This is the place where I grew up from a baby in the lap to a big girl. The mention of this faraway town drives me nostalgic.
First I’ll tell you how we used to travel there from our grandpa’s home every March , when the winter break got over. My father originally belongs to a small town in Ghazipur district near Varanasi. So a taxi use to drive us to Mughal Sarai, the nearest railway station to our hometown, from where we rode the Brahmaputra Mail or the North East Express, crossing the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal all the way to the Assamese city of Guwahati, in a perfect 24 hours run.
When our train approached Guwahati, I remember, we used to leave aside everything and quickly jump for the window seat to have a glimpse of the glittering Kamakhya temple across the shore of the sea-grand Brahmaputra river, which used to look like a huge demon breathing and ready to gallop anything and everything that came it’s way, in the pitch dark night and the brassy resound of the train running over the metallic bridge across the river made it a horrendous scene for little hearts, yet we used to watch the view agape and with nimbly beating heart out of fear, till it flew out of sight.
We halted at night in Guwahati, mostly in the same hotel Mayur which dad preferred then. Mom says this hotel was the place were we learnt to walk the first time, because mom never left us free to crawl on the icy floor of our home at Bhutan , and since here the temperature was promising,we discovered the art of walking by holding the low-level beds in the hotel room when we were on our own.
Next morning, we used to start for Bhutan, almost always by a taxi, although there were lots of buses plying between the border of Bhutan and India. Just after a journey of two to three hours travelling through the lush green tea gardens of Assam, the Indian bamboo plains gave way to the dense vegetation of the lofty Himalayan range and we reached Samdrup Jongkhar. The inhabitants also varied from Indian race to fair, short heighted, narrow eyed, sparsely haired, strong muscular Bhutanese wearing gho and kiras, and now Hindi was a foreign language, what penetrated into the ears were only Dzongkha words like ‘tashi delek tashi delek!!’ instead of ‘ swagatam swatagm!!’ which may sound strange and comic to you but honestly speaking for a very long time, Hindi sounded the same- hilarious and alien to us.
As the journey ahead to Kanglung was a 5hours long journey on a whorl of roads carved out on the mountains travelling at night time was quite dangerous, so we had to again break our journey and wait for the morning to set out for our final destination. The way to Kanglung was a fatiguing one and often obsessing too as all we could see on the way was meandering roads, evergreen jungles, tall sturdy trees on the slopes, cliffs, ravines, fathomless valleys, clear blue skies and crystal white clouds which seemed almost in your reach, snow laden peaks, rivulets, waterfalls and a few scattered typical wooden houses. Just before Kanglung we come across a place called Youngphula , which is at a greater altitude than Kanglung. As a result, minutes before reaching Kanglung, we had a panoramic view of Kanglung settlement from heights of Youngphula- tiny houses, rivulets like roads, and toy like vehicles plying on it and trees so small that we felt we were giants and could uproot it by a single pull, and rocks which we could blow away, it’s a scene that beckons to be frozen and held in the eyes.
We never regarded this natural beauty because Kanglung was the only home we knew then, our home town was just a vacation resort for us. We never realized we will bid the valley adieu one day.
