Deccan Queen: Take Two

This concatenation of stories is based on characters from the life of the author, Farrukh Dhondy, in his childhood and boyhood in Poona and Bombay. Among the many personalities we meet are his grandfather, brought to poverty, misery and ruin through a deal with a Maharajah, the young Scottish brothers abandoned by their alcoholic father in Farrukh’s Anglo-Indian school, and his father’s friend and college mate supposed dead in the Second World War—who returns as the undead… But perhaps even more intriguing than the stories are the reactions of the characters’ descendants and relatives, who write back to the author objecting to aspects of the stories, threatening retribution or even importuning for favours. It is to set the record straight that the author decides to publish this ‘second telling’, a Take Two, which includes these communications appended to the tales. At the heart of the book is the Deccan Queen of the title—the iconic train that runs between Pune and Mumbai—a metaphor about life and journeys in the India of the recent past and today, and the literary conceit that these stories were published in a fictional first edition to which readers and characters in those stories are responding. Through this, the collection poses the eternal questions about stories: What is fact? What is fiction? How much is invention? Where does creative licence end and the truth begin?