Book: MOONLIGHT EXPRESS: AROUND THE WORLD BY NIGHT TRAIN
Author: Monisha Rajesh
Published by: Bloomsbury
Price: Rs 699
Decades ago, they used to talk of Paul Theroux, V.S. Naipaul’s estranged friend, in such reverential tones as to claim for him the status of being the last word on train-travel writing; perhaps there are some people left who still do. But if Monisha Rajesh’s contribution to the canon is anything to go by, it would seem that there is at least one other writer who has negotiated the subject with a comparable degree of excellence. The critic who says on the cover of the book that no one writes trains like Rajesh knows what he is talking about. Strangely, this is the first book by her that this reviewer has read, although she has been doing her kind of writing, simultaneously informative and insightful, for quite some time now.
It is not possible to have this kind of rare, delightful book without a deep passion to see places, know people and their ways, peek into histories and have a lot of fun whilst doing all this. Rajesh, born and brought up in Britain and now the mother of two growing girls, writes like someone to the manner born, only distinguished from others under similar circumstances in that she deftly mixes the understatement of the islander with the risqué humour associated more with the French than any other continental tribe. With the eyes of a child and the curiosity of a footloose seeker, the writer tries to fathom the wondrous depths of travelling from one place to another, one country to another, on the dancing wheels of varied night trains.
Moonlight Express alternates between the witty and the wild. However, what remains with the reader after the adventure is over is a strange wisdom in the wake of bonding, however briefly, with fellow-travellers of many ages and classes, religions and nationalities, both men and women. From Turkey to Norway, or from France to Scotland, the reader rubs shoulders with a gallery of over-the-top eccentrics, staid daily wage-earners, frolicking students and youths, and railway staff of many descriptions. If this were just a travel book, however well-written, it would have been one thing. But the narrative here keeps graduating every now and then into something truly enduring once a certain personal philosophy enters it;
compassionate, probing, wanting to get close to the centre of things.