 |
We were now venturing through what appeared to be a different country. Figures in conical hats waded through newly-planted rice fields; villages nestled behind groves of banana, bamboo and betel nut. The people were different too—smaller-bodied, with neat Mongolian features. It was as if we had taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in Southeast Asia.
The northeast is populated by a bewildering variety of armed insurgency groups—29 by one count—each agitating for another mini-partition of India. The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) wants independence for the Assamese; the National Socialist Council for Nagaland (NSCN) wants a separate Naga homeland; and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) is willing—as a common graffito in the region puts it—to "do or die for Bodoland." Bombing trains like this one is a favorite terror tactic, as is kidnapping oil or tea company officials. The NDFB and ULFA operate from remote jungle camps in Bhutan on Assam's northern border, and stood accused of an ambush only two days before that had killed five people.
One group that has borne the brunt of northeastern insurgency are the Adivasis. These are tribal people from Bihar and Orissa states who migrated during British times to work on the tea plantations. Many now fester in refugee camps dotted across Kokrajhar district. I got off at Kokrajhar itself, a small market town protected by sandbagged army checkpoints. Not far from town stands a statue of the Bodo hero, Jawhalao Daimalu, carrying his bow and arrows. The people of Jaypur refugee camp live nearby in less heroic circumstances, in straw-roofed huts cringing beneath the rain.
They hail mostly from the Santhal, Orang and Munda tribes. Some are Hindus, others Christian, like Robin Hambron who arrived with his family in 1996 after Bodo guerrillas burned down his village. "We just want to go home," Hambron says, "but the government says it still can't provide security." The state does supply a monthly rice ration, but it lasts only 10 days. Other necessities, like salt, mustard oil, clothes and blankets, are provided by a Lutheran charity.
I continued my train journey the next day, crossing the magnificent Brahmaputra River, then nudging slowly through squalid shantytowns of Bangladeshi refugees marking the outskirts of Guwahati, the ramshackle Assamese capital. The station milled with Indian troops en route to the northeast's trouble spots. I was now traveling toward the very origins of the subcontinent's rail system. The second stretch of track ever laid in India was built to ferry coal from the mines at Margherita—my penultimate stop—to barges moored at Dibrugarh on the Brahmaputra's banks.
The train soon arrived in Digboi, home to the oldest oil well in India, and still the center of the country's main oil-producing region. Without the railway—specifically, the British-owned Assam Railways and Trading Co., Ltd.—oil might not have been discovered so early. According to legend, the search for oil began when one elephant employed in the construction of the Dibrugarh to Margarita line was spotted with a black substance on its feet. "British officials would urge on the coolies by shouting, 'Dig, boy, dig!'—thus the town's name," explains local oil official M. P. Chaliah (who insists this story is true). Today, Digboi is run almost entirely by Oil India. A giant refinery dominates the town, but tucked away in the surrounding hills are neat roads leading to spacious company mansions and a golf course where employers play with the help of barefoot boy caddies. It is all very orderly and prosperous, a country within a country.
After Digboi the train briefly veered south, heading straight for the formidable Patkai mountains, a distant relative of the Himalayas. Beyond them lay Burma, linked by the famous Ledo Road, built to ferry Allied supplies during World War II. Trains are a rarer sight in these parts, and delighted children spilled out of passing houses to wave and shout, like they were cheering us past the finishing line—which they were. At 11:46 a.m. the train pulled into Ledo, the most remote station in northeast India and my final stop.
Ledo is a sleepy town of colonial-era cottages, their eaves dripping from the monsoon rain. Less than a month since leaving the dust-choked Afghanistan-Pakistan border, I could not have arrived in a more different place. Yet the two regions—Baluchistan state and northeast India—have much in common. Oil rich and riven by separatism, both lie so far from their respective capitals as to seem like separate countries; both boast an ethnic diversity that no border, man-made or natural, can ever hope to contain; and both were plied by British-built railways that now have a new purpose: not to ferry troops to Chaman, or coals to Dibrugarh, but to try to connect far-flung peoples to a larger, more encompassing national identity.
I took a car and followed the tracks. They continued for a while, to within 30 kilometers of the Burmese border, past coal yards and army barracks. But soon the tracks lost the sheen of regular use and began to rust. Then they burrowed into the jungle and disappeared.
|
|
