The opening
Carmona, Goa. March 1880.
A servant runs barefoot into the priest's yard because a baby has been born blue. Days later she carries him to the font and answers for him in Latin she learned the night before. The parish register records that she did not sign, because she did not know how to write.
Far to the north, where the Indus runs between Sukkur and Rohri, a railway guard keeps his journal for the North Western Railway: every halt, every delay, every wagon, written true and blaming nobody.
Neither family knows the other exists. You will follow both for sixty years.
3 · Two Indias on one map
Two Indias on one map
Most stories of India before independence are stories of the British. This one has two empires in it, side by side, with a customs post and a change of trains between them.
Portuguese India
Goa was Portuguese for four and a half centuries. In a Catholic village on the river Sal, the priest keeps the register in Portuguese, mothers scold in Konkani, and the feast-day cake is baked one layer at a time over coals. The sons leave: for the lodging clubs of Bombay, for the steamers, for the railway being built inland from Mombasa.
The Raj in Sindh
Sindh was the far west of British India. In the river town of Rohri a Hindu family keeps its accounts in a merchants' script written without vowels, prays at an island shrine in the Indus, and puts a son on the trains that cross the great bridge to Sukkur. Sindh is in Pakistan now. The families who kept those books are scattered across the world.
Two languages of government. Two sets of papers. One coastline.
What is a break of gauge?
It is the station where two railways of different widths meet. No train can cross it. Everybody gets down, carries what they own across the platform, and starts again on other rails.
India was full of them. This is a book about the people who had to get down.
Volume I: The Register, 1880 to 1942
- The first train into Goa, and a boy watching it from his father's shoulders.
- A Goan clerk on the Uganda Railway at Tsavo, told to write “killed by wild animal”.
- Plague in Bombay. Influenza travelling along the railway lines.
- A flooded culvert, a goods train at night, and a guard who says no.
- The barrage rising at Sukkur, and Gandhi's call reaching a river town.
- A painter on the sands at Chowpatty who hands a boy his brush.
- A wedding in each house, and the war coming down the line.
Built from the record
The novel grew out of one family's papers: parish registers from Goa, a file in the National Archives of India, memories of the railway recorded in Sindhi, passports, certificates and letters. Where the record speaks, the book follows it. Where it is silent, the book says so.
Each volume ends with a Note on Sources that separates what is documented from what is remembered and what is imagined. In this edition the names of living people have been changed.
Nineteen chapters
- Prelude: Plate 24
- Because She Did Not Know How to Write
- Salt
- The First Train
- The Seventh Tunnel
- The Padlock
- Kudd
- The Guard
- Third to Fourth Degree
- The Gate
- Line Clear
- The Crooked Finger
- Twenty-three Hundred Hours
- Everybody Down
- Counterweights
- Materia Medica
- White Spaces
- Four Days
- The Spare
- Two Breaks
New chapters are released in order. The Prelude is at the start of Chapter One.