Sublime

scrutinised

And because they judged my nature to be blessed with peaceful happiness, Rukhmabai concluded, the women had agreed with her choice for my first name. It was Shantaram, which means man of peace, or man of God’s peace. 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

I’d seen worse, and with far less provocation, in prison. It was, instead, the too-sudden collapse of my stilted complacencies. The weeks of the city I’d thought I was beginning to know—the Bombay of temples, bazaars, restaurants, and new friends—had cindered in the fires of that public rage.

A wide gap between her front teeth gave an impish mischief to her smile, while the superb hook of her beaked nose endowed her serious expressions with an imposing authority.

I peered down into Prabaker’s round face and his large, dark, mischievous eyes, and I nodded, smiled, and accepted the name. I couldn’t know, then, that the little Bombay street guide had given me a name thousands of people, from Colaba to Kandahar, from Kinshasa to Berlin, would come to know me by.

ceaselessly

2012 bestseller, Drugs—Without the Hot Air.