‘No matter how busy a train is, you can always find a quiet space’: Travel writer Monisha Rajesh

There’s a peculiar balance of permanence and impermanence to train journeys that’s hard to find anywhere else. The permanence of space – the certainty of a small, shared world of humans, berths, food, and, if you’re lucky, gossip – set against the impermanence of passing stations and passing lives. Sitting in the space between these two states are Monisha Rajesh’s books on train travel across India and the world: Around India in 80 Trains, Around the World in 80 Trains, Epic Train Journeys, and her latest, Moonlight Express: Around the World by Night Train.

Rajesh has been writing for over a decade, chiefly in travel. On a bright, sunny morning at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Scroll met her for a conversation in the (somewhat cramped) confines of the media lounge. We spoke about writing on the move, the changes she notices in passengers today, the parts of society that reveal themselves only at night, and the companionship she’s found along the way.

I like to think it was a heartfelt conversation. I like to think we were, briefly, on a train.

Excerpts from the interview:

What were the central differences in your experience writing Around the World in 80 Trains and Around the World by Night Train? On one hand, you’re writing about trains, but night is also a social condition as much as a time zone. Moreover, night travel is perhaps harder to describe because so much is unseen.
I don’t feel like it is actually unseen. You’re looking at it differently, and you have to work harder to understand the scenery and engage with the landscape. It’s a misconception that just because there’s literal darkness, you can’t see into anything. What you’re looking for is very different.

For me, the real enjoyment is sitting by the window. You can see lights inside people’s houses, the books on their shelves, people washing up after dinner, and the blue light of their TVs. You get a good understanding of people winding down at night. You see dog walkers and different things from what you would normally see during the day.

One of the most interesting parts for me is seeing the way the world keeps working when everybody else is asleep. You’ll see lorries outside warehouses, people restocking supermarkets at night, and office cleaners sorting everything out – all the people who keep your world functioning while you’re sleeping. There are differences in what you would normally see during the day.

What are you looking for?
I’m looking for everything. I’m looking to understand the people on board the train, the politics and history of a country, and usually the history of the railway on which I’m travelling.

People are often travelling without any knowledge of how a railway was built or the motivations behind it. When you’re travelling in Asia, most of those railways were built by colonisers, and people are kept in the dark about how they came about and the human cost behind them.

When I was travelling in Thailand, I took what’s now known as the Death Railway from Bangkok to Nam Tok, where one person died for every sleeper that was laid. If I hadn’t done my reading around that, I wouldn’t have appreciated the journey in the same way. It’s a beautiful journey over the River Kwai, over trestle bridges, through jungle scenery. You could see people on board relishing that beauty, but it was the undertone of that very dark history that adds to the journey for me, enriches the experience.

That’s the holistic experience I look for when I’m travelling, and each journey is different.

You have been writing about and around trains for a while. Do you see a difference in this extremely-social-and-simultaneously-extremely-unsocial world of ours because of social media, and how that has percolated into train travel?
The one tangible difference is that you can’t really be anonymous anymore. When I was doing Around India in 80 Trains, I didn’t have an iPhone or social media. You could be whoever you wanted to be, chat to people without them asking if you were on Instagram or Twitter. I could talk to someone for nine or ten hours and not even know each other’s names when they got off. That lent itself to people being very honest and unfiltered.

Now, especially in India, within seconds, someone will ask if you’re online. Even if you say no, they’ll find you, see what you do, and know that you write about trains. In some ways, it’s changed things for the worse, but in other ways, it’s improved communication with people in the countries you’re travelling to.

For example, before I went to Turkey while working on Moonlight Express, people reached out to me. Two chapters take place in Turkey, and the only reason I could work my way around Istanbul was that someone who’d read my previous book contacted me and said, “If you ever come to Istanbul, you have a brother here.” Nine months later, he met me at the station, took me around, and shared information I couldn’t have found otherwise.

A train driver also contacted me and said, “If you ever come to Ankara, let me know.” He met me at the station, took me to the museum, brought pastries for the train, and gave me extraordinary detail about the Doğu Express that I would never have found online. In some ways, it’s been a hindrance, but if you use it in the right way, it can enhance your journey.

In Around the World in 80 Trains, you note that travelling with your fiancé, Jem, allowed you to “build and share memories.” Given that night trains necessitate a much higher degree of physical and emotional proximity, how did this latest journey refine your dynamic compared to your previous travels?
With Moonlight Express, I travel with very different people in each chapter. For the first four chapters, I travel by myself. Then I met my friend Jamie, and we travelled through Turkey together. In another chapter, I travel with my friend Ditta from Vienna to Hamburg. In other chapters, I travel with my children. In another, with one of my children and her godfather. I do this deliberately because whoever you’re travelling with changes how you interact with people and how they respond to you.

I assign my trains to people quite specifically. My mom comes on the Royal Scotsman because it’s a luxury train. You have a lot of tea, a lot of cake, nice blankets, and it’s a very leisurely journey. Being on a train together is very different from staying in a hotel. You’re in an enclosed space, and the conversation becomes more intimate and more confessional.

