The thought of spending the night at Dhalkebar was not too exciting. On Nepal's east-west highway, 24 kilometres from the Tarai town of Janakpur, Dhalkebar wore a deserted look at 7.30 in the evening. Three men, eating dinner while sitting on a charpoi placed in the middle of the road, said that the last bus from Birgunj to Janakpur had already passed. Just then, ten or so motorbikes, waving Nepali Congress flags, sped past. They were the people of Anand Dhungana, who is standing from Dhanusha 7 constituency. "Chalu, nik chhe, chunaavi abhiyan shuru ta bhele ab," remarked one of the men in Maithili. "But it is good – at least election campaigning has started now."
As the night progressed, almost a dozen people assembled, hoping for some transport into Janakpur. It was their good fortune that, around ten, an open jeep finally turned up at the highway, and offered everybody a ride. The whole lot crammed into the vehicle – limbs across each other, half sitting in someone else's lap, many still standing. But all were relieved that Janakpur was now only an hour away.
To make up for the discomfort, there was a lot of jovial conversation. The jeep was carrying quite a mix of people – a Madhesi official from a government department in Lamjung in the central hills; the Janakpur owner of an education institute; a teacher from a school in Nagrana village, near the border; a land owner from Mahotiari District; a photocopy mechanic from Patna, on his way back home; a group of students returning home from Birgunj in the central Tarai. There was the usual cribbing about the state of the roads. "Imagine, Janakpur will be the capital of Madhes," pondered one of the students, using the identity-based term for much of the eastern Tarai plains. "No transport at night, and such horrible roads – what will the rest of the state be like?" As the jeep jerked around, the passengers continually fell over one another. "Things will be better after the elections," responded the sarkari karamchari, from his lofty status as a government servant. "If it happens, that is," chimed in someone else. "These leaders have made elections a joke, haven't they – postponing it so many times."
Even though everyone muttered as if in agreement, there seemed to be general consensus that the polls – having been pushed off twice already, and now slated for 10 April – would indeed happen this time around. The conversation then seamlessly moved on to the political dynamics in Dhanusha District, and who would win where. The private-college owner set off on a monologue: "In number one, it will be a contest between Ram Chandra Jha of the UML and the Congress's Smriti Narayan Chaudhary. Two is unpredictable. Three, Bimalendra Nidhi will sweep it. In five, everyone is praying that the pahade [hillfolk] agent Ram Baran Yadav is defeated. Six, I don't know. In seven, it will be a contest between Dhungana and UML's Shatrughan Mahato." The reference to Yadav had to do with the senior Congress leader having stood resolutely by the national (pahade) leadership of the Nepali Congress during the past year of Madhes agitations.