Himalayan Dispatches is a travel series tracing my journey through Sikkim — India’s last Himalayan kingdom. It blends diary notes with photographs taken along the way. This is the first entry, written en route. Subscribe to follow the rest, delivered straight to your inbox.
Himalayan Dispatch #1: The Road to India’s Last Kingdom
Saturday, 23 March 2024. 9:15pm.
Sealdah Station, Kolkata.
Outside Sealdah Station, the air hangs thick with diesel, fried food, and impatience. A swarm of red-shirted porters descends before I can even get out of the car, each trying to claim my one boxy suitcase. I dodge most of them, but one catches me just at the station entrance — persistent, broad-shouldered, a pink washcloth draped like a sash. “Hundred rupees only (£0.9 / $1.2), please,” he says, gesturing toward the train. “I haven’t had any luck today.”
I know it’s a hustle, but I say yes anyway. I have time to kill, and could use the company.
A few steps into the platform, he starts haggling for more, before asking me where I work. I lie and tell him I work in a company in Delhi.
“Can you get me a job?” he asks, faster than I can walk. “This one has no future. On a good day I make six hundred rupees (£5.5 / $7). I have a wife, kids. My sustenance depends on the generosity of patrons like you,” he says matter-of-factly, almost without emotion — like he’s said it many times before.
I ask for his number, out of politeness and guilt.
“I don’t have a phone,” he says. That surprises me — in India, I’ve seen beggars with smartphones. “Just ask for me next time you’re at Sealdah,” he adds, as I hand him a generous tip and watch him disappear into the crowd.
“What’s your name?” I call after him.
“Kumar Yadav,” he says. His first name is lost in the din.
Sunday, 24 March 2024. 4:37 AM.
Somewhere between Malda Town and Kishanganj.
A sudden jerk wakes me — loud, mechanical, jarring. The train has halted, and then it groans back to life with another lurch. I shift under the scratchy blanket and glance outside. Nothing but silhouettes and the occasional flicker of a distant bulb.
There’s something about movement that makes writing easier for me. I’ve written more words in trains, planes, cars, and carriages than I ever have at a desk. Maybe it’s the sensation of being in transit — suspended somewhere between a departure gate and an arrival terminal — that opens up something inside. Thoughts begin to flow like the train itself — clunky but committed — filling the quiet pages with their rhythm.
Perhaps this motion is a kind of stillness for people like me — modern nomads in borrowed time zones. The terminal, the berth, the aisle seat; they become sanctuaries, small places where time stops following the rules of linearity. Where we get to escape the banality of our everyday.1
I close my eyes and drift again.
Sunday, 24 March 2024. 7:55am.
New Jalpaiguri Station.
The Darjeeling Mail pulls into New Jalpaiguri just as the sky begins to soften. I step off the train, stiff-limbed but alert. The air is cooler than Kolkata’s, a touch cleaner too, though still laced with dust and diesel. I find a taxi and begin the short ride to Bagdogra Airport, about fifteen kilometres away, where my parents are flying in.
There’s something gently comic about reunions in unfamiliar places. My parents emerge from the arrivals terminal with slightly rumpled smiles, their luggage trailing behind them. My mother hands me an iced Americano, still cold.
The beauty of airports, I think — those strange islands of global comfort, offering clean bathrooms and caffeine, even on the edge of the Himalayas.
Sunday, 24 March 2024. 11:30am.
On the road toward Gangtok.
For the first half hour, we’re still in the flatlands. The road inches forward through a blanket of traffic. At one point, we pass the unmistakable golden arches of McDonald’s, towering above us on a giant hoarding. And in the foreground, right in front of it, stand the spires of a temple, saffron flags fluttering gently in the still air.
The high priest of global capitalism standing sentinel behind the high priest of a Modi-fied India, I think to myself.
The saffron is everywhere. It never really leaves you along the way.
Gradually, the road begins to climb. It curls and unfurls in lazy spirals, cutting into the rising slopes. The sun is high and sharp, bleaching everything. This isn’t the lush green of the Western Ghats — it’s drier here, dustier, a faded olive that sometimes slips into brown. The hills feel sun-scoured, waiting for rain.
