Small towns that dot the rail route

It's hard to tell a good story even when you are writing about wildly interesting people and places. But it takes a very good, maybe a great writer, to elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary. Small town India is very definitely ordinary but while journalist Bishwanath Ghosh is many things &mdash including wry, nosey, dogged and conscientious &mdash a very good writer he is not.

In Chai, Chai he sets out to discover the towns that lie just outside major railway junctions, the nationally known place-names that nobody ever actually visits. Instead of merely changing trains at Itarsi or Jhansi or Guntakal, he asks, what if you were to get off and treat the town as its own destination

It's an innovative, interesting question, fuelled by the urge to know what people's lives are like in tiny towns towns that lie on the fringes of the traveller's consciousness, usually cloaked in a mist of homogenous anonymity. Sadly, Ghosh does not seem to like the towns much, which is fair enough, but he does not even dislike them interestingly. Knotted up in descriptions of goat-infested lanes and oily hotel sheets, lurching from bar to bar or drinking in his hotel room, he just seems lost. In attempting profundity, he achieves only the purely banal. Here, he is on Manju, a housewife-turned-prostitute in Itarsi "This was a strange encounter people usually spend an hour with a human being who had [sic] turned into a prostitute, but I had just spent an hour with a prostitute who was also a human being."