‘The Wanderer’ by V Shinilal: Tracking the train of events

In one of Ruskin Bond’s short stories, ‘The Great Train Journey’, a schoolboy fascinated by trains decides to board one. But, after a few hours of travel, the runaway boy finds himself at the very platform from where he had boarded, back in his hometown. He then realises, to his utter disbelief and dismay, that the train he chose for his misadventure was a local goods train that ferried apples. In other words, did he really go away or come home?

It’s a thought that arises while reading V Shinilal’s novel ‘The Wanderer’, brilliantly translated by Nandakumar K. The Malayalam original, ‘Sambarkkakranthi’, had won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award in 2022. Long-distance trains like the Sampark Kranti, which traverses 3,420 km from Thiruvananthapuram to Chandigarh, are seen to “connect” the multitudes within a nation. This is the question that the novel seems to probe: what are the values that connect a nation, does a nation evolve or is it trapped in a vortex of prejudices and ironclad beliefs?

Early on, one of the passengers, Karamchand, named so in memory of Mahatma Gandhi, surveys the reservation chart and is amused that the names bear witness to the diversity of India. He confides in a co-traveller that “two people of different castes, who otherwise would not share a space, are seated next to each other”. Karamchand is a travel blogger, observer and dreamer, whose accounts of the events within the train and outside of it form the interspersing linear and non-linear narrative. The personal accounts of each passenger, who forms a “slice of a humongous India”, and that of many historical characters cross paths like the serpentine railway tracks. And these entwine with past and present events, reveries, memories and histories, muddled in the mind of the 39-year-old Karamchand. As he observes, “A railway compartment is a tiny biopsy section of the Indian body.”

Before the train is signalled off from Thiruvananthapuram, Karamchand takes a selfie with the star attraction of the Sampark Kranti Express, the colonial-era vintage steam engine called the Wanderer. It once adorned the collection of the Mysore royalty before it was commissioned by the Indian Railways. There is also a plaque at the station heralding Gandhi’s visits to the city, most significantly the one after the Padmanabha Swamy temple opened its doors to Harijans.

Karamchand witnesses the many ironies and everyday depredations of India manifesting on the journey as well — a passenger who learns she is pregnant wants to deliver the news to her husband who is not the child’s father, while a ticketless woman delivers in the toilet of the train surrounded by mobile-flashing curious male onlookers. The child is lost but takes birth in Karamchand’s mindspace as the “boy with no history”. The hierarchies foisted by a gendered class system are reinforced by the rail system.

The itinerant traveller also recalls the ghost trains, from Mano Majra in Khushwant Singh’s searing Partition novel ‘Train to Pakistan’ to the 1921 Malabar wagon tragedy in which freedom fighters were suffocated to death in a cramped rail wagon. But one feels the horrors of Partition and its generational trauma required more than a passing reference. Then there is Godhra with its pre and post datelines that changed the fate of a nation. Shinilal, who is also a Railways employee, has evocatively captured the essence of a train journey, from its locopilots condemned to encounter deaths on the tracks to nuggets of railroad histories. As the conversations veer towards politics, farmer suicides, nationalism and democracy, the arguments and awkward silences offer a sense of a changing India.

The novel isn’t an easy read and can be unsettling like the jerks and whistles of a moving train. But perhaps, it is meant to be so.

— The writer is a Bengaluru-based contributor