Shantaram - My Favorites

I’d treated the boy, Tariq, himself a stranger in my raw and ragged fragment of the city. Ashamed of the cold selfishness that had stolen my pity, and pierced by the courage and loneliness of the little boy; I listened to his sleeping breath, and let him cling to the ache in my heart. 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.
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We have a saying in the Pashto language, and the meaning of it is that you are not a man until you give you love, truly and freely to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn that love, truly and freely, of a child in return.

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“And for almost all of that long time, all the living things were water things, living inside the sea. Then, a few hundred million years ago, maybe a little more – just a little while, really, in the big history of the Earth – the living things began to be living on the land, as well.”
I was frowning and smiling at the same time, surprised and bewildered. I held my breath, afraid that any sound might interrupt his musing.
“But in a way you can say that after leaving sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. The water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.”

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‘Black markets for things exist,’ he said slowly, as if confiding a personal secret rather than a commercial fact, ‘because the white markets are too strict. In this case, in the case of currencies, the government and the Reserve Bank of India control the white markets, and they’re too strict. It’s all about greed, and control. These are the two elements that make for commercial crime. Any one of them, on its own, is not enough. Greed without control, or control without greed won’t give you a black market. Men can be greedy for the profit made from, let’s say, pastries, but if there isn’t strict control on the baking of pastries, there won’t be a black market for apple strudel. And the government has very strict controls on the disposal of sewage, but without greed for profit from sewage, there won’t be a black market for shit. When greed meets control, you get a black market.

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‘The Indians are the Italians of Asia.’ Didier pronounced with a sage and mischievous grin, ‘It can be said, certainly, with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe, but you do understand me, I think. There is so much Italian in the Indians, and so much Indian in the Italians. They are both people of the Madonna – they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart. The language of India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalité. These are nations where love – amore, pyaar – makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours. It is the secret of my love for India, Lin, that my first great lover was Italian’.

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They’d lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn’t like or respect or admire them anymore, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can’t kill love. You can’t even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

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Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blows away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the women.

You know that’s true when you listen to them, in the hours before they go into battle. They talk about home, and they talk about women they love. And you know it’s true when you watch them die. If he’s near the earth or on earth in the last moments, a dying man reaches out for it, to squeeze a grasp of soil in his hand. If he can, he’ll raise his head to look at the mountain, the valley, or the plain. If he’s a long way from home, he’ll think about it, and he’ll talk about it. He’ll talk about his village, or his home town, or the city where he grew up. The land matters, at the end. And at the very last, he won’t scream of causes. At the very last, he’ll murmur or he’ll cry out the name of a sister or a daughter or a lover or a mother, ever as he speaks the name of his God. The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it’s a woman, and a city.