist it could...

Who do you think would fit the bill?
Well, Vikram Chandra has attempted it, and successfully so, but even then he’s not quite ... we need a Pico Iyer, but a Pico Iyer who resides in Mumbai, not who comes here as a tourist and does a take on his American vision of the city — which is what he has done, and eloquently, but it’s not an insider’s look at Mumbai, it’s through American eyes. He is an Indian writer but who’s lived all his life in America. Salman Rushdie has done it, too, but again his Mumbai is a nostalgic Mumbai, he doesn’t know what contemporary Mumbai is.

A lot of the writing about Mumbai has been nostalgic.
Yes, fifties and sixties Mumbai. Rushdie’s portrayal of the city in the sixties would be hard to match, or compete with, but I’m talking about the nineties Mumbai, which is harder to define because it’s still a Mumbai that’s happening, that’s finding an identity, finding its feet, and has not yet defined itself. Whereas it’s very easy to place Mumbai of the sixties – the parameters were better defined.

Do you think Mumbai will remain in this uncertain state, or will it find its character and grow into it soon?
I think it’s a city in flux at the moment, there have been far too many upheavals. I perceive a strong sense of insecurity, there’s an identity crisis. Mainly because it’s grown beyond reason, beyond imagination, beyond proportion, it’s like a pressure cooker about to explode. It’s difficult to find the appropriate peg under these circumstances. It’s a little disorienting even for its own people to know where they stand in the context of the city because there’s so much change, and I think there is a feeling that we’ve been left behind somewhat, even in the glamour stakes. What the city is clinging to is its filmdom status. So long as Bollywood rules, Mumbai is okay. But otherwise, whether it’s fashion or even business, a lot of it has moved out. There are other power centres now; in fact, each metropolis has developed its own set of celebrities and people who are feted in their own cities. They don’t any more peg their success and self-worth onto how Mumbai perceives them, which has caused the shift. Look at Delhi, today it has marginalised Mumbai on so many levels, including in areas which Mumbai used to think of as its own – fashion being the main one.

Delhi has its young, very upwardly mobile crowd, there’s a lot more visible money, people are flaunting it, there are more options. When you’re judging a city by its status symbols, Mumbai is emerging rapidly as a poor relative. That has shaken its confidence, and of course we’ve had unfortunate incidents, our gangland wars ... there was a time when Mumbai aspired to be New York or London, but now it’s heading to be the new Chicago. I don’t think that’s what we had bargained for, that wasn’t our aspiration. That has disappointed people.

How much do you think the attempt to give Mumbai a Marathi identity is contributing towards this?
It’s a very artificial imposition, like a bandage you’re putting on the city, saying that whatever the wounds underneath, this should take care of it all. It doesn’t work like that. People have to feel it from within, it’s not something you can induce. I don’t even see why it’s necessary. Mumbai’s strength has always been its cosmopolitan character and if you take away from that, I think Mumbai will be the loser. We don’t need to confuse people with this kind of labelling and pigeon-holing.

Mumbai has been a free-floating city. It should be left to go about its business, which is really to make money, to contribute to the country’s income tax coffers. We should just be allowed to get on with that, because at the end of the day it’s the bottom line that counts. What is happening is cutting into that bottom line, which means that people are going to start questioning whether this is really the ideal environment for business. And if that is eroded then there is nothing left in Mumbai, nothing else to fall back on.

Do you think making Mumbai a state would help?
I am all for it. I think it would free it of various constraints. Also I feel it has received very offhand treatment from the centre. It has never been given priority status. We deserve better infrastructure, considering what we contribute to our national economy. It’s amazing that a series of chief ministers have not seen it as a priority, to improve the basic standards of living in the city, and make life easier for its people, in basic areas. We’re not asking for anything unreasonable or unrealistic. Commuting itself has become hazardous and time consuming. So how is a business nerve centre of our country going to function and compete in an environment that’s so hard-driven, if we don’t have the tools with which to compete?

Why haven’t you gone into script writing for films?
There are several offers but I haven’t come across a project that is attractive to me. I personally believe that we are ready to do, within the commercial format, films which have some degree of credibility and which are sophisticated and mature in content. There is room for that kind of cinema along with the fluff and juvenile fare. There can be something like cerebral entertainment, films that make you think but which are not arty films, like The Usual Suspects, or Seven – or just about any film that starts Robert de Niro or Al Pacino, films featuring men and women of a certain age which aren’t mindless. No film maker seems ready to try.

I remember a project some time ago, to do a script keeping Amitabh in mind. I met Amitabh and I told him that if anybody could make that switch and do the kind of roles that a Paul Newman, or a Dustin Hoffman, or a Robert de Niro, or Bruce Willis is doing – they’re all seen as super heroes. They’re all at a stage in their lives where they call the shots. Films, scripts are written around them, which suit their age and their status, and he is the one person who could make the difference and lead us into a new millennium doing the kind of films that suit him. But he’s not ready to do it. Even if the script is written around a hero in his fifties, he will still want to be teamed with a girl in her twenties, and that defeats the very purpose of projecting a mature kind of a package, which I believe the audiences are ready for.

