Description

First published in Hindi in 1957 and out of print since 1979, *The Andheri Express* is one of the great lost novels of mid-century Bombay — restored to the English-reading world for the first time in this superb new translation.

Set across forty-eight hours on the suburban local trains of late-1950s Bombay, Hemant Kashyap’s novel follows seven passengers — a Punjabi refugee clerk, a Maharashtrian schoolteacher, a young Anglo-Indian nurse, a Bohra cloth merchant, a film-aspirant from Bareilly, a Gujarati housewife travelling alone for the first time, and a station-master at Andheri whose son has stopped writing home. Their lives, until that Wednesday in October, have never quite touched.

Then, at 6:42 a.m., the eastbound express derails at Mahim — and over the next two days, as the city stops and starts and grieves, the seven of them are pulled into a quiet, accidental kinship that will outlast the accident itself.

Written in luminous, unhurried Hindi prose and saturated with the textures of a Bombay that no longer exists — the Irani cafes, the lending libraries, the chawl staircases, the smell of monsoon platforms — *The Andheri Express* is a quietly devastating novel about cities, strangers, and the small mercies on which urban life secretly runs.

An Indian classic, finally restored. With a new introduction by Jerry Pinto.