I found out so much more about my friend Ditta in one overnight journey than I’ve known about her in four years. Train journeys for me are not just about the strangers on board, but also about the people I’m travelling with. It adds a huge element of discovery for me.

You have previously explored the “Hanification” of Tibet and the “necrocracy” of North Korea, noting that “seeing is believing”. Since night trains often bypass the daytime “façade” of a city, did your new journey help you uncover more of the “grit and charm” bulldozed in modern megacities?
That’s a layered question. I spent a lot more time offboard in this book, unlike my previous books, where I spent most of my time on board getting from one place to the next, without spending much time in each place. With this book, I wanted to be more thoughtful about getting off between stations, exploring properly, and getting back on board once I felt like I’d had my fill.

Night trains lend themselves to that because you arrive in a city first thing in the morning and have the whole day ahead of you. You don’t arrive and have to find a hotel. You arrive in Vienna at 10 in the morning, and within 20 minutes, you can be at the station and standing in a museum seeing your favourite paintings.

I don’t think it changes a lot compared to day trains. You just arrive and depart at different times. You see cities in a different light and understand how they work, including which towns have no street lights, which areas are wealthy, and which are underdeveloped. You still understand the lay of things.

You’ve spoken about what it means to travel “as a woman, a mother, and a writer.” There are multiple prisms and beings that we carry within ourselves, which is only exacerbated by the political world we inhabit today. How do these identities shape your work?
When I travel, I travel as a writer first. I document everything in a journalistic way. Being a woman comes second. Being a mother adds another dimension. I don’t consciously write as a woman or as a mother; it makes what I naturally write different. Being a woman of colour is an extra layer, and I naturally have different perspectives.

I see things differently from a white man who has traditionally been the travel writer, the adventurer, the explorer. I have different experiences, and I gravitate toward different people.

I spoke to a Burmese student on a train in Finland who had escaped during the coup. I spoke to a father on a train in Berlin wearing a t-shirt that said “make racism wrong again.” Those are the people who seize my attention. As an ethnic minority in Europe, I’m affected by those signals. That shapes my writing, and I want that to come across in my books.

Is there an expectation from “travel writers” to write about certain things and not others? Your observations on political themes, for example, have been both praised/critiqued.
I don’t feel driven by any preconceived motivation about travel writing. I don’t see there as being a rule book or any kind of formula. I write my books in a way that feels informative to me. I want to entertain and educate people, and make them feel like they have been on a journey with me and understood it the way I’ve understood it.

Politics plays into every single thing that we do. Even if people think they’re not political, the choices they make about clothing, food, and where they travel are informed by politics. Travel writing is simply writing done on the go, and what’s happening in the world plays into everything.

Moonlight Express captures a moment when night trains were having a renaissance. Maybe they will die out again, maybe they will continue. For me, it was about capturing that two-and-a-half-year period with the backdrop of a genocide. It influenced conversations, how I was travelling, and how I thought about the people I was talking to.

These are my books. I’m free to write what I want. People don’t have to enjoy it or agree with it. I feel comfortable that I’ve said it in the most honest way.

Talk about your experience editing The Untold Railway Stories.
I really enjoyed doing that book because, while it was obviously about railways, it was a move away from what I usually do. It was a real joy to bring together that group of writers, including Leon McCarron and Andrew Martin, because you can see how people approach railways in very different ways.

Andrew Martin’s Station Gardens, for example, was a beautiful way of looking at railway history without it feeling dry. Reading essays about station gardens and about food and trains in Ukraine was enlightening. It’s a wonderful anthology.

How do you see the meditativeness associated with a train journey, the spontaneity, the lack of rush associated with airports? Or do you see it as a mere romanticised portrayal?
It depends on how you approach your journeys. When I want a quiet journey, I sit in peace by the window without engaging with anybody. There are times when I don’t want to chat to people. I’m tired, and I just want to enjoy the landscape. I put my headphones on without any music and sit and look out of the window.

Your body language on a train indicates whether you want to be involved in a conversation. People stare out of the window, turn away, or give one-word answers, and you immediately know whether they want to chat or be left in peace. You can do both, and no matter how busy the train is, you can always find a quiet space.

Sleeper trains are often romanticised by people who don’t do them very often. Trains aren’t that beautiful inside. They are loud, they shake at night, and you don’t always sleep well. I’m honest about that in this book – the trains where I slept well and the ones where I was awake all night.

The romance of train travel is everything combined: the people you meet, the food, the scenery, and the slowness.

What are you reading currently? Anything you’re working on next?
I’m reading Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, almost finished it. I’m also reading a nonfiction book by Jonathan Slaght, Tigers Between Empires, a very, very good book. He’s an excellent writer.

I’m working on an anthology of women travel writers, and as far as my own train books go, I have an idea, but I haven’t quite fleshed it out yet.