Heart on the line: Wknd interviews Rahul Bhattacharya, author of Railsong

The prize-winning writer’s new novel follows a teen who leaves home and sweeps across a transforming India – in search of, perhaps more than anything, herself.

“A really good story should shift something inside you,” says Rahul Bhattacharya, 46.

(HT Photo: Satish Bate)

His new book, Railsong, certainly does. It follows a runaway teen from a middle-class home in a railway township, as she leaves it all behind and races across the country on a train, in 1974. It follows her — as well as the railways, and India — in intimate detail, through the next 18 years, through confusion, heartbreak and a sort of redemption.

Charulata Chitol (her surname borrowed from a beloved fish to replace a Brahmin caste tag), is an unusual runaway, a child of loving, liberal parents who broke caste barriers to marry.

Her tale, which took Bhattacharya 10 years to write, is masterfully constructed: an exploration of the price of freedom; the vastness of possibility; and the vigilance it can take to wrest control, even when fate is on one’s side.

Chitol knows what she doesn’t want, though she finds it far harder to define what she does. Time extracts its own costs along the way. The Indian Railways remain her lifeline throughout.

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Bhattacharya’s previous book, The Sly Company of People Who Care (2011), won the prestigious Ondaatje Prize awarded by the UK’s Royal Society of Literature.

Ahead of the November 4 release of this one, excerpts from an interview.

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* Why a literal rail song? Why the railways?

In the audible song of a train on the tracks there is a metaphoric song of the rail that runs like a poem through the soul of this country: arrival, departure, transit, compulsion, dislocation, adventure. The song that allows us to become another version of ourselves.

What Jawaharlal Nehru described as our greatest national undertaking, the novel articulates as a human, rather than an infrastructural, network. Through Charu’s life, the accumulation of stories and experiences linked to the railways and to her own, that network is what Railsong looks to embody.

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* The book contains such detail, about people and the system itself; and covers such a vast swathe of time. What does research look like for a story like this?

As a novelist, you soon give up trying to become a subject expert. You might start with the idea that you will try, for example, to learn all that is there to learn about the Indian Railways. It would take lifetimes. You start particularising your research to the needs of your story.

In writing a novel, the allure of the Indian Railways was not the locomotives and routes; it was the people. In the ’80s, there were 17 lakh railway employees, one of the biggest workforces in the world, whose lives were representative of India at large.

I became something of a spiritual employee of the Indian Railways personnel department. I remember, while I was out researching, a senior personnel officer laughed: “You’ve come to the back end of the back end!”

In terms of the historical arc, I felt the need to be true to events as they felt then, not our understanding of them now.

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* Charu, with her hunger for freedom and for visceral experience of the world, feels like such an unusual person. Or is she not as unusual as we think?

If I was to think about what makes Charu powerful, it is perhaps the hero’s willingness to follow her instincts, above all else. Maybe her transparency too. Even when she is being strategic, while she fights her dissatisfactions, there is an emotional transparency, a moral core. And she’s adventurous.

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* More than once she packs a bag and sets off, just leaving it all behind. That is the ultimate fantasy, in some ways, isn’t it? But is there ever really an escape?

The idea of escape is a bit of a preoccupation of mine.

In The Sly Company of People Who Care, the narrator escapes for adventure, and then he is among the descendants of indentured labourers and slaves, people who travelled from compulsion or without volition; a very different dislocation.

Then again, a man escaping and a woman escaping are not always the same thing. If you read Shrayana Bhattacharya’s brilliant book (Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence; 2021), you see a lot of women escape in order to overcome elementary roadblocks and restrictions: on earning, travelling alone, choosing the people they want to be or not be with.

Certainly, Charu is motivated by some of these factors. I now think that a meaningful escape is only really another form of striving, of becoming, and that work has to be done every day.

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* We were a different people at the start of your arc in the late ’50s, and at its end, in the ’90s. What would you say we have lost, and gained, amid our transformation as a country, and in many ways as a people?

Post-’92 India is a markedly different place. If I was to use shorthand, I would say that is because of economic liberalisation and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. But your question reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi’s reply when he was asked what concerned him most: “The hardness of heart of the educated,” he said. A country and a society reluctant to be kind.

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* The book is deeply political, in a nuanced way. How political are you?

Every thinking person is political. To me, politics is the idea of how one lives among others. This novel is an expression of that. It begins with Charu at the age of three saying, “I want to count people.” This is literally the statistical exercise of the census, to enumerate the number and types of Indians in their astonishing diversity. If one were to tweak that sentence to, “I want people to count,” that’s a more novelistic idea. These two together, the idea of the types of Indians, and the idea of so many individuals, living with one another, this novel explores.

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* What does it take to tell a good story today? Has that changed, with Reels, apps and TikTok?

On literature, I take the long view. A work of literature may or may not be a product of that moment, but twenty, fifty or a hundred years later, it should still be able to speak to the nature of societies and people, their moral dilemmas and their dreams.