Into the East

Prologue

Riding across the Northeast was a dream that I had nursed for a long time but it had always seemed elusive. At one point I even told myself that Robert Browning must have been thinking of someone like me when he wrote:

‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?’

But then I also remembered Theodore Roosevelt’s famous line, ‘Believe you can and you’re halfway there.’ And so, in the summer of 2018, I started chasing my dream seriously. I told myself that if I could ride solo across Kashmir and Ladakh in 2013, I could do the Northeast too. The trouble was that I did not own a motorcycle in 2018.

I asked Royal Enfield if they could lend me a Himalayan for three months, and to my delight, they said yes. Raising money for the trip was another hurdle because I had no connection with the corporate world. David Laitphlang, my ex-colleague at Hindustan Times, helped me get a sponsorship from Star Cement. And India’s most famous classic and vintage car restoration expert, Tutu Dhawan, helped raise the rest of the fund I needed.

I was also lucky that my wife Sudha backed me for the adventure.

In 2018, the political situation was volatile in the Northeast and particularly in Assam, where the exercise for the National Register of Citizens was on and the political groundwork was being done for a new citizenship law. So, some of the remarks of strangers I met along the way may sound antagonistic now.

I hold no political brief but I felt these men simply gave vent to their angst against the government of the day and found me a sympathetic listener.

For me, what mattered in the end was that I lived my dream.

1. Stranded in Siliguri: 30 October 2018

The Rajdhani Express for Dibrugarh is already lined up for departure at 4 pm on October 30 when we reach the platform at the New Delhi Railway Station. My wife Sudha and son Aseem help me arrange the luggage and we sit down to talk for the last few minutes. I will be out for two months on a motorcycle expedition of Northeast India which I will be starting from Siliguri.

There are two other young men already seated in the coach. I learn one of them is named Rajiv Bagra, a software professional working in Texas who is on his way home to Dibrugarh. The second is Navin Mukhia, an Army officer who is also headed home to Darjeeling and would be getting down at New Jalpaiguri, which is also my destination. Rajiv is the more talkative one. I tell him about my bike trip and it immediately strikes a chord with him. Rajiv used to be a biker once and was a member of an online travel community called BCM Touring.

‘Do you know Shahwar Hussain?’ he asks.

‘He is my brother. How do you know him?’

‘I don’t know him. But I follow him on social media. He seems to be travelling a lot on bikes across the Northeast.’

I tell him that Shahwar owns a motorcycle touring company and spends many months every year taking Indian and foreign bikers on tours to different places in the Northeast and many of them have become repeat clients.

It is time for the train to leave and Sudha and Aseem get down on the platform and we spend the last few moments together. I hug Aseem and tell him to look after his mother. ‘You are the man of the house now,’ I tell him. He is two months shy of his fourteenth birthday and seems to regard my advice as an onerous responsibility.

‘Yes, Papa. Don’t worry and ride safely,’ he says. I get on the train and it starts chugging. Seconds later, Sudha and Aseem disappear from view and I return to my seat. I discover that Rajiv and I share quite a few common interests like the history of the Second World War and the Sino-India
war of 1962. He asks me about my route.

‘I will head to Gangtok from Siliguri and then go to Darjeeling before heading for Assam from where I will enter Arunachal Pradesh. After I exit Arunachal Pradesh, I plan to head for Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and then Meghalaya and end the tour with Christmas in Shillong.’

He tells me, if possible, to visit a place called Vijaynagar in eastern Arunachal Pradesh where retired Nepalese troopers of the Assam Rifles, India’s oldest paramilitary organization, had been settled many years ago. ‘It’s a very remote place in Changlang district and is still very poorly connected.’