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From Karimganj, the fastest and smoothest way to get to Dawki, my next destination, was to cross the Kushiyara River and take a bus across the plains of Sylhet to the border village of Tamabil, from where Dawki is 0 km, sitting right across the Radcliffe Line, in the Indian State of Meghalaya.
But this is 2015 and not 1945. Therefore I had to drive all the way back to Silchar (four hours again on that wretched 55-km stretch!), fly back to Guwahati, drive down to Shillong, and drive farther down to Dawki.
I left Karimganj at the crack of dawn even though my flight from Silchar was at 12.45 pm. Reaching the airport several hours in advance wasn’t going to harm me — airports are a rather nice place to kill time — but bearing the pain of a dreadfully slow and bumpy ride and at the same time panicking about missing the flight was certainly going to kill me.
The driver was a young Sylheti man who couldn’t have been more than twenty. For some reason I took a liking for him the moment I got into his weather-beaten car. He came across as a sincere, obedient boy and not cocky. I wanted to have a chat with him — we had four hours ahead of us — but conversation was not possible because when you are driving on a road as bumpy as the Karimganj-Silchar highway, you are forever bracing yourself for the next jolt, the time lapse between two jolts being roughly 30 seconds. After enduring a million jolts — I felt sorry for my tailbone — we finally reached the airport.
I gave him a tip of Rs. 100, on second thoughts doubled it to Rs. 200, and asked him, “Why is this road so bad? Don’t you guys protest?”
“What can we do?” he asked me, “The State government is asking Modi for money to build the road, but Modi is telling them, ‘First account for the money you already got from the Central government for the purpose.’”
I wasn’t sure whether to believe what he said — he could be absolutely right or horribly wrong. In my experience, however, taxi drivers often understand the politics of their land better than its long-time residents, leave alone lay visitors.
From Guwahati airport, it took me about two hours to finally hit the four-lane highway leading to Shillong. Peak-hour traffic in Guwahati can be as heavy as Bengaluru’s. We had barely left the city traffic behind when the driver got a call — I was in a radio cab arranged by a local friend — and from the conversation I gathered that the highway was most likely shut due to landslides, though there was a small possibility that it had opened that morning.
It turned out that the two lanes meant for outbound traffic were shut, and the remaining two lanes meant for inbound traffic now served as a two-way road to Shillong, which lay about 100 km away. It was 7 o’ clock and the sun had long set. Every once in a while, the driver drew my attention to heaps of soil — miniature mountains — across the divider. “There, landslide,” he would say.
So far I had only read about people dying in landslides. The heaps of soil gave me a clear idea as to how such deaths happened. The very thought was scary: you are driving on the highway one fine evening and suddenly a mass of soil and boulders descend on you and subject you to an almost-instant burial while you are still alive. You can’t even attempt an escape.
After about 20 km the highway widened back to four lanes and we now cruised toward Shillong. Ahead of us was a lorry that bore the ‘ML’ number-plate. “Are we in Meghalaya yet?” I asked the driver.
“We have been in Meghalaya for quite some time.”
“Switch off the AC,” I told him, “I want to smell the mountain air.”
In Shillong, I did not even need the fan. I slept under a blanket, warm in the knowledge that I was in the ‘Scotland of the East’.
Dawki is 90 km from Shillong.
“If you are going to Dawki, make sure you find a good driver,” the driver who brought me to Shillong the night before had cautioned me, “it's a risky route.”
When a professional driver considers a particular route to be risky, you must worry. But after having seen heaps of soil on the highway, the thought of tumbling down a mountain didn’t scare me. Nothing can be more tragic in this world than dying in a landslide, and no driver, no matter how skilled, can ever foresee or evade a landslide.
The driver who was to take me to Dawki turned out to be a twenty-something Bengali man who was born in Shillong and had roots in upper Assam, but looked more like a mountain-hardened Khasi whom you could trust instantly. He was clearly born to drive in the hilly terrain.
Now, Meghalaya is a place where the drive can be as scenic as the destination. Khasi Hills is easily one of the prettiest places on earth. Once you leave the bustle of Shillong behind, the road becomes empty and you have the whole place to yourself, hardly coming across a soul except the occasional fruit-picker or villager. And then you come across villages — quaint, charming and clean. One of its villages, Mawlynnong, actually enjoys the reputation of being the cleanest village in the country.
Right now, the driver stopped at another village, a typical forest village called Riwai, which seemed to be of interest to tourists because there were stalls at its entrance, selling fruits, snacks and water.
“Go in, you will see a bridge made of living roots,” the driver said.
I walked in, bought a ticket for Rs. 10 from a booth and climbed down steep steps. Butterflies fluttered, insects called, birds chirped. On a wooden stall sat a child selling pomelos: he was most likely minding the stall in the temporary absence of his mother. When I aimed my phone camera at him, he said, “One picture ten rupees” and instantly blushed and turned his face away. It was clear that he had been tutored to say so only recently.
Eventually I came across a stream, the sky barely visible here because of the trees, and across the fast-flowing stream a bridge made of living roots. A bunch of noisy tourists was already on the other side, and soon I joined them by crossing the bridge to take pictures of it. One tourist washed his face and rinsed his mouth in the water, so clean it is, and further downstream, villagers washed clothes.
What a shame I had never heard about this place or Mawlynnong before. For that matter, I wasn’t even aware about Dawki’s existence until a couple of weeks before. The only consolation was that I shared my ignorance with a majority of Indians. I could think of people who would not be able to even name all the north-eastern States: I say this not out of arrogance, but from experience.
