Sanctuary in the underbelly of Mumbai

Leopold's has been ruined for me forever, thanks to an Australian fugitive from justice. Or, maybe, it's become all the more exciting.

This innocuous, happy cafe in Colaba where you drink beer, eat breakfast or snooze over a cappuccino in cosmopolitan camaraderie is apparently also one of the major crossroads in Mumbai for trafficking in everything from a little illegal hashish to foreign exchange to a little bit of Monica by your side.

It's also where a good deal of the action in Gregory David Roberts' autobiographical ramble through the city takes place.

Roberts' escape from a maximum security Australian jail sees him fleeing around the world. He happens by in Mumbai and stays on for 10 years. Those years may be the best in his life, but they're certainly more educative than all of yours or mine put together.

Roberts loves Mumbai at first sight, and he loves fellow-exile Karla also at first sight, and in no time he's made Mumbai (then still Bombay) his home. Making commissions on drug deals and the foreign exchange black market, he sets himself up to discover the city's notorious mafia not altogether unwillingly.

In pursuit of drugs, he visits parts of the city that appear from some faraway and fabled, exotic land, where guns and heroin are the substance of everyday trances, and where, in another forbidding part of the city, the mysterious, veiled Madame Zhou runs a bordello with foreign beauties who have been trained in the art of the erotica with which they entertain the country's most powerful.

He also meets Khaderbhai, and the die is cast. Roberts' soul becomes enmeshed in the underbelly of the city, and its sights and sounds are the skeins that take over his life.

In time, Roberts will take place in murderous heists, he will go to jail and re-visit the humiliations of his incarceration in Australia, he will rescue one of Madame Zhou's more beautiful inmates and earn her undying wrath, and will find himself journeying to Pakistan, then Afghanistan, on a gun-running assignment that will leave his mentor and father-figure dead under Russian attack.

But before all this happens, Roberts will do penance. Almost the first person he meets in Mumbai is Prabaker, a small street conman-cum-guide-cum taxi driver, who introduces him to the aforementioned Leopold's, new friends and much of Mumbai that hides behind an innocence that it never escapes.

Prabaker becomes Linbaba's (in the book, Roberts' identity is Lindsay) close associate in petty crime, friend and, eventually, almost his family. He shifts to Prabaker's slum where he takes a tenement that will be his home for a long while, a time in which he will heal himself of his past, salve his conscience with a first-aid clinic, and turn agony aunt for the slum's numerous problems that extend from drunken orgies to wife-beating and the flush of love across the accursed neighbourhood.

He will fight to save the slum from fire and from flood, from disease and dismay. And in doing so, earn the undying loyalty of his neighbours who define a secular Mumbai where caste and religion are truly community but not communal affairs.

Of course, in the course of his discoveries, he will sip tea with lepers and tie up a supply of medicines for his small clinic from a black market source that, like everything else in the city, is controlled and dictated by its mafia, those like Khaderbhai and Abdul Ghani, who hold the city to ransom just so it can survive and function from day to day.

If Linbaba finds succour in Mumbai (his only break being six months spent in Prabaker's village where he is ironically nicknamed Shantaram "" the book's title "" man of peace), he also discovers quite by chance its queasy, uneasy, unsettling underlife where greed and lust and anger and revenge co-exist just as harmoniously.

People die on the streets but Mumbai, without stopping to moan, carries on, while only Linbaba stops to take note for in every loss there is a diminishing and a reminder of a world from which he has escaped, but which clings resolutely to him in the form of a remembered, phantom family from the deep recesses of his past.

What's striking about this mammoth tome is that the language never becomes pedantic. Roberts reports like a journalist, even in his most sentimental moments "" and there are quite a bit of those too "" at once observer and participant.

His is a life in Mumbai that is far removed from that of most residents, professionals, commuters and visitors, and is an eye-opener to a side about which he writes as dispassionately as a reporter.

His is a Mumbai at once colourful and bizarre, horrific yet honourable, one where he can moan the death of both friends like Prabaker and those in whom he saw his saviours despite their obvious criminal activities.

Shantaram will prove a critical work in the life of Mumbai, but it remains incomplete in one sense. Roberts is a fugitive from justice. The book ends when he returns to the slum where he had found peace, and where he now seeks Prabaker's company in the form of his very young son.

In the Acknowledgements, Roberts notes that it took 13 years to write the book. He is no longer in Mumbai, or India. An epilogue on what happened in those intervening years, how he fetched back home, and what he's doing now would have greatly added to the value of the book.

For, unfortunately, readers will strike an erroneously sympathetic cord with Linbaba and, for all his sins of omission and commission, wish him well. For, did he not learn Marathi as the first step to integrating with the city where he found sanctuary?

SHANTARAM

Gregory David Roberts
Little, Brown
Price: £16.99 (hardback),
£10.99 (paperback)
Pages: 936