It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It's the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood-metal smell of machines. It's the smell of gods, demons, empires, and civilisations in resurrection and decay. I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. I was excited and delighted by it, in that First Bombay minute, escaped from prison and new to the wide world, but I didn't and couldn't recognise it. I could smell it before I saw or heard anything of India, even as I walked along the umbilical corridor that connected the plane to the airport. The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air. So it begins, this story, like everything else-with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck. And I started to play it out, that hand, from the first moment I looked into her green eyes. Luck dealt the cards that led me to Karla Saaranen. And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.īut my story doesn't begin with them, or with the mafia: it goes back to that first day in Bombay. 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 survived, while other men around me died. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved.

I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man. 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. In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one.

Shantaram book review