Railsong: Rahul Bhattacharya’s new novel takes you across stories along Mumbai's railway tracks, blending humour and realism

Author Rahul Bhattacharya at CST. His book follows the protagonist Charulata Chitol, for decades, starting from her stay at a railway colony in the late 1950s and ending in 1992

How many times have you been welcomed in an Indian city by a bird pooping on you? That's how Rahul Bhattacharya's heroine is welcomed in Mumbai at Victoria Terminus. In his latest book, Railsong, Bhattacharya takes you across different stories attached to the railway tracks, with hints of humour and realism. Set to release on November 4 in India, the book follows the protagonist Charulata Chitol or Charu, for decades, starting from a railway colony in the late 1950s and ending in 1992.

Charu's story only truly begins when she runs away from a railway township and steps out of Victoria Terminus into Mumbai's chaos, only to have a pigeon poop on her head. It's a scene as ordinary as it is cinematic. "I walked that route," says Bhattacharya, whose other books include Pundits from Pakistan and The Sly Company of People Who Care. "I tried to imagine her coming out of the train, and how she must have felt entering the city, emerging at Victoria Terminus, which is the outside shot you always see first of Bombay in films. But this is from the inside, a character actually making that journey in an unreserved compartment."

Railsong took him ten years to write, a decade he measured against his older daughter's age. "A lot of that was because of the research," he laughs. "There are two aspects - one is the research, and the second is the process of forgetting the research," he says, explaining that he didn't want this world to seem false to the reader.

From the start, Bhattacharya had the idea of writing about an enterprise that showcases the vastness and complexity of India and its interconnectedness. That's why he chose India's railway network, which connects every Indian in various ways, either through travel, employment, or something else.

But for Bhattacharya, it was never just about the trains. It was about the people behind them.

Particularly, the employees whose entire lives fit inside their service record files. "Life and file are two forms of the same word," he says. "On one side of the table, a life is just a file. On the other, the file is your life."

Reay Road is one of the stations mentioned in the book. Pics/Ashish Raje

The novel's humorous side, too, comes through its people: the clerks with the long nails on their pinkies and the women who gossip over typewriters. He laughs when asked about such moments, and admits he added these for the sheer Indianess of it.

Bhattacharya spent enough time shadowing staffers at the Central Railways' personnel department; "to feel like a personnel staffer myself," he says. Most of his time there was spent trying to understand the bureaucracy and processes that existed in the 70s. So, naturally, a lot of it was through older staffers and oral histories. "The personnel department basically handles the people and their grievances," he explains. "While it seems like a very dry bureaucratic exercise, the kinds of things that come up are actually very intimate."

He heard stories of multiple wives, missing employees, and welfare inspectors who had to turn into detectives to figure out who gets the pension after an employee's death, and more. "I became so intimate with the rule book that I could start structuring stories looking at these rules," he says. His research, he adds, was a lot of good old-fashioned legwork, speaking not to officers, but to the staff who really run the railways. "That's where you get a feel of the ground," he says. "The details spark your imagination."

The result is a novel full of faces you might know - the man with the pinky nail, the clerk who corrects you on a form, or the woman holding a family together from behind a counter. "It's a heavily peopled book," Bhattacharya says. "Once I had spent enough time in those offices, it gave me a sense of the kinds of people who would work there, and I could sketch out characters with that."

What this novel truly presents is the railways as a network of people, not a mere network of stations and tracks. It gestures at the broader architecture of the Indian Republic, and what it means for us to be connected in this way.

That idea opens up fully in the novel's fourth and last section, when Charu becomes a welfare inspector working on the beat, doing field work. "She's encountering such a variety of lives and stories," Bhattacharya says. "We get a sense of what it is to be one among many in this country. Her fieldwork is an education for her."

Charu is a heroic figure, but in a very ordinary way. He says, "It was important for me to show her own privileges being exposed to herself. Most of us think of ourselves as underdogs… and in many ways Charu is, but even so, she has relative privileges of caste and class, which she is then forced to reckon with."

As Railsong is about India and its diverse people, its language mirrors that. Bhattacharya fills the book with Bangla, Gujarati, Marathi, Bambaiya, Dakhni, and Indian English. "It's a difficult negotiation," he admits. "Either you set a novel almost entirely so much in the world of English speakers - and I had no interest in writing that kind of novel - or you find a way to suggest multilinguality without caricature." He calls it "the language of lived experience in India."

Charu's story ends fittingly at a railway station on 5 December 1992, the eve of the Babri Masjid demolition , and the year of India's economic liberalisation. It's also the eve of Babasaheb Ambedkar's death anniversary. A conscious choice that Bhattacharya made because, "It leaves us on the precipice of an India that is about to change," he concludes.

Follow Charu's tracks

To see Mumbai as Charu does in Railsong, take the Harbour Line.

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus: Where Charu first arrives in the city; the novel's pulse point. Listen to the song of the train tracks, and admire the grandeur of the station.

Masjid Bunder: The lanes around here hum with dockworkers, grain traders, and the clerks Bhattacharya writes about.

Sandhurst Road: Beneath the flyover and rail bridges lies an older Mumbai: machine shops, chawls, and the scent of engine grease.

Dockyard Road: Get a glimpse of the docks and the sea; the lives of mechanics, welders, and loaders that anchor the novel's working world.

Reay Road: Once home to railway colonies and repair yards. Experience the kind of places Charu might visit as a welfare inspector.

Cotton Green: Warehouses, godowns, and the smell of grain and iron. This is where the city's invisible labour moves quietly.

Wadala Road: It's a midpoint of rest and motion; workers changing shifts, chai stalls refilling cups.

Chunabhatti: The edge of old Mumbai and of Charu's route. Here is where the city fades into its townships, and the railway's song carries on.