Meet Charulata Chitol, a central railways welfare inspector. Conscientious, self-aware, and immediately engaging, Miss Chitol, as she is referred to, is the central character of Rahul Bhattacharya’s new novel, Railsong, in which he traces her evolution from a railway colony childhood to hard-won independence in Mumbai.Be it the worlds of Indian cricket explored in his non-fiction Pundits from Pakistan or the Guyana-set coming-of-age novel The Sly Company of People Who Care, Bhattacharya has consistently shown a gift for moving beyond surface appearances and conjuring vibrant images and characters in fluid, graceful prose. These qualities are very much in evidence in Railsong.The novel spans Miss Chitol’s life from the sixties to the nineties, beginning when she is a child in the imagined town of Bhombalpur in Bihar where her father is a railway foreman. From the start, it delicately probes the interiority of the characters while richly documenting their daily routines. The highs and lows of her life are treated evenly, without overt drama, and the quality of narration prevents this from becoming a featureless, flat tale.Railsong by Rahul Bhattacharya, Bloomsbury. Photo: https://www.bloomsbury.com/Anchoring Miss Chitol’s personal journey, and often moving to the foreground, is the Indian Railways itself. It is a loom weaving countless stories into one country, “the great railway system whose railsong plucks at our souls no less musically than sitar string”.Miss Chitol’s tale runs parallel with that of modern India, bracketed between the national censuses of 1961 and 1991. Amidst these two demographic snapshots unfold, among other events, railway strikes, the Emergency, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and the communal rumblings that would lead to the demolition of the Babri Masjid a year later. All of these and more are woven into her life, sometimes as a background pattern and at other times more vividly.The weaving extends to her surname itself. It comes from her father, who believed the caste system could be undermined by jettisoning caste titles.“Rather than curtail his at the neutral but bland Kumar, he had adopted, first as pen name and then as surname, this delicate, delicious, absurd, oily fish, which, he reminded the baffled Chattopadhyays in his clan, was the very first avatar of Vishnu, thus terribly auspicious”.Like many long-distance trains, Railsong gets off to a slow start, but soon finds its rhythm. We learn of Charulata’s childhood and her relationships with parents, siblings, and friends, as well as the personal and national tragedies that mark her early life. Still a teenager, she boards a train to distant, glamorous Bombay, as it was then known, to make her own way in the world.Once in the big city, she stays with her uncle and aunt, then in paying-guest accommodations and hostels, with short-lived stints in a footwear store, as a typist, and as a market researcher. She perseveres, caught “in between languages and places and studies and employment, in between the mother’s side and father’s side, in between inner truths and outer facts”, before finally securing a job in the railways’ personnel department on “compassionate grounds”.“Fascinated by rules but literary in her sensibility,” she travels along the tracks of caste, class, and gender. The novel traces her dalliances (old, new, and overlapping), her growing understanding of the department’s regulations (spoken and unspoken), and her increasing familiarity with the city’s demands. New addresses and routines are faced with a dogged, almost phlegmatic manner, along with gentle optimism and a determination to carry on.The novel details how she immerses herself in her work and in life beyond it. Early in her career, she strives to become “Rulemistress Chitol”, navigating labyrinthine departmental protocols, which Bhattacharya renders with his tongue firmly in his cheek. The mock-solemn narration in these sections occasionally brings to mind Naipaul’s tone in A House for Mr Biswas.While Railsong is more concerned with its protagonist’s interiority than with being a full-fledged “Mumbai novel,” there is careful attention paid to the city’s quotidian rhythms and local food, as well as cultural markers such as concerts at the erstwhile Rang Bhavan. In particular, the city’s speech patterns are meticulously rendered: “people talk like clattering utensils,” her brother remarks during a visit.Later in the novel, the frame expands to include those outside the metropolis who are more at the mercy of sudden events and blind bureaucratic ways. As a welfare inspector, Miss Chitol travels to mofussil areas to investigate claims and counter-claims, and encounters lives that make her realise how unequally modernity and progress are distributed.Whenever she sets out on her beat, it is “with an intimation of discovery”. Everything that happened in India happened also on the Indian Railways, she reflects. “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, she became vividly sentimental and felt sensationally alive.”Although narrated in close third person, Railsong occasionally slips into Charulata’s first-person musings. Given Bhattacharya’s skill at rendering her interiority through a third-person lens, these sections feel redundant. The novel can be read as a series of set pieces, each episode marking another aspect of her progress like railway stations during a journey, with some being more appealing than others.At every station, she is guided by the strength and dignity her father once ascribed to their lineage. Her journey allows Bhattacharya to illuminate the personal and the national, the individual against the sweep of history, leaving the reader with a finely-wrought sense of a life and a nation in transit.Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.