Discovering a life...

Some books keep taunting me with a fascinating storyline, a great review or a friend's recommendation but this one had all three and more; but despite that, it has taken me more than a few years of procrastination to finally get down to reading "Shantaram". The last straw which broke the back of my reticence with this book was this post which gave me a sneak peek into some of the best lines from it. And then i decided that it was finally time that I stopped waiting for the right abundance of time to launch an attack on this thousand page wonder and surprisingly it didn't take all that long. Now, that is a real testament to the writer's prowess that a 1000 pages flow effortlessly and leave the reader in me certain that I would want to read them again.
 

Most writers gift the world their words and their thoughts but in this book, Gregory Roberts has gifted to the world a life ! A life and the fullness of its possibilities and all the lessons that one can learn from it. Its words have transported me to the narrow lanes of Mumbai with its rush hour traffic, sights, smells and sounds. Its words have forced me to think of life's lessons and the choices we make based on them. Its characters have made me rethink my ideas of good and evil, of choice and circumstance. It has sketched a life for me which is an example of all that we can do right and of all that we can go wrong with. It has been a wonderful journey into the heart of a man and of a city, all through the words of one man.

And so I leave here a tiny footprint of that book in the pages of my blog... just so that I can revisit them at a later date. 

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"The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides more wisely than your head. There's no where else in the world where that's quite so true."

"The past reflects eternally between two mirrors - the bright mirror of words and deeds and the dark one full of things that we didn't do or say."

"I think that we all, each one of us, we all have to earn our future..... the future is like anything else that's important. It has to be earned. If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, if we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is - a way of earning the future."

"What we call cowardice is often just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than being well prepared."

"Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it's exactly like love in three ways: it's pushy, it has no real sense of humor and it turns up where you least expect it."

"Wisdom is just cleverness with all the guts kicked out of it."

"It's a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you can trust. For people in the safe world, of course, exactly the opposite is true."

"A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him. I guess. Or maybe when he sees the things he wishes he had in himself."

"Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn't, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it's impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love"

"They knew the place in me where the river stopped, and they marked it with a new name. Shantaram Kishan Kharre. I don't know if they found that name in the heart of the man they believed me to be, or if they planted it there, like a wishing tree, to bloom and grow."

"I don’t know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it."

"Every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness"

"One of the ironies of courage and why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone."

"If fate doesn't make you laugh, you just don't get the joke."

"Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, it’s the other way around."

"What characterizes the human race more, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it"

"Sometimes you break your heart in the right way."

"... in the long run, motives matter more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we've done have run their course, it's the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption's climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame."

"The fugitive kind run, trying against their hearts to annihilate the past, and with it every tell-tale trace of what they were, where they came from, and those who once loved them. And they run into that extinction of themselves, to survive, but they always fail. We can deny the past, but we can't escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die."

"You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time."

"...good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict."

"If we can't respect the way we earned it, money has no value. If we can't use it to make life better for our families and loved ones, money has no purpose."

"One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you."
 

"They nailed their stakes into the earth of my life, those farmers. They knew the place in me where the river stopped, and they marked it with a new name. Shantaram Kishan Kharre. I dont know if they found that name in the heart of the man they believed me to be, of if they planted it there, like a wishing tree, to bloom and grow." 

"The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They are wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry."
 

“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.”

“Loves are like that. You heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and independence. After a while, you started throwing people out – your friends and everyone you used to know. And it’s still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take down with it. I’ve seen that happen to a lot of girls. That’s why I’m sick of Love.”
 

“The world and I are not on the speaking terms. The world tries to win me back, but it doesn’t work. I guess I’m just not the forgiving type.”
 

“You said it’s important to have freedom to say no, but I think it’s more important to have freedom to say yes.”
 

“Sometimes I think that’s what heaven is- a place where everybody’s happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever.”
 

“People always hurt us with their trust. The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.”
 

“Mistakes are like bad loves, the more you learn from them, the more you wish they’d never happened.”
 

“The truth is a bully we all pretend to like.”
 

“I could never respect a man who didn’t have the good sense to be at least a little afraid of me.”

“Sometimes you have to surrender before you win.”
 

“Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of it.”
 

“I take everything personally- that’s what being a person is all about.”
 

“It isn’t a secret, unless keeping it hurts.”
 

“Depression only happens to people who don’t know how to be sad.”
 

“Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.”
 

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have – to hold on tight until the dawn”
 

“Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.”
 

“A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare.”
 

“Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.”
 

“You are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return.”

“Be true to love where ever you find it, and be true to yourself and everything that you really are.”
 

"Some of the worst wrongs, were caused by people who tried to change things."
 

"It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive."
 

"We know who we are and define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them."
 

"Lovers find their way by insights and confidences; they are the stars they use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering."

"Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp; and worry that gets most of us, in the end."
 

"Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting."

"Sometimes you love only with hope, sometimes, you cry without tears. Sometimes, that’s all that is left, to cling together till the dawn."
 

"He had said. 'Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities'. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he'd meant. He'd been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I'd always thought that fate was something unchangeable : fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But i suddenly realized that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love."
 

"For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on."
 

"Money stinks. A stack of new money smells of ink and acid and bleach like the fingerprinting room in a city police station. Old money, vexed with hope and coveting, smells stale like dead flowers kept too long between the pages of a cheap novel."
 

"The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has it cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legends of its past with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and heated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be."


"... She had found it incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers and mafiosi as men of honor. The confusion I think, was hers, not mine. She'd confused honor with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honor is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honorable way...."


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Fact and fiction...

