Monisha Rajesh, a British journalist who, in 2023, was named in Conde Nast Traveller’s ‘Women Who Travel Power List’, has made a career out of train journeys, with four books on the topic
If time travel existed and I were a 25-year-old reading Moonlight Express: Around the World by Night Train by Monisha Rajesh, no party, no movie, no favourite meal would induce me to put the book down. A series of travelogues about railway journeys, the book would make me dream about which train I’d book myself on if ever I had the money to do so.
Since time travel doesn’t exist, I read Moonlight Express as the 55-year-old I am, and while I was fascinated by many pieces, I didn’t read them with quite the same fervour as I would have in that glorious period of my life 30 years ago when adventures always came first. Instead, I enjoyed it as an armchair traveller, happy to travel via my imagination from the comfort of my own home.
Monisha Rajesh, a British journalist who, in 2023, was named in Conde Nast Traveller’s ‘Women Who Travel Power List’, has made a career out of train journeys, with four books on the topic. Moonlight Express is the latest. This last book has a theme: railway journeys by night, something that is making a comeback in the West, where air travel has destroyed all but commuter trains. Needing to deal with climate change, governments and private entities are bringing back overnight trains, hoping that the comfort of berths to sleep in and the arrivals and departures of trains directly from city centres will wean business travellers off the planes and into railway carriages instead.
Some of the journeys Rajesh writes about in this book are therefore a bit businesslike in attitude, with little of the romance I associate with railway travel. But fortunately, there’s more to the book than practicality. This includes three pieces on Turkey (I want to go), one about Peru (way out of any budget I could scrape up), several set in very snowy places (brr, not for me), a couple set in the US (meh), a couple set in the UK (fine, if I were rich) and even one on India’s Shalimar Express, which was discontinued soon after Rajesh rode its rails.
As much as I enjoyed the travel component of Moonlight Express however, I probably wouldn’t have liked the book as much as I did if it hadn’t been for Rajesh’s non-travel related observations on humans and identity politics. I haven’t read her other books, but in this book at least, I loved the way she used her travels to think through the world. This is what travel is meant to do, and it truly elevated the book for me.
Moonlight Express: Around the World by Night Train
By Monisha Rajesh
Bloomsbury
pp. 326; Rs 699
