Still more words from Shantaram

Well, since I have nothing new to report or interesting events to share I wanted to put in more amazing passages from this book. This truly is a beautiful book. If I haven't mentioned it already it is the authors story. His life as an escaped convict and how he fled to Bombay and opened a free clinic in a slum there. He lived in one of the camps that sprang up around construction sites. And the people have little more than cardboard huts as shelter.


The drums staggered toward the distant street. Moving away from us, the dancers romped and rolled on the rhythm, their swaying heads like a field of wildflowers weaving back and forth on waves of wind. As the music dwindled to an echo in our minds, the day-to-day and minute-to-minute of slum life slowly reclaimed the lanes. We gave ourselves to our routines, our needs, and our harmless, hopeful scheming. And for a while, a little while, ours was a better world because the hearts and smiles that ruled it were almost as pure and clean as the flower petals fluttering from our hair, and clinging to our faces like still, white tears.pg.370

and during a discussion about evolution:

"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 the 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. That 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."
He fell silent, and at last I spoke my amazement.
"Where the hell did you learn that?" I snapped, perhaps a little harshly.
"I read it in a book," he replied, turning to me with shy concerns in his brave, brown eyes. "Why? is it wrong? Have I said it wrongly? I have the book in my house. Shall I get it for you?"
"no, no, it's right. It's...perfectly right."
It was my turn to lapse into silence. I was furious with myself. Despite my intimate knowledge of the slum-dwellers, and the debt I owed them - they'd taken me in, and given me all the support and friendship their hearts could hold - I still fell into the bigot's trap. Johnny shocked me with his knowledge because, somewhere in my deepest appraisal of the slum-dwellers, there was a prejudice that they had no right to such knowledge. In my secret heart I'd judged them as ignorant, even though I knew better, simply because they were poor. pg. 374