RAILSONG

Bhattacharya explores the costs and possibilities of one spirited woman’s attempts at an independent life in the emerging nation of India from 1961 to 1992.

The important events in the novel cluster around two constants in Charu Chitol’s life: India’s national census, taken every decade, and the vast national railway system. The 1961 census is the first to include 3-year-old Charu. That year her parents move their family to Bhombalpur because Charu’s Brahmin father has taken a job in the township’s Railway Workshop. Over the next 10 years, Charu’s mother dies, India suffers a devastating drought, and Charu, who’s Hindu, becomes best friends with a Muslim girl. By the 1971 census, Charu is turning into an adolescent whose growing resentments toward her restrictive home life parallel unrest among railway workers. A huge nationwide strike affects millions—including Charu’s family, after her progressive father sides with the workers although he’s a foreman. Charu is physically attacked, but the hardships caused by the strike give her courage to leave home. At 16, she moves to Bombay to find independence, which will prove no easier for her to navigate than for India itself. She works in a shoe shop, intermittently attends college, and has mild romances while avoiding an arranged marriage. In 1981, her father dies and Northeast Frontier Railway survival benefits include a job with the company. Rebellious, bookish Charu has transformed into capable and quietly ambitious Miss Chitol. As she rises through the professional ranks in modernizing India, she reconnects with an old college boyfriend and her personal life presents familiar dilemmas as the novel’s witty, slightly Dickensian tone offers both humor and poignancy.

This bildungsroman concerning one woman’s quest to define her identity also brings India into sharp focus.