So I wouldn’t want to do a film just for the heck of it. If it was something which I believe could pull off, and which would use whatever potential I have as a storyteller, then I would jump at it, but not just any old script that comes my way because I don’t think I’m sitting in a mithai shop distributing laddoos to all who come by with the right amount of money.

The all-pervasive spirit of Mumbai can best be expressed with this little episode which occurred even before the meeting with Shobha. When Mid-day called her home for an appointment, her first question was, What is your deadline? Quizzed about this, she admits that thinking this way is not even second nature to her any more; it’s her way of life.
I’d be dead without time management. At any given moment I’ve got fifty balls up in the air, and if even one of them falls I’ve had it. These are the kind of pressures that Mumbai does impose – or you choose to impose on yourself. It’s been the pace of my life for far too many years, I wouldn’t know how else to do it. Prioritising is very much a part of living in this city. I think that’s how it works for all those of us who have fifty balls up in the air; we’ve all become expert jugglers and tightrope walkers. That’s what the city demands.



(First published in Mid-Day, Bombay.)

The Garden

The wicket gate was always open. Today she had no shopping, just her handbag, so she felt freer as she walked slowly along her usual path. Cross the walkway, onto the pavement, under the champa tree (but these flowers didn’t have the heady perfume of those back in India), across the car lane to walk along the clerodendron hedge.

There was a bulbul, and another. They were flying onto the short, stocky trees that succeeded the white-flowered clerodendron along the walkway. There were berries on the trees, green ones which were ripening into blue-black ones now. The bulbuls were busy eating the berries, so they must be quite edible – her mother had taught her that if the birds ate any fruit, it had to be non-poisonous. She could ask one of the gardeners what tree it was. Everything was done so carefully here, they were bound to have entries of everything they grew.

The birds also ate the dates that were ripening now, but not as many went for them as she would have expected. Maybe they didn’t like them. A couple of mynahs did peck at the dates sometimes, but even they were more interested in strolling jauntily about the lawns, looking for insects in the grass. There were the sparrows, of course, twittering everywhere, and one or two officious crows – even when their number was scarce, here in Dubai, they were bossy, she thought.

It was so pleasant to walk through the garden of Maktoum Hospital. Even the few minutes it took for her to get in at the gate from the front and out of the exit gate at the side into the narrow and perpetually crowded street known as ‘‘behind Maktoum Hospital’’, where she lived; even that brief while was soothing, and she looked forward to returning, just to savour this little walk in the evening through the cool, green, flowering oasis.

In one corner of the garden was a tulsi plant. Strange, she often thought, that in this place full of decorative plants there should be one that was not strictly pretty, nor a beautiful flower bearer or a fruit tree. The tulsi was so soothing to look at, though, if only because it reminded her of the one in the garden at home.

Home. It wasn’t how she thought of the little studio flat she was going back to now. Home was the house on the hill which she loved. The garden, the oasis of calm with cats, flowers and her parents quietly going about the business of life. She used to water the tulsi first of all, then the other flowers, the white ananta, the richly coloured mirabilis which bloomed at 4pm, the canna lilies and then the crotons and vines. She would spray water over them and smile as they nodded their heads. Her mother used to say that the flowers were nodding with happiness at being watered. There must have been a scientific explanation, but they definitely did nod. At her. And she nodded back, projecting her happiness to them – the happiness she derived from them, so that it was a gentle, symbiotic rhythm that went on, the breeze, the delicate scent of the flowers, the droplets of water trembling on the leaves and the petals, her joy and theirs.

Now, here. Did these men feel like that? Tears started in her eyes at the sharp, sudden memory of what she had left behind, tears that stopped before spilling out. The tulsi plant did not ask much, she thought. Just a little water, and it healed, soothed and calmed. Tiny flowers, tiny tiny ones, barely seen but pale purple to the eye that cared to look. And tiny insects to rush around pollinating busily.

Her steps slowed. They kept changing the face of the gardens in this place. Suppose this one too was made over, and the tulsi uprooted? She hadn’t seen one anywhere else, it was obviously an aberration, perhaps planted quietly by a homesick gardener. What would she do if they replaced the tulsi?

There were few people in the garden. Only one gardener was visible in a far corner, his back to her. She crossed over to the tulsi and bent to look at it. Proud little brown spears were full of mature seeds. She snapped off a few and put them into her handbag. With enough care, shade from the fierce desert sun and plenty of water, they would grow in a pot, perhaps on her kitchen windowsill. At least one seed would sprout, an exile far from home like her.




(First published on buzzzar.com.)