Tags / 6 quotes from 1 source
#slums
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
A dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet
In my room, I lay down to sleep. The move to the slum would give me time: it was a hard solution to the visa problem, but a practical one. I felt relieved and optimistic about it, and I was very tired. I should’ve slept well. But my dreams that night were violent and troubled…
Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers
ONE WEEK became three weeks, and one month became five. From time to time, as I worked the streets of Colaba with my tourist clients, I ran into Didier, or Vikram, or some of the others from Leopold’s. Sometimes I saw Karla, but I never spoke to her. I didn’t want to meet her…
Unfinished skyscrapers as silos for shadows
We’d reached the perimeter of the legal slum, and the megalithic immensity of the twin skyscrapers loomed before us. Concreting had been completed to three-quarters of their height, but there were no windows, doors, or fittings on the unfinished buildings. With no flash or…
How I became the slum's doctor
And in that way was my role in the slum created. If fate doesn’t make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don’t get the joke. As a teenager I’d trained in first-aid treatment. The formal course of study had covered cuts, burns…
The purity of the slum
We came upon a group of a dozen men and a similar number of women and children gathered near the hut where I’d lived and worked for almost two years. And although I’d left the zhopadpatti, convinced that I could never live there again, it always gave me a thrill of pleasure to…
The Indian custom of amiable abduction
I had no idea where we were going. I had no idea how or when we would return. We were travelling toward Tardeo, which was the opposite direction to my home in the Colaba slum. As the minutes passed, I reflected on that particularly Indian custom of amiable abduction. For…