My next stop was Mawlynnong, “God’s Own Garden”, as it was described in the brochure handed to me by a local youngster after I had paid him Rs. 50 — my contribution to the upkeep of the village, which could have well belonged to the English countryside. There I noticed a signboard, ‘Bangladesh View Home Stay’ and went in the direction of the arrow. I entered a large compound and wandered around for a while. People lived there, because clothes were hung on a clothesline, but I heard or saw no one. And then I came across a bamboo tower — rising up to 30, or perhaps 40, feet — which promised a view of Bangladesh.
As I began to climb — the climb involved walking up a set of bamboo ramps — I heard a man’s voice: “You will have pay me twenty rupees for the view, but don’t worry, you can pay me once you are done.” He was the owner of the place.
From the top of the tower I was treated to a view that I can never forget. Actually I saw nothing. All I could see, beyond the green canopy of Meghalaya, was a vast swathe of land that almost merged with the sky. I could tell the land from the sky only because of the hazy brown of the soil and the equally hazy grey of the rivers, with the brown and the grey occupying almost equal space — so typically Bangladesh.
The fact that I could see nothing made the view special, because the nothingness, almost indistinguishable from the sky, represented a foreign land, Bangladesh, which I couldn’t enter without a passport. Had that nothingness represented another Indian State, I wouldn’t have even bothered looking, and the Khasi man wouldn’t have bothered building the bamboo tower in the first place.
He builds the tower every year after the monsoon — 10 labourers work for 12 days to construct it using “countless bamboos” — and he has been doing it for the past seven years to add to his income from homestays.
“Khasi people are very hospitable people, you know,” he told me as I handed him two ten-rupee notes, “Stay with us sometime.”
“What’s your name,” I asked him.
“Rishot. It’s a Khasi word. It means a pillar. Whether a weak pillar or a strong pillar, that I don’t know,” he laughed.
“Now let’s go straight to Dawki,” I told the driver at Mawlynnong, “I want to get there before sunset.”
“Don’t worry,” he assured me, “we are not very far from Dawki.”
And thus began one of the most memorable road trips of my life. On the one side rose the hills of Meghalaya and on the other side lay the plains of Bangladesh. Half way through the journey I realised that the ‘nothingness’ I had observed from the top of the bamboo tower at Mawlynnong was a mirage caused by height and distance — exactly what happens when you watch the details of your own city getting blurred shortly after a flight takes off. As we got closer to Dawki with every passing minute, the details of the Bangladeshi terrain became clearer.
From time to time we stopped at waterfalls to take pictures: the waterfall would be located in Meghalaya but all the water would be flowing into Bangladesh in the form of a river. Sir Cyril Radcliffe must have had no problem separating Meghalaya, then a part of Assam, from East Pakistan: the line where the hills ended and the plains began became the natural border.
We climbed down the hills and were now almost on the plains, driving along a grey river across which lay the buildings of Bangladesh. Soon the river bifurcated and the section we continued to drive along magically turned from grey to green — a very clean green — and it had countless small boats carrying people with fishing rods. It turned out that the grey part fell in Bangladesh and the green — Umngot River — in Meghalaya, and that the small boats belonged to anglers.
Then we crossed the green part on an old suspension bridge and once again drove along the grey part and reached Dawki, which resembled a seaside English town, only that the shoreline here was the Radcliffe Line. At the border crossing, an officer of the Border Security Force had been waiting for me.
Until about a month ago, the officer said, about 500 trucks would go into Bangladesh each day, carrying boulders stone, limestone and coal. But now there was a ban on the mining of the stones, and as for coal, Bangladesh imported it from elsewhere because they found Indian coal more expensive.
Right now, he said, fruits and vegetables went from India — oranges, pineapple, tomato — apart from betel nut, betel leaf and also bay leaf. From Bangladesh came potato chips and biscuits (both from a brand called Potato), plastic crockery and cotton goods. There was also a weekly bus service, connecting Dhaka to Guwahati via Shillong.
We walked up to the barricade and I took pictures. A green signboard across the line announced Tamabil to be 0 km away, Dhaka 300 km away and the city of Sylhet only 54 km. Which meant Karimganj was only a stone’s throw away from here — well, almost.
The Border Guard Bangladesh sentry asked the BSF officer, in Bengali, “How much would 2 kg of barfi cost on your side?”
“Two kg would cost 1120 or 1130 takas. Our taka, not your taka,” the BSF officer, a native of Bihar, replied. Taka is the currency of Bangladesh, because Bengalis measure money in takas: even Indian Bengalis refer to the rupee as taka.
“He must have asked one of his countrymen to bring him sweets from India and now wants to check whether he has been overcharged,” the BSF officer told me as we walked away from the Zero Line, “Indian sweets are very popular in Bangladesh.”
We now drove to his office, a border outpost, which was barely a kilometre away, and sat on a raised wooden platform overlooking the plains of Sylhet — the grey river and the buildings beyond. It was the magical hour of dusk, when everything looks beautiful — and this was a beautiful place.
Over jaljeera , I asked him if smuggling was a problem in his area. “Smuggling happens in places where people on both sides of the border are ethnically the same. Here that is not the case.”
I heard a sound coming from across the river, similar to the sound of a generator.
“What’s that sound?”
“It’s a thresher,” he replied.
I tried imagining myself in the land across the river, where the thresher was now at work: would it be as rosy as it looked from here?
Suddenly, the call of the muezzin rose from that land, drowning the noise made by the thresher.
Had I been drinking something heady instead of the harmless jaljeera , and had I been sitting in a place not as sanctimonious as a BSF outpost, I could have composed a poem or two at that moment.
