Cowboy in India – An Irishman’s Diary about Gregory David Roberts’s ‘Shantaram’

Went on the usual binge over Christmas. Took a few days off work, cleared the social diary, and told my imaginary secretary to hold all calls. Then, for several decadent days, I did nothing except read books.

Of course I read during the rest of the year too, but only in moderation, usually, and often just for work purposes. Like many journalists, I enjoy a stiff index – it saves having to plough through the whole thing. I can go entire weeks without actually finishing a book. Sometimes, in cafés, I read just to be unsociable.

But around Christmas and new year, I always like to lose myself in literature. And so it was that, over recent days, I finally got around to reading a 930-page epic called Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts.

Shantaram was an international bestseller some years ago, but passed me by at the time. I was only catching up with it now because, last autumn, Roberts produced a long-awaited sequel (to mixed reviews).

What piqued my curiosity then was a BBC radio item about the author, which noted that he had formally withdrawn from public life. He would be doing no more interviews, it said, and had asked people to delete all references to him on social media.

That's an ingenious publicity strategy, if you can get away with it. At any rate, it persuaded me to go out and buy his debut novel. But as I then learned, the veil being drawn over Roberts's personal life now is in sharp contrast with the way Shantaram was promoted.

The book tells the story of an Australian heroin addict who escapes a high-security prison in Melbourne, where he was serving time for armed robbery, and flees to 1980s Bombay.

There he lives in the slums, joins the mafia (working for the false-passport department), and has many fraught adventures, including a spell in another jail (a local hell-hole), involvement in Bollywood movies, and a period in Afghanistan, fighting against the Soviet Union.

It’s an extraordinary saga, marred occasionally by the author’s weakness for bad poetry and half-baked philosophy (given its length and style, the book might alternatively have been called “War and Peace, Man”).

And before he stopped doing interviews, Roberts had been at pains to insist it was fiction, as were all the characters. The point was underlined by some Indians who knew him, and pointed out (not always politely) that he had made stuff up.

But Shantaram's success was at least partly due to a dramatic overlap between the real-life Roberts's CV (he is Australian, abused heroin, robbed banks, escaped prison, lived in Bombay) and the novel.

On my copy, the publishers feature a long quotation from a review that assumes the entire story to be autobiographical. This is placed where the back-cover blurb would normally be. As a forger of passports, the hero of Shantaram would admire the effect.

Still, the book is full of fascinating detail about life in the slums and the work of the city’s black-marketeers. The description of the Indian prison experience is also completely convincing, however he researched it.

With the exception of the overly florid passages, it was the perfect thing for Christmas binge-reading. And I had the inevitable hangover afterwards – dealt with first by leafing through an old Lonely Planet guide to India (well-thumbed from my own sojourn there 20 years ago), and then by visiting an Indian restaurant.

Actually, the restaurant was a fact-finding mission, inspired by Roberts's rhapsodic description of a dish called "masala dosa". It's a south Indian speciality, and among the thousands of Bombay restaurants that serve it, Shantaram's chief protagonist claimed to know the best, whose version he described in seductive detail.

So I did some googling and found a place in Dublin that had a reputation for it too.  It certainly looked the part – cheap and cheerful but full of Indians on both sides of the counter.

I had every confidence in the masala dosa, even after realising it was essentially a vegetarian crepe. And when it didn’t at first impress, I thought the subtle spices needed more time. But I ate, and waited, and it still tasted like a vegetarian crepe, with all the excitement implied.

I remain mystified as to its appeal. Still, as a cure for a book-binge hangover, it worked.

You might even say it was a welcome dosa reality; although if I were you, I wouldn’t.