Crying is for Women: A Song of Trains, Farangis, & Freedoms

Zafarul Azam

- A man, out for prayers, is found dead by a river bank and the reader is off to the races in this relentlessly paced twentieth century chronicle.
- A child of humble beginnings grows up to find himself thrown into turbulent events that altered the direction of human history. The roots of this tale takes the reader all the way back to the Indian sepoy mutiny of 1857.

This is a story of a repressed teen with simple dreams, his close friendship with a transgender person, as he struggles to improve his life in a very turbulent period in the history of the Indian Subcontinent. The other coprotagonist is a strong, independent woman who would stop at nothing to achieve what she believes in.

Human irrationality is front and center in this historical fiction theater. The book’s provocative title is but one example of such, now outdated, criteria formulated by man.