The First Page Of Shantaram
My favorite novel was given to me as a birthday present.
When I unwrapped the 900-page monstrosity, I hefted it like a brick and asked “seriously?”
My friend Nauzli said, “Just read the first page. It will get you absolutely hooked. You’ll fly through it, I promise.”
So right there and then, I read the first page.
And she was right.
It is the best first page of a book I’ve ever read.
Guns, Mobs, and Philosophy. Love, Brotherhood, and War. All happening in the world on the other side of our world. It was beautiful and intriguing.
The book is Shantaram, and I have recommended it more than any other novel. At this point I’m sure I’ve gotten dozens of people to read it. (With a 100% appreciation rating!)
Here is the author’s backstory:
Normal Australian guy with a wife and daughter
After a divorce, starts messing with drugs.
Gets addicted to heroin and runs out of money.
Starts robbing banks to feed the drug habit.
On his third armed bank robbery, gets caught.
Goes to maximum-security prison for 20 years.
After eight years in prison, he escapes.
Flees to India to live in the villages and slums.
Starts a new life there as an outlaw, mobster, doctor, and philosopher.
You don’t believe me, I get it. Here’s his wikipedia.
This is the author’s true life story. The novel is about this time in his life, living in India as a hunted man. We don’t know where reality ends and the novel begins.
Eventually he is recaptured and serves out the rest of his sentence — and in prison, he writes this book. Prison guards destroyed the entire manuscript twice.
His writing is so vivid, his life so unique, and the book is so thoughtful that it is unlike anything else I’ve ever read.
Here is the first page of Shantaram:
Chapter One
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, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them.
It doesn't sound like much, I know.
But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.
In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man.
Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died.
They were better men than I am, most of them: better men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.
And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own. But my story doesn't begin with them, or with the mafia: it goes back to that first day in Bombay. Fate put me in the game there. Luck dealt the cards that led me to Karla Saaranen.
And I started to play it out, that hand, from the first moment I looked into her green eyes. So it begins, this story, like everything else- with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.
If this hooked you like it hooked me, you can get the book here.
(Also, it is incredible on Audible. The narrator does an amazing job with a wide variety of accents!)
If you read this, please let me know what you think. I laughed, cried, shivered, and thought new thoughts. By the end of the book, I felt like I lived a whole other life.