A novel in three volumes · Free audiobook
Two families. Two empires. One subcontinent, and the place where the rails stop matching.
Listen free on SpotifyCarmona, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vol. I · The Register
The archival backbone
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.
Parish registers from Goa.
A file in the National Archives of India.
Memories of the railway recorded in Sindhi.
Passports, certificates and letters.
Note on Sources
Every passage in the Note on Sources is set in one of three inks. Choose one to isolate it.
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.
DThe parish register of Carmona records a baptism on the seventeenth of March, 1880. The entry is in Portuguese, in the priest's hand.
RMy grandmother said the feast-day cake was baked one layer at a time over coals, and that the whole village could smell it.
IThe guard checks his watch against the station clock, finds it two minutes slow, and writes nothing, because there is nothing to blame.
DThe North Western Railway's working timetable for 1911 lists every halt between Rohri and Sukkur.
A demonstration of the device. In the printed volumes, the Note on Sources carries these sigils in the margin, so the reader always knows which ink they are reading.
Vol. I · The Register
All twenty-one episodes are streaming now. The Prelude is at the start of Chapter One.
The work