Somehow as a child, I had long held these rigid boundaries between fact and fable and it seemed always that stories that you read about or see in movies do not intersect with our everyday life trajectories. And now as I have learnt my lessons, I know that i couldn't have been farther from truth ! 

Our lives are these growing, tangled web of stories and it is only a question of knowing the people around you an the stories that they have lived and are living. There are stories all around us - stories of war and struggle, of exile and escape, of struggle with disease and death, of struggle with poverty and fear, stories of love and hate, envy and anger. 

Stories that are impregnated with truth even as they embolden the people who have lived through them. Stories that show human courage and strength even as it reveals our foibles and our weaknesses. Over the past few weeks, I have heard of stories of escape from the Vietnam war followed by a struggle with poverty to rebuild a life in exile. I have heard of battles with cancer as family members use every skill at their disposal to dissect the disease at hand. I have seen a woman working hard in the labortaory trying to find a cure for the cystic fibrosis that afflicts her husband. I have seen unity and harmony in strangers and a strange separation in couples. I have seen relationships unravel like a blanket that frays I have seen cover-ups and close-ups... I have seen some lives and heard some stories and all these experiences have completely eroded those naive illusions that i had about the separation between fact and fiction. I now see every life as a story in making and i only wonder if i will ever get to hear it. I now see every person as a potential story teller and I am left wondering what the end is of these many stories that are weaving themselves into the fabric of my life.

Will I ever read the whole story ?  Will I become a part of these stories ? I guess, only time will tell us the answer.

A sign and an epiphany...

For the past few months, i have lived a life of insulated isolation. I have also perhaps sought this out intentionally because this insulated numbness was easier to deal with that the daily fluctuations of loneliness and solitude. Very few things in this period have managed to give me an ecstatic high or the heart breaking, gut-wrenching low. I have just lived ! 

But then something was different that day. As I came home from work and left for my run, my mind was perceiving more than what I would normally allow it to. I noticed the fullness of autumn as it painted the leaves in these rich hues of reds and yellows. I noticed the disappearance of green and the abundance of leaves on the tracks. The air smelt of water as it held promise for those rare days of  rain that we see here.  It also smelled salty from the breeze that flies in from the oceans, every evening, like the fishermen returning from work. The streets smelled of eucalyptus even though I couldn't see them as the darkness was fast enveloping my strides. Everything was signaling a change but I was to have no premonition or inkling of anything extra-ordinary or special. But in those few minutes at the cusp of night and day, everything was going to make sense to me.

In that darkness, as I sauntered back towards home after my run, with my heart racing and my chest muscles heaving, I saw a "left turn yield" sign. A sign, which I had strangely missed the last time I was at that junction in my car and when another car had almost rammed into me. Seeing that sign made me see that almost-accident in a completely different light and made me count my lucky stars. It doesn't happen too often that I feel lucky but today I felt blessed. I had survived a mistake, a big one at that ! Yes, a lot of people make mistakes and I had not done anything that bad but as things played out, the consequences in my case could have been grievous. 

It was in the first week of my driving solo that i had once driven through this residential stretch at dusk; and driving did not come to me easy! I could happily bike to work, ride close to freeways and speeding monstrosities but in a car, i was daunted and scared (strangely and unexpectedly). I think the power of the machine and the possible consequences of a mistake daunted me and scared me into a frenzy. In my early days, when I did not even know "my car" well enough to judge, I was on a constant adrenaline drip when in the car. In the incomplete darkness of that evening, I couldn't read the fluorescent ink on the sign and the fading light had not helped me see the sign too. Normally it wouldn't have been dangerous as it was a residential area with few cars and I had made the turn on the green light. But then that day, as I made that turn, I realized that I had missed the front end of another car which was approaching me at high speeds from the other side by a whisker (quite literally at that). It could have been a major disaster. At that time, the almost-accident had scared me from driving for a couple of days as i couldn't understand how the signals were designed so. I was sure that i had turned on the green and i expected the mistake to be at the other end but it was a rather unusual occurrence here, where people are usually more disciplined on the roads. I told myself to go slower and got back on the road with a little more courage and a lot more caution. But the mystery of that day had remained till this day when everything became clear in those few minutes after dusk. It is a feeling difficult to describe in words but it is probably something like the vision that a painter has when he imagines a painting; it has everything right, it is complete and it is heart-breakingly beautiful and joyous.

I had that feeling of clarity in those few minutes on that day. Despite the lingering presence of the atheist and agnostic somewhere deep in me, I wanted to believe. To believe in purpose, and meaning and a personal God. A God who did not roll the dice for governing my life but who had a plan with my best interests at heart. Because while it was unfortunate to be almost run into by another car, it was extremely fortunate that it was only "almost". And in that hour, that "almost" made me feel like the luckiest person alive. It was a feeling of great intensity and purity. But as i reached home and let the monotony of the daily chores divert my mind, the feeling was gone. But its not something i want to let go of without a fight and so here I am finding words that best describe it, only in the hope that even as my memory fades, these words would hold the key to atleast partially unlock that feeling of revelation. That feeling of joy - pure and simple and that feeling of "belief" that wanted me to have faith. That feeling of optimism and positivity that saw a greater good hidden in every tear shed and a jubilation in every sigh uttered ! 

Like the painter whose vision of the painting fades a little as he paints, because flaws emerge and limitations stare back and that initial vision of perfection gets a little jaded with each brush stroke. My vision of perfection is also being eroded constantly; But i want to hold onto it because that vision is all that keeps the painter going.

If only everyday could bring such intense and complete perceptiveness, I would never want to build that cocoon around myself.  But till I reach that stage of continuous epiphany (an oxymoron screaming "impossible"!) I guess i will have to revisit this post to re-consolidate my weakening synapses !