Railsong

by Rahul Bhattacharya

Sweeping, elegiac and at times wonderfully comic, Railsong is a powerful portrait of a woman forging a life for herself amid the social and political upheavals of twentieth-century India.

In a young country charged with national vigour, Charu, the motherless child of a railway worker, pines for a life freed of oppressive domesticity. As diesel engines replace steam, and the calamitous churn of drought, famine, strike, chokes the railway township, she dares to imagine a different future for herself. Boarding a train she flees westwards to Bombay, even as the country rumbles towards Emergency. In the frenetic landscape of the great modern metropolis, Charu, the budding adventuress, seeks the means to live on her own terms.

Tenaciously she fills the blanks in her life – the idealistic, artistic father Animesh whom she abandoned; the enigmatic mother Jigyasa long gone; her funny surname Chitol that no one recognizes; her bank balance – with her own material. Negotiating the treacherous planes of love, she marries a sheltered easy-goer. Fighting tragedy and loss, she becomes, after all, a railway woman. Against the rapidly clarifying prejudices around her, unfazed by everyday discriminations, she remains a small hero, an Everywoman who keeps her heart open – sometimes guilelessly – to her nation’s vast possibility.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, India, Historical, Novels, Indian Literature, Literary Fiction

402 pages, Hardcover

First published February 17, 2026

About the author

Rahul Bhattacharya is a writer, journalist and editor. His first novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Pundits from Pakistan, his first book, was a Wisden Cricketer top ten cricket book of all time. He was born in Bombay and lives in Delhi with his wife and two daughters.

Reviews

[Sayari Debnath · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll never forget Charu Chitol.

[Parvathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember loving The Sly Company Of People Who Care, and I remember feeling that there was something special about that young writer. It took Bhattacharya thirteen years to write another book...and I was lucky enough this time to get an autographed copy, courtesy a friend.
This one is a very different novel. But it is special too, in its own way. It is not everyday that a man writes convincingly from a woman's point of view. But Charulata Chitol, as the heart of this book, is lovely. She grows up in a fictional railway town, daughter of a Bihari mother and a Bengali father, who in the idealism of the India of the fifties and sixties, decides to give up his high caste surname for the indeterminate one of Chitol. That idealism stays with Charu through her life, as she runs away to Bombay looking for freedom and independence, as she encounters the bureaucracy of a railway job, as she tries to work through the complications of an inter-state marriage. Through her life we see the life of a nation, as Bhattacharya weaves in, ever so subtly, the events that shaped India in the latter half of the twentieth century. And also through her life, we see the change in women - as they begin to work outside their homes, negotiating an autonomy society is loathe to grant them. But the magical core of the book is the Indian Railways - its ordinary employees, the clerks and the sweepers and the station masters and the ticket inspectors. Charu, as she travels the trains as a welfare officer, meets them all and sees in them the complex richness that is India. Bhattacharya writes a love song to this behemoth - as it chugs along, inspite of all its problems, carrying a billion Indians across the land, irrespective of their caste or religion or language.
I don't know if I loved this as much as I loved The Sly Company, but Bhattacharya tells a good tale, slow-moving in parts, but heart-warming and rewarding as a whole.
A recommend.

[Natasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

As slow-moving as the titular trains winding through the book, with little of the promised song. Although Charu was an interesting and complex character, her mundane adventures and the ponderous writing style that relayed them failed to engage.

[V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding book. Was hooked throughout. Beautiful prose, felt like I was in Bhombalphur in the 50s and Mumbai in the 80s. Also, an empathetic and beautiful perspective on the Indian railways. Ms Chitol, what a character

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remember that marvellous novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care (2011) which won The Hindu Literary Prize  in 2011 and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize in 2012?  I read it for the Shadow Jury when it was shortlisted for the  Man Asian Literary Prize (2011), but it was also longlisted for the  DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2013.  We've had to wait 15 years for a successor, but Rahul Bhattacharya has done it again with his new novel Railsong.  And while the two novels couldn't be more different — Railsong has a female central protagonist for a start — once again it's about the coming-of-age for an individual and the coming-of-age of a decolonised country.

