From my early high school years until my Mom’s retirement, she brought a particular kind of story to our dinner table. Each batch of B.Ed students at her college included 3 to 5 young women from extraordinary circumstances – blue collar families, broken homes, abuse, acute financial strain. A degree for them was not a natural progression. It was audacious, a deviation from their current trajectory.

Some had sponsors. For others, the Principal quietly restructured fees, asking to be repaid only after employment. And then there were peers who, often without naming it generosity, ensured these girls belonged. They covered lunches, movies, parlor visits, the small rituals of urban life and its belonging. These acts made progress possible without making it lonely.

That memory resurfaced as I finished Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong.

At sixteen, Charu refuses the domestic inevitability set before her in a motherless home in a small fictitious town in Jharkhand and boards a train to Mumbai. Her courage is striking, but what compels is her agency. It is deliberate. She weighs trade-offs and holds hope without being naïve. Disposable sanitary pads or a new umbrella for the monsoon. A parlor indulgence or fritters with tea. A sales job or completing her B.A. Staying with her maternal side relative or moving to a hostel. Her becoming inches forward as a continued accumulation that compounds and not some theatrical pivot. Her boarding the train alone was also rehearsed in some past instances.

The author situates Charu within the Indian Railways, her eventual employer, and turns it into both institution and metaphor. For a nation built on paradox, the Railways are an apt motif. A loss-making entity that functions as the country’s arterial system. Vital yet neglected. The contradiction reveals a larger truth. Institutions that genuinely serve the many are rarely profitable and often indispensable, yet seldom prioritised. The same may be said of women. Neither survives because of their economic sense, but because too much depends on them.

From her position in HR, Charu encounters the layered realities of labour in Railways – engine drivers, toilet cleaners, clerks. The Great Railway Strike of the 1970s becomes a defining moment in the early part of the novel. Charu witnesses her father at its forefront and sees him lose long-term benefits for his participation. The episode reverberates with contemporary anxieties about the current uncertainties of the private airlines and the gig economy sustained Q-commerce.

Another thread running through the novel is the Census. Once an instrument through which the state sought to understand its people in order to govern better, it finds an echo in Charu’s brief exposure to market research. Data that once informed policy today has completely migrated toward commerce. Platforms know users not to identify social gaps, but to identify market opportunity. The shift is subtle yet profound. It indicates the importance of public and private institutions.

10 or more days after finishing the book, it continues to grow on me. This, perhaps, is what separates books we admire from books that start to inhabit us. It is less about the craft in storytelling and more about its generosity. Generosity of context. Of institutional responsibility. Of historical memory within a character-driven narrative. The reader is not simply carried through someone else’s life but handed a vocabulary for their own lived experiences.

Jharkhand and Bombay are not merely geographies in the book but aspirational coordinates. The Railways are not just an employer. Replace them and the context changes; the argument remains.

What unites my mother’s students, Charu, the Railways, and the Census is a thesis of sorts about institutions and women emerging from constraint. Migrant women will recognise Charu’s calibrated optimism. Those who stepped beyond expectation will find not inspiration but recognition. We celebrate successful women as singular heroes. Yet resilience without support is not possible.