SHANTARAM: Chapter 25-30
* Do you think that one great act of genius can allow us to forgive the hundred flaws and failures that bring it into being?
-I had the sense of a trap, of a destiny not shaped by my own deeds and desires. It was as if the constellations themselves were just the outlines of an immense cage that revolved and realigned itself, inscrutably, until the single moment that fate had reserved for me.
-The lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight.
-There is in you, as there is in me, a morbid belief in love, and a fascination for the madness that love puts in its victims.
-You come here and fuck with Indians, you fuckin’ fuck-heads! India is finished for you! You come back here and I will personally cut off your fuckin’ balls. Do you see my hat? You see the mark on my fuckin’ hat! You don’t fuck with an Indian guy’s hat! You don’t fuck with and Indian guys for any reason, hat or no hat! Not ever! And especially not, if the do wear a hat!
-The Indians are the Italians of Asia. 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 banalite. These are nations where love—amore, pyaar—make 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 meets yours.
-There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me.
-Depression only happens to people who don’t know how to be sad.
-In order to know about any act or intention or consequence, we must first ask two questions. One, what would happen if everyone did this thing? Two, would this help or hinder the movement toward complexity?
-I never liked him. He was one of those guys who smile as a tactic and not because they actually feel anything worth smiling about.
-Every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. The little good that I’ve done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark inspiration. What I do know now, and didn’t know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for that 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.
-There’s probably no single group of citizens who are more cynical about politics and politicians than professional criminals. In their view, all politicians are ruthless and corrupt, and all political systems favor the powerful rich over the defenceless poor. Prison had given us an intimate acquaintance with human-rights violations, and every day the courts confirmed what we’d learned about the law: the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy.
-For some people, danger’s a kind of drug or even an aphrodisiac. For me, living as a fugitive, living every day and every night of my life with the fear of being killed or captured, danger was something else. Danger was one of the lances I used to kill the dragon of stress. It helped me to sleep.
-The smile he gave me was warm but wounded. There was a hallowness in his eyes: a black hole of shocked grieving that swallowed all the questions and released no answers. His young face assumed a numb expression. I knew that expression. I sometimes caught it, by chance, in the mirror: the way we look when the part of happiness that’s trusting and innocent is ripped away, and we blame ourselves, rightly or wrongly, for its loss.
-It’s said that you can never go home again, and it’s true enough, of course. But the opposite is also true. You must go back, and you always go back, and you can never stop going back, no matter how hard you try.
-She had the kind of determination you find in people who do it all the hard way, without hope.
-Missing the people I loved was a kind of grieving for me, and it was worse, much worse, for the fact that—so far as I knew—they weren’t dead. My heart, sometimes, was a graveyard full of blank stones. There was money in bundles on the night stand, and there were passports freshly forged in that could send me…anywhere. But there was nowhere to go: nowhere that wasn’t emptied of meaning and identity and love by the vacuum of those who were missing and lost forever.
-A Dutch mercenary once told me that the only time he ever stopped hating himself was when the risk he faced became so great that he acted without thinking or feeling anything at all.
-In my first knife fight I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill. The simple fact is that fighting to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.
-If we all learned what we should learn, the first time around, we wouldn’t need love at all.
-I once chided Didier for being immature and he’d told me that he was proud and delighted to be immature. “The fully mature man or woman,” he said, “has about two seconds left to live.”
-I should’ve pitied him. Even if we never pity them at any other time, and any other way, we should pity the dead when we look at them, and touch them. Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and, because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer. And dead men demand prayers. The silent heart, the troubled nave of the chest unbreathing, and the guttered candles of the eyes—they summon our prayers. Each dead man is a temple in ruins, and when our eyes walk there we should pity, we should pray.
-I didn’t know then that good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.
-You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.
-Love makes men big, and hate makes them small. I told him that my little friend was one of the biggest men I ever met because there wasn’t any hate in him. I said that the better I knew him, the bigger he got, and I tried to tell him how rare that was. And I joked with him, and laughed with him until that great smile, as big as a child’s biggest wish, returned to his gentle round face.
-Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or even thought, has an effect on you that’s greater than zero. Some things, like the background sound of a bird chirping as it passes your house in the evening, or a flower glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, have such an infinitesimally small effect that you can’t detect them. Some things, like triumph and heartbreak, and some images, like the image of yourself reflected in the eyes of a man you’ve just stabbed, attach themselves to the secret gallery and they change your life forever.
-I envied Anand as he turned and walked with his back straight and his head high into the long, suffering years ahead. I envied his peace and his courage and his perfect understanding of himself. Khaderbhai once said that if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom. I hope he wasn’t right about that. I hope good envy takes you further than that, because a lifetime has passed since that day at the wire and I still envy Anand’s calm communion with fate, and I long for it with all my flawed and striving heart. (when Anand chose to stay in jail even though he was not guilty and Lin could have gotten him out)
-If we can’t respect the way we earn 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.
-A man has to find a good woman, and when he finds her he has to win her love. Then he has to earn her respect. Then he has to cherish her trust. And then he has to, like, go on doing that for as long as they live. Until they both die. That’s what it’s all about. That’s the most important thing in the world. That’s what a man is. A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns he respect, and keeps her trust. Until you can do that, you’re not a man. Without a good woman, a man like you—men like you and me—we’re just asking for trouble.
-The ones who have it all have to share some of it with the ones who have nothing. The people you call fanatics can only get others to listen because there’s a grain of truth in what they say.
-Fanaticism is the opposite of love. A wise man once told me—he’s a Muslim, by the way—that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. As Winston Churchill said, ‘a fanatic is someone who won’t change his mind and can’t change the subject.’
-At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they’re dead and gone. For I still love you with the whole of my heart, Prabaker. I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can’t give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.
-I’d lost my two closest friends and with them I’d lost the mark on the psychic map that says ‘You Are Here.’ Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them. I was that point in space and time where Abdullah’s wild violence intersected with Prabaker’s happy gentleness.
-A mujaheddin fighter once told me that 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.
-Some people always manage to make us feel sorry for them, no matter how stupid and angry we feel about it after. They’re the canaries, kind of, in the coalmines of our hearts. If we stop feeling sorry for them, when they let us down, we’re in deep trouble.
-The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They’re 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.
-A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.
-We all cope with anxiety and stress, to one degree or another, with the help of a cocktail of chemicals produced in the body and released in the brain.
-There are three things that no Indian man can resist: a beautiful face, a beautiful song, and an invitation to dance.
-All horse good, all man not good.
-No love, is no life.
