A journey to remember

I met a rather interesting person on the train from Calcutta on my way back home late in December. Old, bespectacled, strongly built and balding, this person was travelling in the same compartment as me and occupied the berth opposite mine. As the train set out from Calcutta, we began speaking to one another. On being asked “aap kya karte hain? (what do you do in life), he replied, “main baatein karta hoon” (I merely talk). And talk he did. A good deal too. He spoke about everything from the cold wave beginning to sweep through the Ganges plain, the surprisingly slick performance of the Indian cricket team (it was slick then), the prospects of the Indian economy over the coming year and the impending marriage between Abhishek Bachhan and Aishwarya Rai.

As the journey progressed, the conversation veered from politics to sport, then back to politics and then to the economy, and then back to politics again. (This is inevitable in Bihar). We began talking about politics in the state, in the country, and in neighbouring Nepal. It was then that he really caught my attention. His knowledge of Nepal’s politics was enormous and he seemed to understand its intricacies better than most (read Western journalists).

The following morning, as we reached our destination, I asked him if I could drop him home since he lived in a town that I would have to cross on my way to the Nepalese border. On the way there, in the course of a rather mundane conversation, he mentioned nonchalantly that he was friends with GP Koirala (Nepal’s Prime Minister), and a host of other senior Nepali leaders. I got him to tell me more about their relationship and learnt that their friendship went back almost 40 years when he had spent a few years with GP after GP had been exiled from Nepal by the monarchy for fighting for democracy in Nepal.

I had already formed a very high opinion of the man and was in awe of him. Little did I know what lay in store for me. The man lived in a town named Farbesganj, which happens to be nondescript, dusty and lifeless. However, his bungalow was like a breath of fresh air. It had large lawns dotted with fruit trees and flowers of every kind. Within five minutes of stepping onto the premises of his bungalow, I had seen as much greenery as I had in the entire town.

We sat down to parathas and a cup of tea in the verandah overlooking the garden. There was a smile on the old man’s face which he could not conceal, try as much as he did. I asked him what the matter was. He then told me that the Congress Party of Nepal was founded in that very verandah that we were sitting in. I almost dropped my teacup. This man just didn’t cease to surprise me. The gist of the very long conversation that we had following his disclosure was that the top leaders of Nepal in the mid 20^th century had all met at his home in Farbesganj to decide on the their future plan of action for the country. Nepal was not safe enough for them and the easiest way out for them was to slip through the porous Indo-Nepal border into Bihar. Once there, following lengthy deliberations, the leaders decided to form a new political party, the Nepali Congress – the political party that led Nepal’s struggle for democracy for over four decades… and eventually succeeded.

I didn’t know what to say or how to react once he had finished telling me all he had to say. The best I could come up with was a request that he write a book on the history of the Nepali Congress. It was beginning to get dark by this time, and I decided to take leave. It seemed like I had leaden feet, for I did not want to leave the place. The sense of history attached to it had an overbearing effect on me.

As I finally settled into the backseat of the car and left his home, the last twenty-odd hours began playing themselves out in my mind. Before long, we were at the Nepal border. There was a strike in Nepal, and so, I got onto a rickshaw – baggage and all – and began the last leg of my journey home. Not a grand homecoming by any means.

Over the last twenty hours, I had discussed politics. Now I was a victim of it.