The novel begins in Charu's childhood in an unconventional family in a railway town called Bhombalpur.  Her father Animesh Kumar Chitol works in the railway workshop as a junior employee on a wage barely adequate for the upkeep of the extended family: his wife and three children Dhrubo, Charulata (Charul) and Anando; his widowed mother Nistarini Debi; and the servants.  These inadequate pay rates for vast numbers of railway employees erupt into nationwide strikes, which were the catalyst for police surveillance, violence between strikers and scabs, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's controversial Emergency (1975-77). India's new and fragile democracy was curtailed by cancelled elections and the suspension of civil liberties.

These and other political events form a backdrop to Charu's life, as does the Census which takes place in years ending in '1', tracing the rise of India's population from 439 million in 1961 to 846 million in 1991 when Charu herself is a census collector. But it is Charu's life that is the backbone of the story.

The tragedy of partition is well within living memory but Charu's parents had adopted the values of newly independent India, marrying for love despite parental objections, not bothering about religion, and changing their Brahmin family name to Chitol which designates no caste.  This renunciation of a caste-surname in favour of a neutral one places the beginning of the novel in the 1950s because India's 1950 Constitution banned discrimination based on caste and abolished 'untouchability'.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2026/06/21/r...

[Lisa Goodmurphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Railsong opens in the fictional town of Bhombalpur in the state of Bihar, India at the time of the 1961 census when Charulata (Charu) Chitol, the child of a mixed caste marriage, is three years old. Her mother dies a few years later and Charu and her two brothers are raised by their railway worker/political activist father.

As a 16 year-old searching for freedom and independence, Charu flees on a cross-country train to Bombay where she lives with maternal relatives for a time while attending college before finding work in a shoe store and moving to a women's hostel. Eventually she secures a position with the Indian Railways where she is known as Miss Chitol and builds a career beginning as a junior clerk and advancing through the system to become a welfare inspector investigating worker's claims and fraud.

Spanning three decades (1961-92), Railsong is a heartfelt coming of age story about a complex young woman in a changing India in the latter half of the 20th century. Charu's struggle for personal independence takes place against a backdrop of social and political upheaval in modern day India highlighting the inequality that exists both between castes and within the patriarchal society. Through Charu we observe the changing role of women in India's workforce and the importance of Indian Railways as an employer. I enjoyed learning more about the history and geography of the country and Charu is a memorable character. Railsong is an interesting and enjoyable story although I did find it to be slow moving and the prose a bit awkward at times.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for providing a digital ARC of this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

[Sandeep · Rating 4 out of 5]

Railsong by Rahul Bhattacharya is a breathtaking, elegiac novel that traces modern India through the life of Charulata Chitol, a motherless railway worker's daughter who flees to Bombay at 16 after a brutal rail strike and carves out an independent life as a railway clerk and welfare officer.

Spanning decades from the 1960s to the early 1990s, the story follows Charu as she navigates patriarchy, bureaucracy, and her own heart while India transforms from steam to diesel and post-independence optimism fades into disillusionment. What makes this novel so powerful is how it captures the contradiction of a nation charging forward with vigour while human costs pile up and women are expected to "dissolve like sugar in milk".

Charu refuses to shrink and that refusal becomes the heartbeat of the book, and along the way this book tells the story of an arguably modern country but hardly a decent one. This is the central ache of Railsong, where the railways connect people and places but also reveal the everyday cruelty underneath the national narrative.

This is one of those novels that needs to be read slowly, and savoured.

[Chythan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

In Railsong, I came across one of the best well-written female characters I've come across in recent years, Charulata Chitol. The spirited woman who, when confronted with the stifling banality of domestic norms and routines, leaves her relatively liberal home as a young girl to make a life of her own. Living and striving at a time when the young republic was undergoing  political and social  changes that found reverberations in everyday politics and personal relationships, she holds onto her commitment to individual freedom and assertion of her free will. Growing from a young girl who "loved to count people", to a railway welfare inspector who refuses people to be stories and lives lost in ageing files, Charu shows a nuanced acknowledgement of human dignity and empathy. Charu isn't flawless. Instead, she is admirably real in her relentlessness- towards herself and everything.

