SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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Journey from Guwahati to Phuentsholing, Saturday 26 November

It doesn’t come as a complete surprise, but as the train leaves Guwahati railway station heading westward, we travel along miles of slum dwellings, small miserable shacks and an incredible dirty surrounding with litter everywhere. This is also India in the era of IT and world economic and political aspirations!
This is, of course, the real challenge: when will there be a progressive linkage between the dynamic service and science-based future economy with its enormous global potential and that other half still trailing in such a misery?
On the train itself, a stream of beggars appears, all of them physically handicapped. There is no way you can avoid or escape and we have to part with coins and small notes. The heart simply caves in as we sit comfortable in our spacious AC two-tier compartment.

We pass the mighty Brahmaputra and surrounded by green mountains we move into the rich green flatlands of its basin, and after a few hours we leave Assam and once again enter the state of West Bengal.
At 3 o’clock in the afternoon, one hour late, we arrived in the North Bengal town of Cooch Behar – till 1949 the capital of the princely state with the same name. The Maharaja of Cooch Behar ceded his country to the Dominion of India only on the 28th of August 1949, the so-called Cooch Behar Merger Agreement (read details about the agreement). Still the city is dominated by the old Royal Palace, called Rajbari (see photo to the left).
Unfortunately we did not have any time to look around in this interesting town, as we had to proceed to the Bhutanese border before evening. We were met at the railway station by Dr. Soumyajit Samanta, an acquaintance from our visit to North Bengal University in Siliguri, a week before (see the report), and his friend Debasish Bhowmick, called Debu. They had promised to take us to the border town of Jaygaon/Phuentsholing by car, and after a quick late lunch at Sarbashree Lodge we departed from Cooch Behar with Debu’s Hyundai car and set out northwards in the direction of the Bhutanese border.

At first we passed villages and small farmsteads somewhat elevated on clay platforms to avoid floods during the monsoons, a phenomenon so typical of Bengal. Flat lands, cattle, green plots with a variety of crops. After a while we reached the highway going through the thick forest jungle. This was Doars, the rolling landscape of North Bengal stretching all the way up to the foot of the Himalayan mountains, a region full of tea plantations and forests with leopards and other wild animals. As it started to become dark outside Debu drove fast, being a bit apprehensive about parked vehicles – this area is infested with thugs, he said.
The journey should have taken a couple of hours, but due to absence of proper road signs we missed the turning from the Highway towards Jaygaon, drove much too far and had to return and search again for a turning. It was 7 P.M. when we finally drove into the twin towns of Jaygaon (on the Indian side of the border) and Phuentsholing (on the Bhutanese side). In fact the two towns are totally built together, and people cross the open border without any control. Without realising it we did the same. When parking the car outside a shop complex it turned out we have already passed the imposing gate and entered Bhutan without passing any passport control or customs office! The registration bureau closes already at 5 o’clock.

This created a problem, because we thought that we were going to be met by our Bhutanese guide, arranged for us through the Centre for Bhutan Studies (CBS) in Thimphu, right at the border. But how to find him now without knowing neither his name nor his telephone number? What should we do? This was the first mistake in our otherwise elaborate planning of the journey (it later turns out we had failed to receive an e-mail from CBS giving the contact information about the guide).
The problem was however solved with a phone call to Thimphu, yes fortunately there were still people working at CBS, and through them we got hold of our host, Dr. Karma Galay. He informed us about which hotel we are booked into, and he gave the mobile number to our guide, Mr. Samdruk.
Hotel Druk is the nice place where we are going to stay, and we get installed in this already classic establishment. We called Mr. Samdruk (photo to the right) and he was with us in few minutes, and we got the schedules already prepared for our stay in Bhutan. Since we missed the border control, he said, we must go back to Jaygaon (India) next morning and get our emigration stamps, before leaving for Thimphu with a brand new Hyundai Jeep.

We spent the evening at Druk Hotel, eating late supper with our Indian friends, and having a typical Bengali wide-ranging intellectual discussion on issues as varied as Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel prize, Bengali literature, Alexander the Great, why there will be poor people in India even in 2025… Then we had a bidding farewell, warmly thanking them for bringing us safely here in the darkness amidst thugs and other dangers.
A few words of eternal wisdom from Lord Buddha and a long sleep. We were now inside Druk Yul – the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon.