Children’s literature in India is slowly coming of age, and bookstores and literary festivals have just about begun to feature original and contextually relevant stories for young/adolescent readers who have for long read about adventures by children who seem to inhabit a reality quite distant from their own. So, when I picked up Dipavali Sen’s evocatively titled book of six stories interlinked by the cast of central protagonists, I was looking forward to reading about the adventures of children whom I have played with or seen playing in my neighborhood; and that too by the ‘railway tracks’, the parallel tracks of which coming from elsewhere and going elsewhere symbolize distant horizons and possibilities— where the past and future are equally shrouded in mystery.
The longest of the stories in this collection, the eponymous ‘Adventure by the Railway Tracks’, attempts a lot of things at the same time. First, we have two intrepid young sleuths, Kushmi and Gaurav, both of whom are spending some time in Sonarhat, away from their homes in Kolkata and Delhi, finding, losing and then recovering buried/drowned treasure. Then we have the regional history of thugee and zamindari, not to mention terracotta temples; inscrutable (but stereotypically servile) tribals; a minor kidnapping and an interesting description of the local flora and food. The story involves the attempted theft of ‘priceless’ terracotta tiles for a city builder and the mantras of education and employment as panacea for all social ills.
Despite the potentially exciting ingredients that could have made this an interesting story, the pace is frantic but rarely exciting, and the action is largely confined to climbing up and down the embankments on either side of the titular railway tracks, which does not contribute significantly to the plot in any way. While the local colour and history do give the story a strong cultural rootedness, the sententious tone of the narrator dilutes the sense of adventure, as does the slightly contrived dénouement.
Each of the stories that follow has at its heart a strong lesson, harking back to the original impulse of children’s literature that was conceived in the first instance as a way of instructing young readers to grow up into good and socially useful human beings, and being ‘taught’ lessons through a simple binary of reward and punishment, triumph and tragedy. So whether it is Kushmi’s encounter with vitiligo in ‘Pachyderm’, or Gaurav falling into a disused baoli in ‘Lost in the Past’; making a burglar alarm for his grandmother in ‘Quite Alarming’ or hearing a listicle of maxims that he is advised to follow in ‘Getting Help from Chanakya’, or even the final story which brings our two young sleuths together again, this time bent upon ‘Knowing the Rakshasas’—each story trundles to a halt with its moral and pedagogical imperative, and in the process becomes rather far removed from what would motivate often reluctant readers to turn the page. The author has valiantly attempted to give the young readers, for whom I imagine the book has been intended, lessons in Indian history and mythology, but the careless editing and proof reading as well as the inadequate triangulation of plot, character and action, make these stories satisfactory at best to find a place in a school text book, as they do offer many teaching moments and opportunities for discussion. However, in the ultimate analysis, this book does not contribute in any significant way to the journey of Children’s Literature in India as I doubt if readers would be inspired to finish reading the stories with breathless excitement, which is after all what adventure stories, at their best, should achieve.