I am reading an amazing book titled ‘Shantaram’. (Thanks Josh)  It’s an autobiographical novel by Gregory David Roberts, who is a talented writer but became addicted to heroin after his marriage collapsed.  He was sent to prison on armed robbery charges but soon escaped and went on to live in India, New Zealand, Asia, Africa, and Europe.  During his time in Bombay, India, he established a free medical clinic for slum dwellers, worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner and street soldier for the mafia.

There is a part in his book I’d like to share with you.  It takes place shortly following Lin’s (main character) arrival in India after his prison escape in Australia.  His guide, Prabaker, has invited him to his home village away from the hustle and bustle of Bombay for a few months.  When he first arrives, Lin is like a fish out of water.  However, at the end of three months, he has experienced a profound shift and realizes this while standing by the river…

‘I was thinking about another kind of river, one that runs through every one of us, no matter where we come from, all over the world.  It’s the river of the heart, and the heart’s desire.  It’s the pure, essential truth of what each one of us is, and can achieve.  All my life I’d been a fighter.  I was always ready, too ready, to fight for what I loved, and against what I deplored.  In the end, I became the expression of that fight, and my real nature was concealed behind a mask of menace and hostility.  The message of my face and body’s movement was, like that of a lot of other hard men, Don‘t fuck with me.  In the end, I became so good at expressing the sentiment that the whole of my life became the message.

That didn’t work in the village.  No-one could read my body language.  They knew no other foreigners, and had no point of reference.  If I was grim or even stern, they laughed, and patted my back encouragingly.  They took me as a peaceful man, no matter what expression I wore.  I was a joker, someone who worked hard, played the fool for the children, sang with them, danced with them, and laughed with an open heart.

And I think I did laugh like that then.  I was given a chance to reinvent myself, to follow that river within, and become the man I’d always wanted to be.  …. They judged my nature to be blessed with peaceful happiness and so the women agreed to my new name.  Shantaram.

They nailed their stakes into the earth of my life, those farmers.  They knew the place in me where the river stopped, and they marked it with a new name, Shantaram Kishan Kharre.  I don’t know if they found that name in the heart of the man they believed me to be, or if they planted it there, like a wishing tree, to bloom and grow.  Whatever the case, whether they discovered taht peace or created it, the truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain.  Shantaram.  The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be.’

It’s never too late to be who you want, or are meant, to be.

Related posts:

1. Becoming Location Independent
2. Keeping an Open Heart
3. Central American Revelations
4. How to Re-ignite Your Wanderlust
5. Joy. Decisiveness. Travel.