"In a newly independent India charged with national vigour, Charu, the motherless daughter of a railway worker, pines for freedom from the shackles of her impoverishment and meagre prospects. As diesel engines replace steam and the calamitous churn of drought, famine, and a great strike engulfs her town, Charu dares to imagine a different future for herself. She boards a train and flees westwards, leaving behind the oppressive domesticity of her childhood for the alluring modernity, and apparent opportunities, of Bombay. Unfazed by the everyday discriminations around her she becomes an unlikely hero: a railway woman and census enumerator who keeps her heart open-sometimes guilelessly-to her nation's vast possibility. Sweeping, elegiac, and at times wonderfully comic, Railsong is a powerful portrait of grit, optimism, and the force of character that enables one remarkable woman to live on her own terms in a country full of contradictions."--Amazon.