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.)