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Literary Review
Personality
The bad boy of fiction
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
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Because his life has been so notorious, it can overshadow his work, says Australian novelist Gregory David Roberts.
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Photo: Christopher Cox
Contemporary concerns: Exile and alienation are his central themes.
GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS (GDR), the latest bad boy of fiction, is in Mumbai working on a sequel to Shantaram, his best-selling novel of his own story as a runaway Australian convict on the mean streets of the Mumbai metropolis.
I meet him at Leopold's Bar and Restaurant, overlooking Colaba's colourfully chaotic Causeway. Humming with the buzz of many accented conversations in foreign tongues, Leopold's is, in many ways, a centre for the story. It was here, seated on cedar chairs that surround a profusion of glass-topped tables in "Leopold's little world of light, colour and richly panelled wood" (Shantaram), that everything began. Here's where the author — escaped convict, one-time junkie and gun-runner — began his career of crime in Mumbai, a life that was the inspiration for his stunningly compelling novel of crime and punishment, and of love and friendship.
Obvious question
So how much of the book is really true, I ask him, having spent the better part of the last few days mesmerised by the dramatic details of the author-narrator's life in the Cuffe Parade slums, battling fire and flood and municipal demolition, of drugs and dope and petty crime and of squalor and torture in the Colaba police pick up. Shantaram maybe a potent mixture of fact and fiction, but GDR is not enthused by this oft-repeated question. "Nine out of 10 people ask me this question," he complains. "Because my life has been so notorious and so bad, it can overshadow my work." The book itself, all 900-plus pages of it, makes for racy reading, as the author-narrator makes his living black-marketing and money-laundering on the streets of Colaba, then moves into the Cuffe Parade slum and establishes a clinic there, only to be imprisoned in the Arthur Road Jail, emerging again to more crime and then eventually gun-running in Afghanistan. Is the horrific jail section true, I ask him, did the "aeroplane" style beating really happen? "Everything I wrote about the jail is true; it was in fact much, much worse." And the Colaba police pick up? "That part too, is true", he says. "I met some of the same cops now — they are all good decent men, trying to do their job and they have a hard life and they are incredibly brave. Give a policeman in Australia or New York a piece of bamboo, and ask them to maintain order on their beat, they'd never do it."
The conversation veers from law and order to literature and GDR is equally enthusiastic. He talks about the structure of the novel, any novel, and then that of Shantaram. It is, he points out, extraordinarily complex. Shantaram echoes the central theme of the 21st Century — that of exile, and of mass migration, especially to the cities. Mumbai, as an island city, is a symbol of that exile, and the leitmotif that recurs in images throughout. He explains and illustrates literary parallels that inform the plot and the characters, parallels that may emerge only on a detailed or a repeat reading. GDR's literary influences have been the classical writers, Herman Melville, Lawrence Durrell, Flaubert, Dante and Shakespeare and he illustrates how some of these classics reverberate in Shantaram. His is a novel that is in the tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote la Mancha and also of Dante's Inferno, in its themes of exile and descent into hell (read prison and a life of drugs and crime), and his little guide Prabhakar is akin to Virgil as a guide to Dante's hero and Sancho Panza to Don Quixote. Besides this, he discusses other, not-so-immediately apparent complexities of the novel's structure — the symbols and the self-referencing, and the "house of mirrors", as it were, with every character and event having a mirrored version occurring somewhere else in the book.
So what now? The screenplay for the film version where Johnny Depp plays "Shantaram" is complete. GDR divides his time between the sequel to Shantaram (of which he gives a gloriously alive preview of accents and action; he's as theatrical as he is literary!), his mobile clinic project and joint endeavours with artists — there's a collection in New York inspired by Mumbai and soon there will be a book of photographs on the island city. Coffee at Leopold's is over and the all-black-clad and booted, neatly pony-tailed, six foot-plus GDR, with associate Ader, is off on his bike to the Crossword bookstore to lend support to theatre personality Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal's reading at another book launch.
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