Shantaram
by Gregory David Roberts
List Price: $14.95
Pages: 944
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0312330537
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne, Australia. Sentenced to nineteen years in prison for a series of armed robberies, he escaped and spent ten of his fugitive years in Bombay---where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia. Recaptured, he served out his sentence, and established a successful multimedia company upon his release. Roberts is a now full-time writer and lives in Bombay.
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The first wall of any prison is the one that surrounds the heart; it's put inside the man, before the man's put inside the prison. It's that wall of flesh and fear that keeps men confined. And when you escape, when you break out, it's the wall within yourself that you have to scale first, before you get anywhere near the one made of stone and steel.
After I'd spent ten years on the run as my country's Most Wanted Man, after I'd been to two wars, and set up a clinic for the poor in a Bombay slum, and worked as a forger, counterfeiter, smuggler and gunrunner for a branch of the Bombay mafia, after I'd been captured and imprisoned in Germany with Europe's most notorious terrorists, after I'd been extradited to Australia and put into solitary confinement for two years as a punishment for escaping, I discovered and then had to scale another wall that pride and fear and rage had built in my heart. I'd written the first 300 pages of a novel, based on my life, and I returned to my cell one day, from two hours of walking the exercise cage, to find that a sadistic prison officer had torn the manuscript into fragments no bigger than a thumbnail, and used them to fill the toilet bowl to overflowing.
An anger, throbbing so hard in my heart and my blood that it ached in my head, tormented me: I had to literally flush away three years of work. The inequitable cruelty of the guard's actions --- I had every legal permission to write my manuscript --- was no less injurious than the blow made against my art: strike at my face, hurt my body, I'll accept it, but don't hurt my work.
After receiving permission once again, I began work on the second draft of the manuscript. Three-and-a-half years and 350 pages later, I returned from work in a prison factory to find that the second draft of the novel had also been destroyed, with fragments of my work scattered throughout my cell and out onto the prison tier.
I sat down on the bed in my cell, surrounded by the pieces of my heart, and I recalled the two times I'd been tortured in an Indian prison, during the years that I was on the run. And last, and strongest of those memories was the thought that had claimed me, and saved me, and freed me in that floating moment: Let it go. Forgive them. Let it go, if you want to live.
I found the prison officer who'd destroyed the second draft of my book. I told him that I forgave him. He didn't believe me, at first, but if I could forgive that destruction of six years' work, I could forgive just about anything.
Shantaram changed as a result of that destruction, and it's a far more complex book, for its long, agonised gestation period, than it ever would've been had they just let me write it from the first draft. And the prison officer, who expected to be attacked that day, changed as well. He looked down at his polished boots when I finished talking, and mumbled: I'm sorry. I don't know why I done it. I shouldn't have done it. I don't know why I did. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
The coda to this account of having my manuscript destroyed twice in prison is that I met that prison officer again, just recently, while I was speaking at the Writers Festival in Melbourne. He approached me after I'd addressed an audience on the very theme of Forgiveness as a Literary Virtue, and told me that he'd changed his life in ways that resembled the changes occurring in mine. He'd left the prison service, soon after the incident where he'd destroyed my novel. In the years that followed, he'd enrolled in a course of night-school classes that brought him to study literature, as an adult student at university. We hugged. He cried. And I signed, with no little love and passioned thanks, his copy of the book he'd once destroyed.
This is an excerpt from Greg Robert's essay "The First Wall: Forgiveness, Love and The Writer's Dream." For a full version of the essay, visit www.shantaram.com.
Excerpted from Shantaram © Copyright 2012 by Gregory David Roberts. Reprinted with permission by St. Martin's Griffin. All rights reserved.
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