I started reading years ago, making my way through genres of stories; autobiographies, thrillers, crime, self-help, non-fiction, geopolitics, historical fiction, fables, horrors, fantasy, romance, legends and general literature. And in that entire course of books that I counted to around 70 before losing count, I loved and learned from them all. I enjoyed all the stories and tales I read, I loved and hated the characters, I cried and I laughed and I mourned and missed.
Among them all I found that there is a cleverness in the words, but more than that it’s in the way they are used. A simple sentence can be uttered in multiple ways, and a simple expression can be called out to convey many more ideas than one can fathom. The words carry with them immense power and when they are used to express thoughts and emotions than just what has come to pass, they become the arrow that pierces the mind and reaches the heart; they push us to believe a bit more and they make us a part of them.
Some words form stories that excite us, and give us a thrill and adrenaline as much as the characters in them, they make us part of the adventure. Some preach others’ advice. Some make us think and some inspire such intense thinking that they creep into our dreams. The cleverness and diction is a part that makes a mark, but the emotions and feelings they bring are what tattoos them on the skin of our heart.
There are a few stories that found their place in my heart and they kept on piling there till I realized that there was something common in them all. They talked more and more about the character and the emotions they felt and dealt with, rather than just the incidents they faced. They talked about how the character was, rather than who they were and what they did. They had lengthy – and what some might deem unnecessary – descriptions of the places, the colours and thoughts. And that exactly was what attracted me more to them.
They made me feel. They made me question and made me find answers to those questions about myself. Those stories shaped my thoughts and emotions in a way I could never have imagined. They gave me an understanding of human emotions to a level that today there is almost nothing that I cannot empathize with. And it is because of those stories that I can understand and deal with my own emotions better than I ever could.
A life, a saga, a masterpiece. Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts is one of those stories that will be in my heart for ever. I lived the book in a way that very few stories let you. Set in the city that I so dearly love gave it an unfair advantage and unsurprisingly, it made me fall in love with Mumbai all over again.
Some books are literal page-turners, we can’t stop at the end of a chapter. They almost haunt us to finish them. Fast-paced, rush and adrenaline till the climax. We become part of the adventure, like one of the characters in the book. We feel the thrill in our bones and admire or detest the actions of the characters. However, we are busy living a life of thrill that in the back of the mind, we know, we won’t be part of in real life.
Shantaram takes a different approach. It is not a story that I finished in a week. It took me months. I did not admire or detest the characters, I thought about them. I thought about their lives and their thoughts. It took its own time to make sense of the characters and their actions and their emotions. I felt contrary on more than many occasions about the emotions that the characters felt but by the end of the last page, every single character made sense. It made me wonder about faith, religion, wars, love, poverty, money, business, morals, beliefs and the adherence to those beliefs. It mandated me to think about humans and their ways of life, the cities and the history, the war and its cause, the sin in the crime and the crime in the sin.
Details and intricacies are the roots of the story that we remember by heart. There are some small and unimportant details that make it a bit more relatable. For instance, the songs that play in the background in a scene or the food and its aroma that has no significance as the character walks by a restaurant in the story. But these details etch the tale, perhaps unconsciously but surely, on the stone of our mind. And I couldn’t have enjoyed more the vivid images as they flashed in front of my eyes as I read about the city that I walked the streets of, not so long ago. The markets, the roads, the fountains, the stores, the temples and the mosques, the sea and the sunset at it.
Faith is the easiest thing to lose when there is no love to show for it. We cannot have faith with no love. In the world of today where hate is so easy to be seen and there seems to be no sign of love for miles around, it is easiest to lose faith. But what I know now that I didn’t before, is that love is there waiting to be seen and felt, but it has to be given first. Love, I feel, is not what you can ask and get, it is the thing that you can only give. And faith is what goes in hand with it.
And so the fate, that we curse and blame for all the blemishes of life, unlike what we usually believe, is not something which is fixed from the moment that we are born; it can be changed by a single thought, a single action of love. All it takes is that one thought in the heart of a man to change fate, and as Khaderbhai had said, “Every human heart, is a universe of possibilities”
theThoughts 