Heart on the line

His last book won the UK Royal Society's Ondaatje Prize. Bhattacharya now has a sweeping new novel out. Railsong is the tale of a teen who leaves it all behind and makes her way across a transforming India in a series of varied train journeys - in search of, perhaps more than anything else, herself

- Dipanjan Sinha

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

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.

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.

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.