[Jenn]

DNF. This just isn't working for me. I'm bored.

[Varun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime

[Muskan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it twice, a quick read through the second time. But Charulata Chitol is a heroine in the truest sense of the word.

Although it’s a 4.5 for me because as beautiful as the story is, the awkward clunkyness of the prose in some parts really starts getting to you.

[Kopal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Railsong gave me a much needed template to think about patriotic feelings.

[Govind · Rating 5 out of 5]

tender, beautiful, highly self aware.

you will remember the protagonist as intimately as one knows one own self and their negotiations with the world.

[Susmita Kundu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Born into a relatively young India, a very young Ms. Chitol arrives at the railway workshop town of Bhombalpur. Here she faces a tragedy early in her young life and that sets into motion events that cast their shadows throughout her life.

But time and again our Ms. Chitol refuses to be defined by her circumstances. She never loses her convictions and each time she forges her own path.

She is not exactly an always morally upright character and has ample shades of grey. But you always find yourself rooting for her. And that's how you realize this is a character whom the author loves, maybe even is partial to her. He devotes equal parts to the work of a woman as he does to her personal life. How work shapes her life.

A superb example of a character driven novel. The Indian Railways, life and work in the Railways and train journeys become an authentic backdrop against which the character of Ms. Chitol comes alive for the reader.

This book has all the makings of a modern Indian classic along the lines of The God of Small Things and A Fine Balance.

[Paree Punnj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some books are read. Some feel lived beside.

Railsong was one of those rare books for me where I was not simply following a character through her life, I was gathering pieces of womanhood with her.

What stayed with me most was this constant negotiation of independence. The exhausting awareness that even your presence cannot inconvenience others. That women are expected to shrink themselves emotionally, physically, socially, until they fit neatly into whatever role the world demands from them. And every time Miss Chitol tried to step outside that shape, whether in her uncle’s house, at a funeral, in marriage, at work, there was resistance waiting for her.

There is a particular loneliness to the "motherlessness" in this book that completely shattered me. The way it shapes attachment, forgiveness, abandonment. The way she keeps leaving only after enduring far more than she should have. The way she seems constantly suspended between wanting to belong and wanting to escape.

And then there were the letters from her parents, which were perhaps the most emotional part of the book for me. She spends so much of her life piecing them together through fragments, and somewhere within those fragments, you realize that they may have been the only people who would have fully understood her. Her rebellion, her tenderness, her anti-caste instincts, her quiet refusal to bend entirely. It didn't come from nowhere.

This book also captures India in such a layered, unsettling way. Its caste hierarchies, its emergency years, its quiet cruelties hidden inside respectability, its obsession with surnames and purity and appearances. There are moments where people appear virtuous until equality threatens their own position. That complexity was written so honestly.

Even the structure of the novel felt meaningful. The four sections mirror her evolution so cleverly that by the final part, Welfare Inspection, it no longer feels like she is inspecting the lives of others but finally turning inward and examining her own life with honesty.

The prose is dense and demanding at times, but so incredibly beautiful. You can feel the years poured into it. Certain metaphors and images are like emotional landmarks and do justice to how the parts are structured across the book, the handkerchief, the digital clock, the paperweight with ferns, the handkerchief, the attached bathroom. Small things carrying enormous emotional weight.

And the characters felt painfully real. Not simplified into heroes or villains, but shaped by fear, patriarchy, compromise, helplessness, ego, loneliness, class, caste, desire. Even the men being referred to mostly through initials created this strange distance where you saw them more through their impact on her than through fixed identities of their own.

By the end, it felt less like I had finished a book and more like I had known someone deeply.

We meet so many people over the course of our lives. Some we write into our pages, and some, without us realizing it, end up writing parts of us.

This book, this character, her life, it does not belong to me, and yet it will always linger somewhere within me. Not as something lived, but as something remembered. As if, in some distant compartment of the same train, our journeys brushed past each other without ever truly meeting.

Miss Chitol will stay with me for a very long time.

[Visalakshi Kannan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book came highly recommended and didn't disappoint.

