A small taste....
Chapter 1
Page 1 (only)
'It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know
about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it
came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being
tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind,
that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free:
free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It
doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the
chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of
possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving,
can become the story of your life.
In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a
revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who who
lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a
maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the
front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most
wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to
India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a
smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents,
beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into enemy guns.
And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better
men than I am, most of them: better men whose lives were crunched
up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone
else's hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, too many
of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my
own.
But my story doesn't begin with them, or with the mafia: it goes
back to that first day in Bombay. Fate put me in the game there.
Luck dealt the cards that led me to Karla Saaranen. And I started
to play it out, that hand, from the first moment I looked into her
green eyes. So it begins, this story, like everything else -- with
a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.'
Copyright 2003 Distributed Pan Macmillan
