A Sunday morning in January, with the feel of winter in the salty sea air. We sit in a rooftop coffee shop on the Arabian Sea. Above us, planes fly by. And pigeons too.
“Be careful,” the waiter warns us. “Should we put the roof up?”
“No, no,” we laugh. We like the sky above us. Besides, pigeons are lucky.
Railsong, the saga we are reading this month, confirms this. As our motherless heroine, Charu Chitol, emerges from the railway train onto Victoria Terminus, a pigeon shits in her hair. “Vanda nahi,” a passerby tells her. It is no matter. Pigeon shit on your hair is, in fact, an omen of good fortune. It is a story we all recognise, a folk refrain from our lives.
Railsong has many moments that resonate thus. The book affects us all in different ways.
For readers like me who have read Rahul Bhattacharya’s earlier books, it lives up to our hyped expectations.
Years ago, I picked up Pundits from Pakistan. I’m still not sure what possessed a non-cricketing enthusiast like me to do so — but once I did, there was no putting it down. I quickly turned a fervent fan, as this sporting history drew me in with its quirky, irreverent voice.
Later, I read The Sly Company of People Who Care while travelling in Georgetown, Guyana, marvelling all over again at this talented young writer, who seemed to capture the people of a place with his portraits and its soul with his storytelling.
We read aloud other railway books — Moonlight Express by Monisha Rajesh and Branch Line to Eternity by Bill Aitken. And we reference Amitava Kumar’s new book The Social Life of Trains. Before we come back, again, to Railsong.
Railsong slows me down. Of course it does. It is meant to. It’s train travel, after all — a saga that starts in a railway colony in 1960s Bengal and goes on to the Bombay of the seventies and eighties. There’s something here for everyone — the small-town childhood person, the train traveller, the girl who wants to work, the rebel, the idealist. We all love Charu, the girl with grit, whose story mirrors that of India, as she journeys west by train from Calcutta to Bombay.
“It’s like a layer of dense chocolate cake; there’s so much in it to chew on,” says R. We nod vigorously.
Quinoa upma arrives, and then a plate of English breakfast with baked beans and hash browns, which we cut up into little pieces and pass around.
V is talking about her daily Pune–Bombay train journeys, about the kindness of strangers. M remembers the newspapers she spread on train floors.
Cappuccino arrives, and cutting chai. R reads aloud a passage; we exclaim over the descriptions of the perspiring air and the metal clips at the end of paper files, the quality of grief and of camaraderie.
“How many layers there are!” M says.
Our waiter brings French toast with whipped cream and strawberry jam. We each take little squares. Thus far, we have been in agreement over the rave-worthiness of Railsong.
It is time to decide what books we read next month. The shortlist is swollen and scintillating, exhilarating and overwhelming. The readers are irrepressible. They want it all. If only. It’s time for me, as moderator, to moot, well… moderation.
There’s Ed Yong’s The Immense World. “It’s slow by itself. Shall we pair it with an animal novel?” I suggest.
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, this novel about a big, gangly dog and a crotchety middle-aged woman. Or The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers, voiced by Ethan Hawke.
Someone proposes Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton. We are all instantly intrigued.
Proto by Laura Spinney triangulates archaeology, genetics, and linguistics to study language. The premise feels weighty and yet fascinating. We need a novel with it, one around language. Maybe A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo? Or The Interpreter by Leila Aboulela? No one has read either.
There are two autobiographies — Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood and A Patchwork Quilt by film director Sai Paranjpe. And two books on Gaza: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli and One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar el Akkad.
We pitch our particular favourites; we bargain, we bicker. The books are put to the vote. We will start small, a chapter for each of us from The Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us — sounds, smells, echoes, magnetic fields, electric fields, etc. We will also read Raising Hare. A month from today, under another sky, we will meet again to see what we have gathered.
And in the meantime, a question for you, dear reader. What would you bring to our table? What book — new or old, weighty or light — would you argue for, bargain with, or quietly place in the centre for us to share?
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)
Curated by Dr. Elena Rodriguez