Loved the heroine, Charulata Chitol. What a character. We follow her right from when she's a child in 1961, who moves with her parents to a railway township in Bhombalpur (an imaginary town in Bihar) to when she's in her mid-30s in Bombay. She's so memorably written; she runs away from home at 16 to make her own life in Bombay. She has a soft landing to the extent that she has her mother's brother to live with. She dabbles with getting an education, while hiding the fact that she works in a shoe shop. She meets men, gets her heart broken but all the while her primary purpose is independence. She loathes the idea that her life's purpose (as for most women in that era) is to get married and take care of her husband and kids. She moves from one PG accommodation to another.

Her life and the book really kick into gear after her father passes away and she gets a "compassionate posting" (after much dogged chasing) in the Railways. I loved the fact that she refuses the easy way out of accepting a job in Bhombalpur and insists on working in Bombay. Eventually, she marries for love, and true to character leaves when she thinks she can't live in her husband's house on her terms anymore and continues to focus on her career in the Railways. At this point, she's a welfare inspector and each case/story is dealt with so beautifully. The author goes deep into the bureaucracy behind the running of the Railways and you feel the incompetence, the patience, the frustration behind every interaction, every delay, every file.

Aside from the midsection where long passages on Railway rules somehow become the focus, and some uneven pacing (the author describes indepth her efforts to get a job in the Railways, but somehow she's married in a line!), the book is lovely. The ending moved me to tears: "The straps of her backpack impressed into her shoulders a great many written people, a disorderly bunch which only had in common that their lives had crossed hers, flickering upon each other the miracle of their journeys, like travellers on a train to who knows where, but somewhere, certainly somewhere; and pressing on her worn heel, into the song of the rail climbed Charulata Chitol, who had wanted to count people."

[Kavity · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t feel like writing a review of Railsong. It is simply not that kind of a book. It isn’t a book.

I have been living with Charulata, Charu, Ms Chitol, as she has grown up through the railway employees’ strike, the emergency, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Babri Masjid, and a few censuses in between. I have been traveling with her on trains, from Bhombalpur to Bombay, from Bombay to Hyderabad to Delhi, in the unreserved class, the third sleeper, the third AC.

Charu is part of my daily routine now, a woman independent in thought, action, reaction to reactions. She cares about her money, living well, doing her job perfectly, questioning questionable practices, standing her ground, being decisive. And on and on and on.

Railsong makes me halt often through the narration, wondering how a man has written a woman so well, better than how many a woman has written a woman.

A book club friend says, “I want to be written like how Rahul has written Charu”. I am tempted to say “I want to be understood like how Rahul understands Charu”.

Does Rahul’s Railsong remind me of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, as some seem to allude to? Only in how the nation’s politics offer a vivid backdrop to an unfolding personal story.

But, where Seth’s words are lyrical, poetic, dreamy, his heroine Lata an almost one-dimensional character, her role revolving around having to choose her ideal marital match, Rahul’s Charulata isn’t tethered, motherless and wantonly fatherless as she is, choosing to write her future, wanting not to be “of someone” but “Ms Chitol, XYZ something”.

Railsong is great on audible, the narration is perfect. But it’s a labour of love I want in my bookshelf, these are words I want to read and read again.

Railsong is no ordinary book. It is an epic in its own right. Charu is no simple protagonist. She’s an emotion in her own right.

In case it isn’t already clear, recommend. Yes, loud and clear. Recommend.

Be warned. It’s a long long book though, meandering here and there. Some journeys are long and meandering after all. And are worth it for exactly that.

P. S. Charu almost reminds me of Balachander heroines from the 1970s-80s (Balachander was a famous Thamizh director who directed a 100+ movies, many of them radical and way ahead of their time).

[Adii (adiiturnsapage) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A biiiig thank you to @bloomsburyindia for this copy ❤️
..............................

Ms Chitol has my heart. Really. And I'm in love with Rahul Bhattacharya's prose - so poetic, so lyrical! What Bhattacharya has done is weave a rich tapestry of personal longings, grief and joys, political upheavals, and quiet undercurrents of revolutionary changes that take place within an individual. What remains at the heart of his narration essentially, is the Indian railway; literally binding the various aspects of this beautiful tale together.

