Shantaram Poverty Quotes
How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Like brown and black dunes, the acres of slums rolled away from the roadside, and met the horizon with dirty heat-haze mirages. The miserable shelters were patched together from rags, scraps of plastic and paper, reed mats, and bamboo sticks. They slumped together, attached one to another, and with narrow lanes winding between them. (1.1.21)
Lin's first visions of India are of extreme poverty: miles and miles of the poorest people living together in makeshift homes and communities. It's not an inviting welcome, to say the least, but remember that Lin is a fugitive. The same precariousness that the impoverished experience will allow him to blend in unnoticed.
Quote #2
It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travellers, was only kilometres away from those crushed and cindered dreams. (1.1.21)
If there's anything we humans are good at, it's compartmentalizing. That's what makes it possible for the richest and poorest to butt right up against each other without (the rich) even noticing. The "modern airport" is secure, even pre-9/11, because it's too expensive and too well-guarded to let many poor people in for travel. That's why it "seems impossible" that there could be such poverty so nearby.
Quote #3
But they were alive, Prabaker said, those boys and girls. They were the lucky ones. For every child who passed through the people-market there were a hundred others, or more, who'd starved in unutterable agonies, and were dead. (1.3.144)
It's hard to say whether it's better to survive a slave market, but Lin believes that the survivors are "lucky." The point is, though, that the children who go through it—bought, sold, or dead—are there because they and their families didn't have the resources to save them.
Quote #4
"Prabaker took me to a kind of hospice, an old apartment building, near the St George Hospital. [...] And the owner of the place, who has this reputation as a kind of saint, was walking around, tagging the people, with signs that told how many useful organs they had. It was a huge organ-bank, full of living people who pay for the privilege of a quiet, clean place to die, off the street, by providing organs whenever this guy needs them." (1.4.158)
A for-profit hospice might seem completely insane, but in the Bombay that Shantaram paints for us, dying is a profitable business. The moribund (SAT vocab, baby) homeless are so grateful for a quiet place to cast off their mortal coils that they pay a guy with both money and their organs (!).
Quote #5
"I never realized that men had to climb six flights of stairs, to fill a damn tank, so that I could take those showers. [...] I told Prabaker I'd never take another shower in that hotel again."
[...]
"He said, No, no you don't understand. [...] It's only because of tourists like me, he explained, that those men have a job." (1.4.167-169)
Lin is used to sloughing off the sweat of Bombay three times a day in his hotel shower, but when he finds out where the water comes from he feels guilty. However, the guys who fill the tank are so poor that they are grateful for the work and the pay. Of course, there's probably something that could be done on an infrastructure level so that they're not choosing between back-breaking work and poverty…
Quote #6
"But… but…" I stammered, flattered by the generous gesture, and yet horrified at the thought of life in the slum. I remembered my one visit to Prabaker's slum only too well. The smell of the open latrines, the heartbreaking poverty, the cramp and mill of people, thousands upon thousands of people—it was a kind of hell, in my memory, a new metaphor that stood for the worst, or almost the worst, that could happen. (1.7.69)
General Sherman had it wrong: war isn't hell; poverty is. The slum is basically a big old symbol of poverty in the city, and all the difficulties that come from living in it stem from a lack of economic resources and power.
Quote #7
To the right, looking from the road, the World Trade Centre was a huge, modern, air-conditioned building. It was filled to three levels with shops, and displays of jewels, silks, carpets, and intricate craftworks. To the left was the slum, a sprawling ten acres of wretched poverty with seven thousand tiny huts, housing twenty-five thousand of the city's poorest people. (1.8.52)
Once again we get the juxtaposition of hyper-wealth and uber-poverty. (Yeah, we like prefixes too; thanks for noticing.) The World Trade Center stands for international commerce and a cosmopolitan, globalized society. The slum, though, stands for what that society is built upon.
Quote #8
"There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor," Abdullah said, in his quiet tone. (2.9.133)
Abdullah thinks that the generosity of the poor is a beautiful "act of faith." Why would that be? It's definitely beautiful, as all generosity is, but there must be something that the very poor believe in, have faith in, for him to say such a thing. Perhaps it's that their generosity will someday be returned to them.
Quote #9
Known as pavement dwellers, they were people who made homes for themselves on every available strip of unused land and any footpath wide enough to support their flimsy shelters, while still permitting pedestrian traffic. [...] When the monsoon struck, their position was always dangerous and sometimes untenable, and many of them sought refuge in the slums. (2.12.91)
Is Lin serious right now? There are people who are so poor, so bad off, that they have to come to the slum to save themselves? This is bleak. The pavement dwellers make the slum, which is periodically burned down or knocked over by government workers, seem permanent.
Quote #10
"You know, poverty looks good on you. If you ever got really down and out, you might be irresistible." (2.12.127)
Okay, Karla, you might want to go back and look at the other quotes in this section before you start acting like poverty is sexy. But we'll give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe what she likes in Lin is his selflessness in giving of his time and energy to the slum-dwellers. Or maybe she's just sick.