Title - Trains of thought

A young British woman of Indian origin, a journalist with a flair for words and an eye for the human story, decides to travel around the land of her ancestors, to discover the “truth” about the country she had lived in briefly — and vehemently hated — as a child. And what better way to do it than to travel on Indian trains? She has another brainwave — why not do it in “80” trains, the number and the scheme taken from Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days? After all, as she finds out on re-reading the Verne classic, the action in that novel had been kicked off by a newspaper report about the launch of a railway line between Rothal and Allahabad, cutting down the time taken to circumnavigate the globe. Monisha Rajesh’s Around India in 80 Trains is the fruit of that expedition-adventure.Indian Railways is, in many ways, a metaphor for India. Nicknamed the “lifeline” of the country, it knits together its four corners and a majority of its villages and towns, transporting a humongous 13 million people — that’s greater than the population of the city of London — over a (now nearly) 110,000 km network. The railways may be a harbinger of modernity, but in India it is a modernity that has been tempered with the country’s dust and heat and made uniquely its own. For the adventure-minded tourist/traveller, for those who have the stomach to brave its filth and chaos, Indian Railways affords an unsanitised experience of the “real” India — those large parts of the country that haven’t yet been touched overmuch by the glitzy malls, fancy cars and “cheap” air travel. The idea of “making sense of India through its railways” is, however, hardly original, tried earlier, and more famously, by Rudyard Kipling in Kim, Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar, and more recently, as Rajesh acknowledges early on, by Peter Riordan, a journalist from New Zealand. The railways are often used a trope for serendipity in novels and films, the hand of chance bringing characters together and setting off a chain of events. (A good example of this is Anna Karenina, but in numerous Bollywood films, most recently in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, the principal protagonists meet and romance on trains.) Rajesh decides to extend the role of luck and leave her entire itinerary to chance. “Our plan,” she writes, “was to have no plan at all. India is not a country that lends itself well to organisation and punctuality, so to try and incorporate any system….will only result in frustration.” Indian readers will find this offensively clichéd, as they will consider her depiction of the people she meets on her journeys, their boorish behavior, and her travails in overcrowded compartments and shady hotels full of stereotypes and caricatured exaggerations. But then this is a book that is clearly meant for a Western readership. Disappointingly, too, Rajesh's random peregrinations get tiresomely repetitive after a while.

Besides being a travelogue, Around India in 80 Trains is also a book about a rite of passage — the physical expedition is as much an inward journey of self-discovery. In this case, it is about Rajesh coming to terms with her prejudices about India, gaining a better understanding of the culture of her “roots” — and, more particularly, about overcoming her phobia of rats. Some of Rajesh’s most vivid memories of her two years’ stay in Chennai had to do with the rodents. The apartment in Besant Nagar she lived in had a lot of rats with rather indiscriminate apetites — they ate everything from the sponge of her brother’s Sony headphones to Modern Bakery bread. Matters reached a head one day when one specimen was detected and Rajesh’s mother enlisted the help of the maid to catch it. The maid not being very efficient, it led to a merry chase all over the house which ended with the rat jumping inside her petticoat — the rat was caught and killed, but the maid had to be hospitalised from rat bite. A traumatic experience for the little girl who had climbed on top of the dining table to watch the fun. Thus it says quite a lot when Rajesh spies a rat on the train from Delhi to Jammu, and not only keeps her cool but also nonchalantly raises her feet to allow it to disappear under her feet. She had finally got India, as they say.