Around India in 80 Trains (2012) is a travel adventure set in India over four months.
The author mentions her parents who left India in 1976 to settle in England as newly-married junior doctors with two children. They returned to India in 1991 for two years. Twenty years later, Monisha Rajesh takes her own journey to India – a 40,000 kilometre train journey, equivalent to the circumference of the Earth.
Leaving England, she travels with an unnamed Norwegian photographer, whom she calls Passepartout (All-purpose). Their plan is not to have a plan – except a list of trains belonging to Indian Railways. There are luxury trains, commuter trains, a hospital train, and toy trains.
They hit the ground running, and before you know it, two train journeys are over with barely a mention. Then there are sick days and days with lots of fellow passengers – an Australian, a Swiss, and so on, around the world – like Rick, ‘white-haired and wiry’ in his late 70s and retired cardiothoracic surgeon Cyril in his 80s. And, of course, thousands of train staff, and locals, such as 30-year-old Benoy and engineering graduate Pramod.
The chapter called ‘Super-dense Crush Load’ gives readers an idea of what is to come when they reach Mumbai. They take the Deccan Queen, ‘one of the most well-loved trains of the Indian Railways, known fondly by her subjects as the ‘Blue-Eyed Babe’ from Mumbai to Pune (train No 25), purely by chance when their planned train is fully booked. Then, ‘for the price of a Kit Kat we were soon on board a bus farting black clouds up the hill towards Shimla.’
They do stop at times for a visit to a local railway museum or a temple or some other interesting UNESCO World Heritage listed sites. They have time to read books and do a meditation course.
And there is a list of all 80 trains.
It is a very fast journey around India, and very much a ‘then-we-went-on-this-train’ style of travelogue. There is often not much history of the train, or of the landscape, and there is no summary at the end to round out the author’s overall impressions of the journey. In fact, for such an interesting title, there is little of interest – it is not for train buffs and it is not for travel lovers. It is mostly for those who want to know who is in the train.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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