Bloomsbury
Review by Brian Tanguay
Charulata Chitol is an unlikely heroine. The motherless daughter of a railway worker, Charu, as she’s known, lives with her father and brothers in India’s hinterlands. When a massive rail strike looms, Charu wants to join the protestors. Her father commands her to stay away, reminding her of the danger. “You don’t want me to see anything, do anything, be anything at all,” Charu replies. Once the strike commences the government responds with swift brutality, attacking the strikers with bayonets, lathis and fists. The Chitol family is forced to flee and go into hiding until the crisis boils over. The family name is on a list of suspected agitators.
What does a young, independent-minded girl do when her dreams butt up against societal expectations, tradition, and patriarchy? Refusing to accept a stunted future, Charu packs a duffel bag and sets off for Bombay, the big city. She’s sixteen years old, traveling alone, relying on her wits. For a time she lives with an uncle and aunt, enrolls in college classes she doesn’t attend, and evades the pressure to follow a traditional path, an arranged marriage. She lands a job in a shoe store and moves into a women’s hostel where the rules are rigid. No pets. No males. Open hair is forbidden in the communal dining room. Rooms can be searched at any time, for any reason. Some of her roommates are married, others divorced, a few had fled from overbearing inlaws. Charu adapts, learns how to skirt the oppressive rules and find small moments of freedom.
Eventually, by way of sheer persistence and her father having died “in harness”, she secures a position with the Indian National Railways. The INR is an institution that occupies a central role in the imagination of the nation, connecting the many regions, cultures, languages and religions that make India a chaotic miracle. A physical representation of modernity and independence, the trains run north to south, east to west, from the teeming cities to the smallest villages. Charu begins near the bottom of the bureaucracy, as a junior clerk, and steadily works her way into better positions. She’s smart and capable, and can hold her own with male bosses. The INR is labyrinthine, its operating procedures and rules set down in manuals and circulars, guidelines and regulations. Somehow, the massive bureaucracy keeps the wheels turning, the trains moving more or less on schedule. Charu is grateful for the job and the foothold it grants her. It’s something to hold in a life marked by loss: her parents, home, even her childhood. She’s proud to be a working woman, a useful cog. She earns raises and promotions, and makes a career for herself as an independent woman.
There’s a great deal more to this sprawling tale, told with flair and heart by Rahul Bhattacharya. A part near the end stuck in my imagination. Charu, now married (for love) and living with her inlaws in claustrophobic proximity, is told the way to navigate the situation is to dissolve like sugar in milk, become sweet, but Charu hasn’t come this far by pretending to be someone she’s not. Although the journey is often lonely, her happiness is bound to the independence offered by the rails.