The story begins in a tiny fictional railway township of Bhombalpur. Little Charu/Ms Chitol, is a motherless child surviving amid poverty, a strict grandmother, and a kind father. Her life turns 180 degrees when she flees to Mumbai escaping the rut and the shackles of Bhombalpur.

Spanning from the 1960s to the 90s, the story has rich expression of every emotion, all very heartfelt. At the same time it captures the India of the 20th century, all with its political changes, religious clashes, and an evolving society that's slowly but surely leaving behind simpler times.

Throughout the book you find yourself rooting for Ms Chitol. No, she's no simple saint. But she wins your heart with her daily struggles and undying positive spirit. Her self healing, sincerity and discipline pulls her out of her downtrodden environment to something much calmer and uplifting.

The novel carefully touches on issues of caste and religion, class, patriarchy, fragile male egos, all from the 1980s perspective that seems long gone albeit much-relevant even today.

As Ms Chitol finds her footing in Mumbai, finds love, builds a career, finds her true self, you find yourself walking with her, never wanting to stop.

This novel is a must-read for literary fiction lovers; without a doubt. It is magnificent yet grounded, extremely simple yet immensely complex. I couldn't get enough of it.

[Anand Venkatraman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rahul Bhattachary's Railsong is a wonderful story about Miss Chitol and her pursuit of 'independence' as she defines it - independence from household chores caring for her 2 brothers and grief stricken father after her mom passes away; from household chores at her uncle's house in Bombay who shelters her after she runs away from home in a railways workshop town in West Bengal; independence from the strictures of living with her in-laws in a small flat; finally, from a husband who is torn between Smt. Chitol, an independent working woman, and a tradition bound mother. Most of all Miss Chitol is attracted to the Indian Railways just as her father was in all its grime, bustle, and rhythms. There are rhythms that run parallel like rail tracks into the future - the decennial census, modernization in the railways from steam to diesel, and progress in post-independent India. The author does not dilly dally on events tragic or otherwise. He is almost insouciant in his narration. There is a sense of constant motion in the lives of the characters from the various deaths-in-the-family, the famine, the emergency of dictator Mrs. Indira G., railway strikes, her father's union activities, emergency era union busting, Miss Chitol’s various boyfriends, travel for work to far-off remote locations as a Railways Welfare officer, Charu evolving into ‘Miss Chitol’, and finally to ‘Smt. Chitol’. From hating Bhombalpur where she grew up, Smt. Chitol comes full circle back to loving it once she gains freedom from her marriage and goes back to visit an uncared for empty house and old family friends who have passed away. She comes full circle from counting people as she stood in the door of a moving train as a child with her father, to working for the census, counting people and their lives. Written in mostly the third person, this is a lovely book with well developed characters and an engaging storyline.

Lovely book!

[Radhika Ayalur · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve journeyed into the new year with Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong… with Charulata Chitol’s adventures and astonishing range of musings for company.
I have followed her from a sleepy railway township in eastern India where she grew up with her brothers. And I’m sitting with her in a concert hall in faraway, deliriously liberating Bombay where she is about to meet the man she may possibly spend her life with.
At that point, she is waiting… for life to get going. A wait that is filled with new adventures and old grievances, could-be boyfriends and nosy colleagues… a wait in which she feels she is on the threshold of something… but what?
And then she realises that the wait is the real deal.
“Without the wait, everything is hollow. Without meaning. Why must I resist the waiting? The journeys we navigate everyday failing to recognise the exquisite. … the sadness, the richness, the pleasure of the waiting and the wandering… we forfeit all for the mundane”

And so she waits: for trains, for buses and bullock carts, for the decisions that must surmount red tape and optics, for her family to come to terms with her choices.

I liked the way the events in independent India’s history and the span of its geography are woven into Charu’s story. I loved the way her story shifts gears once she arrives at Bombay, her absorbing of the sights, sounds, smells and tics. And her intense desire to “belong” to this chaotically endearing city.

I’m gobsmacked at the amount of research it must have taken to chronicle a railway employee’s life and fieldwork in such rich detail.

