A breath of Bombay hope, in the first glimpse of the sea, on Marine Drive, filled my heart, if not my head. I turned away from the red shadow. I stopped thinking of that pyramid of killers, and Sanjay's recklessness. I stopped thinking about my own part in the madness. And I rode, with my friends, into the end of everything.' The end of the eighties was the beginning of everything. The Berlin wall fell on a ruined empire, and the Taliban took Afghanistan. Lin, on the run after escaping from prison in Australia, working as a passport forger for a Bombay mafia gang, finds himself standing on a tattered corner of a bloody carpet that would soon cover most of the world. But he can't leave the Island City: not without Karla. Two years after the events in Shantaram, Bombay is a different world, playing by different rules. Lin's search for love and faith leads him through secret and violent intrigues to the dangerous truth.