Reading Group Guide
THE FIRST WALL - Forgiveness, Love and The Writer's Dream: A Biographical Note on the Writing of Shantaram
The first wall of any prison is the one that surrounds the heart; it's put inside the man, before the man's put inside the prison. It's that wall of flesh and fear that keeps men confined. And when you escape, when you break out, it's the wall within yourself that you have to scale first, before you get anywhere near the one made of stone and steel. I learned that the hard way, by standing on the front wall of a maximum-security prison, between two gun-towers, at one o'clock in the afternoon. I was calm, as I stood there in the long, heart-thud second before sliding down the rope to freedom — calmer than I should've been with only one throw of the dice between escaping from prison and being shot dead — because I'd already climbed the big wall in my heart, and no matter what the outcome, escaped or dead, I was already damned and already free.
Years later, after I'd spent ten years on the run as my country's Most Wanted Man, after I'd been to two wars, and set up a clinic for the poor in a Bombay slum, and worked as a forger, counterfeiter, smuggler and gunrunner for a branch of the Bombay mafia, after I'd been captured and imprisoned in Germany with Europe's most notorious terrorists, after I'd been extradited to Australia and put into solitary confinement for two years as a punishment for escaping, I discovered and then had to scale another wall that pride and fear and rage had built in my heart. I'd written the first 300 pages of a novel, based on my life, and I returned to my cell one day, from two hours of walking the exercise cage, to find that a sadistic prison officer had torn the manuscript into fragments no bigger than a thumbnail, and used them to fill the toilet bowl to overflowing.
An anger, throbbing so hard in my heart and my blood that it ached in my head, tormented me: I had to literally flush away three years of work. The inequitable cruelty of the guard's actions — I had every legal permission to write my manuscript — was no less injurious than the blow made against my art: strike at my face, hurt my body, I'll accept it, but don't hurt my work. Resisting and denying the impulse to strike back took an effort of will that strained the whole of me, body and soul, and left me stronger, in some remote, eternal sense, and yet shudderingly diminished at the same time.
When my two years in solitary ended, I was transferred to maximum security, where I had to serve out the remaining four years of my sentence. After receiving permission once again, I began work on the second draft of the manuscript. Three-and-a-half years and 350 pages later, I returned from work in a prison factory to find that the second draft of the novel had also been destroyed, with fragments of my work scattered throughout my cell and out onto the prison tier.
I sat down on the bed in my cell, surrounded by the pieces of my heart, and I recalled the two times I'd been tortured in an Indian prison, during the years that I was on the run. I remembered that the first time I'd been chained face-up, lying on my back, so that I could see the men who were taking turns in teams to torture me. I remembered looking the men in the eye one by one, until my own eyes were too filled with blood, and sending them the message: Yes, I see you, I'll remember you, I'll get you, one way or another, I'll get you for this … And then I recalled the second systematic, torturous beating, two months after the first — face down, that time, so that I couldn't see the men, the many men, the twenty men who took turns to whip and slash my body with razored bamboo canes. I remembered struggling to lift my face from the muck as my arms were stretched out and chained beside me. I remembered thinking that I might drown in my own blood and tears, and then finding myself in the moment of that choking, drowning thought floating above my own body. It was as if I'd had an artist's view of my own stripped and bloodied self, and of the men whose arms rose and fell and rose again, and fell again, in the frantic jazz of the flogging. And last, and strongest of those memories was the thought that had claimed me, and saved me, and freed me in that floating moment: Let it go. Forgive them. Let it go, if you want to live…
I found the prison officer who'd destroyed the second draft of my book. I told him that I forgave him. He didn't believe me, at first. He was expecting violence, and he braced himself for a fight. I told him that I thought I knew where cruelty such as his came from, that I'd learned something about it in the years that I'd been on the run. I told him that cruelty begins as an agony in the self, before it's inflicted on others, and I felt sorry that such an agony existed in his heart. I also told him that I wanted to thank him. He was still wary, still suspecting a trick that might lure him in close enough for a head-butt or a thumb in the eye. He snarled at me. You want to thank me, do ya? I did. I thanked him for giving me the chance to scale the high wall in my angry heart and test my capacity for forgiveness — if I could forgive that destruction of six years' work, I could forgive just about anything — and I wanted to thank him for making the book a better novel.
And it is: Shantaram changed as a result of that destruction, and it's a far more complex book, for its long, agonised gestation period, than it ever would've been had they just let me write it from the first draft. And the prison officer, who expected to be attacked that day, changed as well. He looked down at his polished boots when I finished talking, and mumbled: I'm sorry. I don't know why I done it. I shouldn't have done it. I don't know why I did. I'm sorry. I'm sorry …
The coda to this account of having my manuscript destroyed twice in prison is that I met that prison officer again, just recently, while I was speaking at the Writers Festival in Melbourne. He approached me after I'd addressed an audience on the very theme of Forgiveness as a Literary Virtue, and told me that he'd changed his life in ways that resembled the changes occurring in mine. He'd left the prison service, soon after the incident where he'd destroyed my novel. In the years that followed, he'd enrolled in a course of night-school classes that brought him to study literature, as an adult student at university. We hugged. He cried. And I signed, with no little love and passioned thanks, his copy of the book he'd once destroyed.
1. Discuss Bombay/Mumbai as a "character" in the book. What role does it play? What are the things Lin loves most about the city? Why does he fit in there?
2. Why are Prabaker and Lin drawn to each other so quickly? What do they have in common that binds them?
3. Discuss how Lin's prison stays end up casting a long shadow over his life. In what ways do the wounds from prison – both physical and psychological – change him? How do they change his outlook for the better? For the worse?
4. Characterize the various women in Lin's life and talk about the role they play and the influence they have on Lin: Karla? Madame Zhou? Lisa Carter?
5. "Shame" is an important theme throughout the book. What does Lin feel shamed by and how does this guide him through life? In which other characters do we see "shame," and what are the positive and negative effects?
6. The Bollywood world constantly weaves in and out of the fringes of Lin's story. Where do you see it influencing Lin and the other characters in the novel? How does it make you feel to have this glamorous world of film so closely linked to the underworld of the Bombay slums?
7. Khader Khan has a fascinating, almost paternal, influence in Lin's life. If you could pick just three words to describe his character, what would they be and why? Would you say you have chosen positive words to describe him, or negative ones?
8. Khader Khan arrives at the following conclusion: "It is wrong to kill. But your reasons were good. So therefore, the truth of this decision is that you did the wrong thing, for the right reasons…" Discuss what he means by this in the context of Lin's life. More generally, do you agree with him, that doing certain actions can be wrong, but for the right reasons? Why or why not?
9. Lin's journey to Afghanistan is brief but profound. Were you at all surprised by the depiction of social and political strife in that part of the world between the mujaheddin and the USSR? How do you see Afghanistan as depicted in the book tying into what you know of Afghanistan from more recent events?
10. "The choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life." Talk about this assertion in the first paragraph of the book in the context of Lin's entire life story. How does Lin's life change based on who he hates and who he forgives? How have the choices you've made with "hating and forgiving" affected your own life?