At the close of the last chapter (which hangs at a critical date), Charu is “vividly sentimental and sensationally alive.”
As I close the book, I can say much the same for myself.

[Shruti · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's hard to know where to begin—but this may be the best Indian novel in English I have ever read. certainly I am finding it hard to think of something that surpasses it. what Rahul Bhattacharya has managed in this book is to write his protagonist with such sensitivity and care that she never becomes two-dimensional or a caricature; but most importantly, she carries that sensibility with her into the world she lives in, narrating the people she encounters and their worldviews in a manner that is uncompromising without being harsh. the novel deals with India across decades of momentous change, through the Emergency and the railway strikes all the way to the demolition of Babri Masjid and the entrenchment of anti-Muslim bigotry in everyday life. other novels in recent years have attempted to deal with Hindu majoritarianism and caste in India, but have often betrayed the author's own urbane guilt and anxieties, or have shown the writer's derision for the people they criticise. that is never the case with this novel, which is critical and truthful without ever collapsing people into caricatures or stereotypes. it is also beautifully written, preserving much of the colloquialisms of Indian English without aiming to be translatable to a Western audience (in the Indian hardback edition, anyway). and it draws out the mundane, sometimes ugly details of everyday life (from period cramps to rat-bitten curtains) but still grants them beauty and dignity. it took me several weeks to read, much longer than usual, but I can't recommend this book enough.

[Beena V Sarkar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silver Railway tracks or the stitches of Kantha embroidery ? Or both ? My first thoughts , when I see the Blue-bare hard-cover, shorn of its decorative paper-one.

A woven Tapestry of a life, written with such a knowing understanding of a female mind - a pleasant surprise- with a sensitivity that I have read last in Tagore's. With descriptive prose never indulging in itself too much , never leaning to the tedious ; the right balance.

As a person who never knew the intricracies of the clerk /welfare verification / Census work - a peek into this world through the eyes of girl, tenaciously climbing her way up to the VT (now CST) main "beautiful building" office at Bombay (now Mumbai) is a ride that I shall indulge in - not once, but couple of times.

Do read and understand why she was never referred to by her first name in the book , unlike her brothers, but by her surname "Chitol" - an aspirational name given by a parent taken away too soon, whose absence lingered through letters address to the other parent discovered later , whose ideals forged her identity.

Pick this one up - a shelf keeper :)

[Snigdha Dagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hope Charu Chitol's tenacity continues to inspire me.

I love long sprawling sagas and this one, as others have noted, is definitely reminiscent of A Suitable Boy. As Charu grows into adulthood, India goes through its transitions - there is the emergency, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, railway union strikes, caste tensions, religious riots, demands for the Ram temple - that create the backdrop of the social tensions of the time. I dipped into the story completely, transported back into the Bombay of the 80s. It is a story that needs to be told in current times. Our fault lines as a country have always been the same, yet there is so much that connects us - the railways, the census that enumerates the millions to billions of us, yet there is hope, there is the idealism of those who came before us, each small life adding up to what is the whole.
If I had to fault anything, it would be the middle section that could have been cut short and at times felt a little tedious.

[Nirbhay Kanoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rahul Bhattacharya's Railsong is an ambitious and dizzying novel that succeeds in what it sets out to tell - the story of Charulata, a.k.a., Charu, Chitol.

Born to a humanist (and equally important, Indian railway employee) father, who trades in his high-caste last name for an invented and uncategorisable Chitol, Charu's story begins in Colonial India and ends after the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

As the railways criss-cross and connect India, Charu too travels, physically and metaphorcally, in a time when few women would dream of leading a life that was not laid out for them by their fathers or husbands. She marries outside her community, takes up unconventional jobs, and lives life on her terms.

All the praise being heaped on this book isn't enough. It's an excellent and moving read.

[Aditya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very engrossing and realistic. The early parts dragged a bit, but as I went on it became harder and harder to put down, and quite appositely I read the second half of the book on a train.