To our right, the Teesta slips in and out of view, glinting under the haze. “It’s the dam,” Sanjeev, our driver, says. “Slowed everything down.” It now moves with reluctance — less river, more ravine.
Prayer flags start to appear. First a few, then more — white, red, green, yellow, blue — and then the cycle repeats. They flutter even when there’s no wind, like they remember a breeze from long ago.
The road itself is a constant negotiation. The tar gives up at intervals. Stones jut out. The car groans as it lurches from side to side. I pity the tyres. The suspension. And our tailbones.
We pass roadside shrines — Hanuman in orange, Kaali in red — dotting the slopes as we snake past. Sanjeev, without fail, lifts his right hand — first to chest, then to forehead, then back to chest, and then over the head — in a silent prayer. I find myself mirroring him. Palm to heart, forehead, through the hair.
Convoy trucks rumble by; Ashok Leyland greens thick with army gear. They are a quiet reminder of where we are.
The Siliguri Corridor — or the Chicken’s Neck, which connects mainland India with its northeastern states — is just 21 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. The distance of a half marathon, I realize. Before Bangladesh was born, this was one of India’s most fragile arteries: East Pakistan to the south, China’s army in Tibet to the north, and the Maoist (Naxalite) rebellion brewing right in the middle, from a nearby village called Naxalbari.
It’s no surprise then that the Indian state watched Sikkim closely. When anti-monarchy riots broke out in 1973, the government stepped in. Two years later, Sikkim became India’s 22nd state. A clean entry in textbooks, but a complicated one in real life.
It’s strange to be here, on this road, watching army trucks crawl up these hairpins, knowing that I once studied this corridor in a classroom. Stranger still to remember that in 2017, I wrote about the Doklam standoff — a tense moment between India and China just north of here — and how this narrow strip of land, the Siliguri Corridor, remains one of the region’s most critical pressure points.2
Sunday, 24 March 2024. 1:15pm.
Somewhere en route.
We stop for lunch at a roadside restaurant on a curve and order plates of fried and steamed momos and a local delicacy: bamboo biryani — rice slow-cooked inside hollow bamboo. Smoky, earthy, surprising.
Sunday, 24 March 2024. 2:10pm.
Higher up.
The climb grows steeper. The sky narrows. On our left, a family of deodar cedars stand tall, still, dignified. From the backseat, my mother hums a song from the 1960s:
ध्वजा से ये खड़े हुए हैं वृक्ष देवदार के
गलीचे ये गुलाब के, बगीचे ये बहार के
ये किस कवि की कल्पना का चमत्कार है?
ये कौन चित्रकार है? ये कौन चित्रकार?These deodar trees rise like banners, proud and still.
These rose carpets, these gardens of spring —
Whose imagination dreamed up such wonder?
Who is this painter? Who, this divine artist?
Sunday, 24 March 2024. 4:05pm.
Border bridge between West Bengal and Sikkim.
Around a quiet curve, it appears — a long bridge, sudden and unannounced.
It stretches across a bed of pale, crumbling rock — a riverbed emptied of its contents. We’re told it’s the Teesta, though it looks more like the ghost of one.
The river is the natural border. West Bengal behind us. Sikkim ahead.
There’s a sign. A couple of guards. The people look the same, but the air feels different — lighter, somehow.
With a foot on the clutch and a change of gear, we cross.
I think everyone’s everyday is banal, no matter how interesting we believe we are. Some of us are just lucky enough to escape it a few times a year — and then we curate that escape, that exceptionalism, on our social media feeds as if it were the norm.
Just yesterday, the strategic relevance of this slender neck returned to the headlines. During a visit to China, Bangladesh’s interim chief advisor Muhammad Yunus described his country as the “only guardian of the ocean” for India’s Northeast — implying the region is landlocked and effectively cut off from the mainland. His remarks triggered a sharp backlash in India, reigniting anxieties about the vulnerability of this corridor and calls to build alternate road and rail routes to bypass it.
Lovely post. Looking forward to the rest of the Sikkim Diaries.
I have fond memories of Sikkim, and Lachung in particular. It was the place where I first saw snowfall. :)