If Kathmandu is a slum where the privileged live in their gated cocoons, the moffusil has become a jungle raj. I had a glimpse of it while travelling by road from Kathmandu to Biratnagar. I have always loved a bus ride in Nepal. I smell the river and the forest, watch and speak with people, and sample the local cultures even at some risk of the bus falling off into the Trishuli. So, again, I boarded the bus and headed down South, despite the rumour of a banda in three of the Tarai districts. As we descended down the Naubise decline, the bus slowed down and came to a halt. We thought our fear had come true sooner than we had anticipated. But it was nothing more than a jam. Some passengers got down from the bus, saying, “Let’s help them clear the mess.” They went out and came back, and we hurtled along.

The road looked fine and safe, and we passed Krishna Bheer without knowing where it was. Past Narayanghat, the rumour regained steam when the bus slowed down again and halted. The event turned out to be an incident of a perceived accident. The police sub-inspector had stopped all the buses of a company to find out who had dropped a passenger at a particular place some ten miles back. After noting the drivers’ names and mobile numbers, he let us go. But the rumour gained more ground as we reached the Madhesi belt. In one place where the bus made an unscheduled stop, we feared that we would now be held up for the entire day at gun point. But it turned out to be nothing more than a flat tire.  By the time we reached Biratnagar, real and imagined events had delayed our arrival by several hours. We reached only by seven thirty. We went to bed with the rumour of a possible strike the next morning due to the killing of a driver in Jhapa. The next morning, things were normal. I got a few official things done during the day and headed for Dharan to spend time with my family in the evening. 

The next morning when we left to return to Biratnagar, the rumour became a reality when no vehicle would take us. There was no bus, no microbus, no private vehicle for hire. We asked three wheelers; their fare to Itahari was beyond what we were ready to pay. At one point we thought of walking the distance but soon we dropped the idea because an against-the-grain trek from the foothills to the border town, especially given our loaded bags, would cost our bodies more than we could afford. We noticed a red-plate SUV and the driver, a long retired Gurkha veteran of the British Army, showed sympathy in his broken English but told us that his was a private vehicle, strictly for personal use.

We then ran into a blue-uniformed police officer, who was keeping busy trying to regulate the banda traffic. When asked about the cause of the banda, he said, “The rumour is that a driver has been killed somewhere in Jhapa. Other than that, we know nothing.”

“How can we go to Biratnagar now?” I asked him. “What can I do, sir?” he said. “We are small people.”

Leaving the small man to fend for himself, our hunt for a vehicle began anew. About quarter of a mile walk down the road toward Itahari, we found a Maruti van heading South. We ran to the driver and begged him. He quoted a fare; we gave in. But he warned that he would take us up to Itahari anyhow but beyond that would depend on how the situation unfolds there. The man then drove his van like a man running for his life — fast, looking hawkishly left and right as though he were using the hard-earned run-and-hide skills of his guerrilla days. In Itahari, he went through its maze of side streets, and when he emerged on the main road and was about to take a side street again, he spotted a bus heading for Biratnagar from the East. He swung to the crossroads and headed for Biratnagar. The banda was only a rumour after all. The next morning, I had to leave for my village, about 18 miles North-East, and my wife was visiting family in Siliguri, but we woke up with the rumour that the Morang district chief of Youth Force had been shot and there would be a banda. It was a double strike against travellers, as the murdered driver’s story, too, had by now hogged the headlines.

What a transformation these past few years have wrought on the nature of the Nepali people! Just because the driver asked the members of the wedding party to come down from the roof of the bus to sit inside or forgot to pick up each of the wedding party members, they beat him to death, leaving his family without a breadwinner! What are the sources of this beastly rage?

On the road, we saw the number of ambulances multiply, but we refused to be patients. A family member got in touch with the local middleman and a whole bunch of women in the family boarded the vehicle on the Indian side of the border and left for Siliguri. I returned to find my way to my village. On the Rangeli-Biratnagar route, even the motorbikes had been banned. After debating whether it was better to stay back or leave anyhow, I went hunting for a rickshaw. Walking was out of the question because I had luggage. The only consolation in the whole business of the banda was that the rickshaw men were having a field day and making hay because the sun was shining brightly. A rickshaw man agreed to take me to Rangeli for a price, and we commenced on a three-hour-ride.

In the past couple of decades, I had always used a motor-driven vehicle to get from the district town to my village. So, this slow bumpy ride was a welcome change. It afforded me the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the locales I had long been familiar with in my childhood’s slow walk or bullock cart ride to Biratnagar. On a bullock cart, it was a multi-day, hazardous trundle to the famed town, navigating not only robbers and carnivores but also sandy rivers and mud holes where the wheels would get stuck and harried bullocks needed robust drivers’ shoulders to get the cart out on the other side. On foot, however, it was a different proposition altogether. Well before sunrise my father and I would set out on our trek back to the village and, the fast walker that he was with his long legs, I had to break into a run to catch up with him. After a full day’s trek, we would reach the village in the evening. 

So, the rickshaw ride, although bumpy on a smoothly paved road, turned out to be a back-to-the-past experience. I could recognise not only each village despite the fast-paced transformation modernisation had wrought on the landscape but also the names of Rajbanshis and Muslims on both sides of the road whom I had visited with my parents.  North from Rangeli, the road was gravel but the path was smooth. A van reserved for a wedding took me home by evening.

The journey from Kathmandu to my village showed the present-day reality of Nepal for travellers. Is there hope? I frequently asked myself. I had to seek an answer in Nepali people’s good work and endurance that I also saw on the road, which I leave for next week.

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