How many times have you been welcomed in an Indian city by a bird pooping on you? That’s how Rahul Bhattacharya’s heroine is welcomed in Mumbai at Victoria Terminus. In his latest book, Railsong, Bhattacharya takes you across different stories attached to the railway tracks, with hints of humour and realism. Set to release on November 4 in India, the book follows the protagonist Charulata Chitol or Charu, for decades, starting from a railway colony in the late 1950s and ending in 1992. 

Charu’s story only truly begins when she runs away from a railway township and steps out of Victoria Terminus into Mumbai’s chaos, only to have a pigeon poop on her head. It’s a scene as ordinary as it is cinematic. “I walked that route,” says Bhattacharya, whose other books include Pundits from Pakistan and The Sly Company of People Who Care. “I  tried to imagine her coming out of the train, and how she must have felt entering the city, emerging at Victoria Terminus, which is the outside shot you always see first of Bombay in films. But this is from the inside, a character actually making that journey in an unreserved compartment.”