My encounter with Shantaram

Do you know Gregory David Roberts? I strongly suggest you do if you don't. If you are a reader (God. Please say you are, else you will already bounce out of this blog piece) you must have heard of Shantaram - the novel. And maybe even The Mountain Shadow. Well, I had the distinctly interesting experience of meeting Greg - author of both Shantaram and The Mountain Shadow some time back. Up close and fairly personally. And I got to spend a long time with him, courtesy my friend.

Various sources describe Greg like this:

Gregory David Roberts (born Gregory John Peter Smith; 21 June 1952) is an Australian author best known for his novel Shantaram. He is a former heroin addict and convicted bank robber who escaped from Pentridge Prison in 1980 and fled to India, where he lived for ten years.

Roberts lived in Melbourne, Germany and France, and finally returned to Mumbai, where he set up charitable foundations to assist the city's poor with health care coverage. Roberts was reunited with his daughter.

He also wrote the original screenplay for the movie adaptation of Shantaram (2011) as well as the screenplay for the 2008 film Allegra, which is about the modern slave-trade of women.

His new novel, The Mountain Shadow, continues the story of Shantaram and was published in October 2015.

Here is an account of my experience.

You could hear the boombox voice, filtered through honeyed charcoal, even before you entered the five star suite. I could.
You could smell the incense and the energy, coupling madly with the great ganesha standing sentinel in one silent corner. I could.
You could see the under cast skyline of an otherwise overcast Bombay, merging with the sea on one side and the smooth glass horizon of the suite windows on the other. I could.
You could taste the brilliant effervescence of a life lived on hyperdrive, spanning mountains and spawning stories that are too real to be true. Too unreal to be imaginary. I could.
And, finally, you could touch the great shadow himself. Standing there and smiling like a black Buddha, surrounded by characters who may all get the chance to become someone in his plot. An angry footnote here. Or, a shy subtext there. They were all there. And, you could have become any of them. I maybe did.

My extended meeting with Gregory David Roberts, the character who made the man Shantaram, was a tight bunch of vividness. A window into the realm of the immensely possible world of high fiction. The minutes that flowed like so much sparkling water under the bridge mixed with the rushed hush of one outstanding story after another - narrated with the liquid ease of a veteran of countless experiences. Gregory's foaming stories, uncorked compulsively in response to any subject under the sun, were as real as they were textured. As detailed as they were loaded. And, as graceful as they were quick. And as I listened to the guitar that may have been Depp's, the rain that may have been somewhere else and the hum of the camera snapping both still and sparkling Gregs of all sound, sense and serendipity; I felt absent. Not merely un-present but deeply absent, wishing the chance to be what I can be still.

Impeccable in black. Like a well ironed metaphor wrapped in irony.

Shantaram is as scintillating from the pages of a journey as he is out of them. A thousand red bulls thrown into the fire of bright smiles would have lagged with lolling tongues behind this gentle man full of savage energy.

Wait. I am getting carried away here. But then, what the hell.

The hotel suite seemed too small for the larger than long novel Gregory David Roberts – raconteur across the seas, more Indian than some Indians I know and prince of the art of motorcycle loving. His stories are too precious to vicariously publish here. His stories are too free to freely swim in. I chose the latter.

From the deep darks of the past to the bright yellows of the future, here is a man who talks of prison and the internet as a tree with equally optimistic ferocity. From kaali to rampuri knives and hitch hiking to consciousness in animals, he effortlessly redrafted the adage while serving his bottomlessly hospitable Perrier incessantly.

Sparkling waters run deep.