Rahul Bhattacharya’s new novel is an epic of one woman and a nation on the move

 AFTER HIS FIRST novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, came out in 2011, it took a few years for the seed of the next to come to Rahul Bhattacharya. And then 10 more years were required to write Railsong. At the end of it what you have is an opus with two protago­nists—Charulata Chitol and the Indian Railways. In intertwining the two, Bhattacharya weaves the story of a life and a nation in the thrall of change. And yet, the book is never ambiguous about its heart. This is the journey of Charulata. The tracks on which she moves and which move her are the canvas for the portrait, an ambitious and overarching canvas but never overpowering.

Railsong (Bloomsbury; 461 pages; `799) begins with Charu’s arrival as a child at a railway colony where her father is joining work—“A foresty fragrance accompanied the Chitols as they passed from the town into the township, under the curved iron banner that stated, incontrovertibly, ‘Bhombalpur Railway Station, estd 1960’.” The book ends in 1992 with Charulata, now a woman in her 30s, back at the same station, soaking in the change in both her and the place. Within the timeline, in prose that often borders on the lyrical, are upheavals and self-discoveries with always— like a constant background hum—the railways. Feeling her independence increasingly restricted, Charu escapes her family and father, a railway employee, and flees to Mumbai while still in her teens. Eventually she becomes a railway employee, a part of what she once fled. It now opens new enriching journeys for her.

The details about people and processes around railways are meticulous and that came from long hard research, a reason why it took Bhattacharya so long to write it. He had no close family association or connection to the organisa­tion. Setting it in that universe is just how the story came to him and he continued to explore. He travelled to railway colonies, especially spending time in Chittaranjan, West Bengal, where India first started making its own locomo­tives. “Not only a township like Chittaranjan, but railways colonies in places like Mughalsarai and Asansol. Just to make a credible space. Once you have the physical space, the layouts, the texture, you can put your imagination to work. The house in which to build the novel, as it were. I was very keen to get those details right. People who have lived through that period should be able to recognise that world as authentic,” he says.

He also spoke to many railways’ employees, often hang­ing out with them to get a sense of their lives. “I must have driven a few crazy with my queries – really esoteric ones, because I was guided by the problems created by my own story,” he says.  

 It was not just that he had to find out how, say, a process hap­pened but how it happened in the ’70s and ’80s. “I needed to know what the designations were at that stage, what the pay scales were. All the rules were superseded by newer rules. I had to really throw myself into both paperwork and tracking down people who were working at the time,” he says.

Writing came to Bhattacharya by happenstance, beginning with an impulsive article on cricket. When Courtney Walsh broke the world record for most wickets in Test matches in 2000, Bhattacharya wrote what he termed a bombastic piece and sent it to the Cricket Talk magazine. The editor called him for a meeting and, to Bhattacharya’s shock, gave him a job right there. In 2004, when the Indian cricket team toured Pakistan, he was there and wrote a non-fiction book on it called Pundits from Pakistan.

When he got down to fiction, the trigger was the memory of a cricket tour, the very first international one he covered in 2002 in the West Indies. The first Test had been in Georgetown, Guyana. “I was 22, very young. It was eye-opening for me to be in the Caribbean and experience a world that I had only read about in, say, [VS] Naipaul’s or CLR James’s books. Guyana hit my senses. You know the way in which various parts of you, mind, body, respond to a piece of music. You’re stirred in­side and want to find out more. Guyana, its people, demography, language, topography, all awakened that feeling in me. I thought at some point I really want to come back here.” Four years later, he packed his bags and lived a year there. Sly Company is about a journalist who spends a year in Guyana but he did not initially plan it as fiction. He had not even authored a short story till then. When he came back and started writing, he realised that making it a novel would allow him to say what he wanted. “Fiction allows you to arrive in some way at deeper truths. To capture the emo­tion and mood of things. Also, the ambiguity of things in a way that non-fiction is more limited at doing. When I started writing, I felt very much this is going to be a novel.”

It was September of 2015 when he finally started writing Railsong, and the first draft of around 100,000 words was entirely handwritten, something he had never done before. Bhattacharya says that he probably would never have finished the draft otherwise. “The problem was I could not enter the fic­tional space on the computer. I found it very difficult after the internet became so pervasive. The moment a doubt came into my head, I looked to check it up on Google, read more about it, etc. I just didn’t feel settled, and then I read a Toni Morrison interview where she spoke of writing her first drafts by hand. She would use 2B pencils and write on yellow legal pads. I thought, if it’s good enough for Toni Morrison, why should I not give this a shot? So I did exactly that. That draft took me three years. I would write in the morning. I would have my pen­cil, my legal pads, the sharpeners, ready. Sometimes I would get down just a paragraph, some days a couple of pages,” he says.

Railsong is made up of four parts, the phases of Charu’s life. As you move through them, what also strikes you is Bhattacharya’s increasing ambition to experiment with style. For instance, the novel’s narration is in third person. In one chapter, Charu has just joined the Personnel branch of the railways and is settling in, observing the world around her. Suddenly, it ends with a line, “And do you think I was just standing around, doing nothing?”. In the next chapter, she is directly talking to the reader in first person. The one that comes after reverts to the original form. After setting the foundations of a recognisable form, the question for Bhattacharya was what else could be added to the reading experience. “There’s a danger of becoming static in one’s writing project. The line, ‘and do you think I was doing nothing’ came to me on the page while I was doing it. And then I followed it because I liked that moment of surprise. I thought, let me see whether I can write a chapter (taking it forward),” he says.

Charu’s journey with her first arrival at Bhombalpur starts around 1960 and ends in 1992 while she sits in the station waiting for her train. It is a year when economic liber­alisation and the Babri Masjid demolition are both on the anvil, and a group of kar sevaks pass her by. Bhattacharya was clear it would be a post-Independence novel, but the rest, of placing her in that era, was guided by instinct. Choosing this period allowed him to show the frailties and promise of an India in the making. As a child, Charu is touched by momentous events like famines and railway strikes. She is an affected corollary who refuses to stop defining herself. In Mumbai, working alone, the regular appurtenances of life come calling: love, marriage, loss of love, separation, career, struggle, freedom, hope. The last chapter finds her ‘sensationally alive’ to the moment. “The novel in some ways is opening out when it ends. There is a sense that her journey is still starting when we end. And along with that, the sense that India’s journey is continuing,” says Bhattacharya.