A person convicted of armed robbery escapes from a jail in Australia. He is not a seasoned criminal but a first-time convict who wants to escape the jail term. He gets a fake passport and lands in Bombay. He is fascinated by the vividness the city offers. In no time he becomes part of it. He goes by the name in his fake passport “Lin”. He becomes a part of foreigners group living in Bombay. All of them have a criminal past in their respective home countries and they do not want to go back. They are all people with normal lives who accidentally got into crime and found Bombay as their hideout and a place to heal and thrive. ‘Leopold’ a restaurant in ‘Colaba’ area of Bombay is the place they meet regularly.
Lin has a
personal tourist guide, Prabhakar, who helps Lin find a hotel and takes him
around the town. Not just the regular tourist spots, he takes Lin to the dark
side of Bombay too, like the slave market. They become close friends and Lin
goes with Prabhakar to his native place, a village in Northern Maharashtra. Not
only he enjoys living there, but he also gets an Indian name “Shantaram” chosen by the villagers for him.
After he
returns to Bombay, he runs out of money and his visa is expired too. He goes on
to live in a slum where Prabhakar lives where no one questions his visa status,
and he does not have to pay any rent. One day, when the slum is caught on fire,
Lin treats those affected with the first aid he has with him. Then on he
becomes the doctor, the first person to go for medical assistance in the slum.
The goodwill developed attracts the underworld don of Bombay, Khader Bhai
(loosely based on the real character of Karim Lala). Lin gets medicine supplies and
references to the hospitals and doctors with the help of Khader and he
becomes a well-known person in the slum.
While trying
to help his friend, Karla, with whom Lin is in love, he gets into
a negative spiral. He gets jailed in Bombay and severely beaten up by police
for four months. Khader helps him to get out. To repay the due, Lin
becomes part of the illegal businesses Khader Bhai runs. Li becomes part of foreign
currency exchange, passport forgery, and gold smuggling all of them operated by
underworld gangs. He becomes confident of Khader Bhai and goes on to fight the
war in Afghanistan. There Lin learns that he was part of a bigger scheme of
Khader and that meeting him and Karla were no random events. In Afghanistan,
Khader dies in the conflict. Lin returns to Bombay. He has a score to
settle with a person who had sent him to jail. But he learns that that person is
already destroyed mentally. Prabhakar dies in an accident. Love for Karla dies.
But life goes on.
This is a
930 pages novel set in the Bombay of 1980s. It was on my book rack for years but as it became a TV serial
now, my interest got rekindled. I put my hands on it and could not take it off. This
book reads like a work of fiction but feels real. In fact, most of this
book is real and is loosely based on the author’s real-life experience.
Conversations
with Didier (a character in the novel) are deeply psychological and the discussions
in Khader's council are philosophical. I have learned many things in this
novel that I could not grasp in the books of Psychology and Philosophy. The character of Karla is brilliantly crafted. Many of the passages are worth re-reading. Surprisingly for a first-book writer, literary
quality is very high. The author has not only lived an interesting life; he has
mastered putting it into words also.
This book
has a sequel (a novel running 870 pages). It has already arrived on my study table.
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