The book beautifully depicts an India that is obviously of the past (and perhaps a somewhat rose-tinted one) yet entirely familiar today in its society and families. The story of Charu's life is almost biographical. I most enjoyed the 'happy ending' of her rejection of joint-family life and continued pursuit in an 'unsuitable career', which, along with her parents' breaking of caste and language barriers, would sadly be as remarkable today as they were decades ago. The politics in the later parts of the book are also unfortunately all too familiar.

The railways provide a beautiful background connecting the story together, but characters and emotions are always in the primary focus.

[Ranjani Sheshadri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this in America and struggled to start it, but found my footing in India, really immersing myself in this story of a young girl trying to assert herself in life and in love in a modernizing Mumbai, watching with delight as it afford her new opportunities and horror as it perverts itself into the fascistic nightmare of Hindutva (dare I give this book to my mom?!). This book is rich with characters and details and humor and longing, and Charu/Miss Chitol feels real and worthy of your adoration—and this from a male author! I really am impressed by the way he managed to capture the effervescence and tenuousness of young womanhood. You too, as one of the reviewers writes, would follow her anywhere, through this chaotic, exuberant country.

...the people of the Indian Railways, of whom she was, without whom, according to how could I forget retd c.p.o. Harsharan Singh Bedi! – khatri Sikh, born Multan, present-day Pakistan, beard in net, toothaches addressed by cloves, legaches by midgets – without whom there will be no India. There being no India was a comedic thought. Yet watching the trains pull in and out, the crissing and crossing, thousands of people making their way, their hearts in transit, their languages on the go, their origin stories, mythologies and migrations and conquests possibly in stark conflict with those of another, the gods and heroes of one the demons and villains of another

[Olivia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meandering and at, at times, boring this book was a DNF for me a little more than halfway through. Heavily laden with unnecessary detail about side characters we only meet once and who enact little to no change to the plot; such detail would only be justified if I had been made to care more about the main character, which I wasn’t. I made it halfway before I realized, Miss Chitol’s constant aimlessness led to my own disinterest in her story. The extraneous details, constantly-changing cast of characters, and Miss Chitol’s own lack of direction, left me slogging through this book.

The writing was beautiful and evocative, and at times highly relatable, but could have benefited from some significant editing and direction. Knowing where the novel was going, namely where Miss Chitol ends up employed, I couldn’t see myself making it through the second half to a rather thankless ending.

[Aashima Singhal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went into Railsong not knowing what to expect and initially struggled with the writing style—it often felt dense and at times unnecessarily complicated, making me reread passages more than I would have liked. But somewhere along the way, I found myself settling into the rhythm of the book and becoming quietly invested in Miss Chitol and her journey through life.

What stayed with me most was her sense of growing self-awareness and the quiet freedom she seems to arrive at by the end. The book doesn’t offer a dramatic resolution, but rather a subtle understanding of who she has become, and I found that deeply satisfying. Even though I didn’t always enjoy the way the story was written, I truly valued the life it portrayed and the perspective it left me with.

[Lubna Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Railsong feels like a trip back in time for anyone who grew up in India during the late 80s/early 90s. It perfectly captures the small-town life and the constant presence of the railways. As a woman, I found the story of the main character’s personal and professional growth very inspiring. The beautiful, poetic writing and the political backdrop made me feel a deep sense of gratitude for how much "easier" my life as a woman is today compared to the generation before us. In many ways, it felt like reading about how my own mother’s journey through her younger years would have been.

It is a 5 stars for me except that the book is a slow burn. While the writing is lovely, the pace stalls so much in certain sections that I had to force myself to pick it back up and keep reading. It’s an evocative and meaningful book, but it requires some patience.

[Raghunath · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it okay. It suffers from this trope often found in oscar-bait movies: A story centered on how a privileged person evolves in life while the horrors of the underprivileged are the impetus for their journey and are soon relegated to the backdrop.

What was the point of switching POVs from 3rd person to 1st person for a couple of chapters? Author was just having fun?

As a telugu man from Hyderabad, I was glad to see some telugu representation and Amberpet - Hyderabad mentioned. The monologue by Chandramma was heart breaking and also accurately reflects the plight of Dalits. Even the EN text in this portion was well written, reflecting the way working class Telugu people talk, the idioms they chose and the phrasing they prefer etc.