The Trip to Cooch Behar

The journey to Cooch Behar was a way we felt we could break the monotony of handling the sultry days we spent wastefully at my grandmother’s house. We woke up to a beautiful silence, devoid of the loud traffic that passed by the street. The morning was cool and calm, for the sun had yet to awaken from its slumber. Taking with us the light bags we had already prepared, we departed from Siliguri. We had booked tickets on the Vande Bharat Express that started from the New Jalpaiguri Railway station to Guwahati. We had come a bit earlier than the departure time and waited for the train to enter the station.

The Vande Bharat did not fail to come on time. It hooted once to announce its arrival and then noiselessly entered the station. Boarding was a simple process that did not have the chaos of a crowd ascending and descending the vehicle. It was easy to be in awe of the train’s interior; modern, clean, and posh—words one does not generally associate with the Indian Railways. After a few pictures and selfies, we waited for the train to depart. As it slid out of the station to a rising sun, I returned to my sleep. Truth be told, whenever one finds the opportunity to sleep, just sleep. It’s a simple doctrine used by combatants worldwide for “when the next patrol starts, be awake, be alert to be alive.”

I awoke to see, on the other side of the glass pane, a bright day with the sun illuminating the green rice fields of Bengal. Groggily, I went to the restroom, holding my breath expecting the usual filth of the IRCTC, but lo and behold! The restrooms were clean and did not reek like a filthy landfill. A true miracle of Lord Ram and the Amrit Kaal! The train covered the distance with great speed, 132 kilometers in about 100 minutes. We got off at the station, which was too quiet for a place that was once a bustling point in Bengali history.

Little history lecture: Cooch Behar was the capital of the Cooch Bengali Royal family. The once-prosperous royal family had huge stakes of land. However, the royal family soon fell into disarray after losing the land to Bangladesh, and bong politics sent the royal family into a downward spiral. It missed the grandeur of even a 3-tier Rajasthan royal city. The station was super quiet. Only two other passengers disembarked from the Vande Bharat, and only cargo trains were seen at the 6-platform railway station. We decided to walk to the Rajbari, the erstwhile royal palace. Google Maps warned us that the Rajbari would be closed today; however, the determined and the crazy couldn’t care about such problems. The walk brought mixed emotions of shock and surprise for us. Stocked granaries in the land of the hungry. A black Audi in a slum that was cleaner than the neighborhood. A military residential complex with freshly whitewashed quarters and decrepit apartment complexes looking like a ghetto. There was a shopping mall and an old market within a 2-mile radius.

Gayatri Devi, a princess of Cooch Behar, spent her early years in India and abroad, receiving a privileged education and upbringing. Later, she married Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II of Jaipur in 1940. Her western and modern outlook had a strong influence in Rajasthan, a region where social norms were stricter and girls/women had less access to education. She remains a celebrated figure in both regions, remembered for her contributions to social causes, her elegance and charm, and her role in modernizing and promoting the heritage of her royal homes.

We decided to eat the local breakfast of the Bengali, which was oil-soaked Pooris and gravy filled with potato; you have to be delusional to expect a healthy, wholesome breakfast in any Indian state north of Maharashtra when traveling from south of India. Boy, oh boy, was it some of the most delicious food you will ever come across, especially when those aromatic potatoes melt in your mouth and Pooris have the perfect texture—until you realize that there is no proper plate in which they are serving you but a few pages from a grade 8 Bengali state board of education maths book that has been converted into an improvised plate, so you better not have any guilt after eating all those calories AND denying some poverty-stricken kid their education. I finished by breakfast with two Gulab Jamons which just melted in my mouth.

The Rajbari came into view, and one could feel a sentiment of disappointment. The splendor of royalty was missing compared to even its most disappointing Rajasthani counterpart. The domes of the palace were an aluminum and steel blend with telltale signs of rust on some of the older ones. The gardens of the royal family in the front were trimmed and well-maintained. The toilets were breeding grounds for spiders, mosquitoes, and other vermin forms. The whole overall experience felt mediocre inside the lost glory of the once mighty royal Bengali regal family. We could only take some decent pictures (which could at least be posted on social media) of the lawn with the palace in the background and decided to bid farewell to Cooch Behar and take the next bus to Siliguri.

Friday is a weekly holiday for visitors, so we couldn’t explore the inside and the museum. We should have done our homework on choosing the right day.

We climbed aboard the state transportation bus, which was thankfully cleaner in its interior than its Paan-caked exterior. In the beginning, I mentioned how my grandmother’s house was akin to a Turkish bath. Well, the North Bengal State Transportation Corporation bus managed to be even more humid than any place on the equator. Imagine a sauna stuffed with people who simply chew paan and spit into the road, leaving very “personal” graffiti on the road or any other unlucky object in its trajectory.

It was a miserable afternoon traveling for 3 hours at a snail’s pace on that bus, which had to cover, opposite in every respect to the comfort that the Vande Bharat offered. The NBSTC bus offered no comfort, no peace, and was straight hell for the time we suffered in the cooker.

We were dropped off at the entrance of the gate of the North Bengal University and slowly trudged quietly under the protection of the green canopy of the university trees back to our grandmother’s house where an ice-cold shower and delicious (and healthy) Bengali food awaited us.

Pictures 2024 Kochbihar