Ah, Chicken's Neck! What an incredible spot on the South Asian map this is. With nothing to show for it but the lines drawn on the map after 1947, which separate this country from that and the other, the narrow strip is like the mouth of the tube of toothpaste that is India, squeezed out through this orifice, to exude into the eight states of the Indian Northeast.
At the very southeastern tip of Nepal is the town of Bhadrapur. Cross the border by wading through the shallow waters of the Mechi river, which drains the southern watershed of the Kanchenjunga, and at the village on the Indian side, catch the chhoti line (one of the few metre gauges still operational in India) which hugs the Nepal border all the way west to the Nizam's Lucknow. Or forego that option on this occasion and turn your attention southeast, where, barely two-dozen kilometres away, it is Bangladesh – Rangpur district of "North Bengal".
Ecologically, whether it is Nepal, Bangladesh or India, it is all the same floodplain. Paddies and banana groves, and the aromatic stench of drying hemp, which villagers have peeled from jute stalks that have been steeped in stagnant water. Clumps of dwellings all raised above the flood line because of centuries of rebuilding. More or less, even the same level of poverty in the villages in all three countries and flashy display of wealth of the mofussil trading classes in the cacophonous bazaar towns, whether Siliguri or Rangpur.
All the goods and services that mainland India provides the Northeast and all the natural resources the latter has to export to the former, pass through the Chicken's Neck. And so, National Highway No 31 has no choice but to make it to this northern tip of West Bengal before heading down the Siliguri bypass into lower Assam. The chhoti line and the broad gauge all funnel their way through this sliver of land, ferrying passengers, goods and – a most significant category for the Northeast – soldiers.