Who knows how the bearded man got here to Dhanusha, in the southeastern plains of Nepal. But he told the villagers he was from Bangladesh. Before he was lynched.
Some quote police reports saying that he seemed mentally unsound. Before he was murdered. Perhaps he had crossed into India from Bangladesh at Chyangrabanda or Banglaband, or anywhere along the Indo-Bangla frontier where the border fencing is absent or down. He would have wandered across the identical landscape of northern Bangladesh, through the Chicken's Neck strip of West Bengal, and into the districts of Jhapa, Morang and then Dhanusha.
He would not have felt out of place in the populous tropical landscape of Dhanusha, amidst the pre-monsoon heat, amidst the banana plantations and sisham groves, amidst the ponds overflowing with hyacinth. But how could he have known that Nepal, so indistinguishable from neighbouring regions, was actually a country wracked by statelessness, anarchy. He would not have known that this had become a country inhabited by an edgy citizenry that could be incited into abrupt mob violence. Not the country you know. A dangerous country, suddenly, for the stranger who comes wandering by.
The reasons for this national rage are many. The years of conflict, the rise of a political party that trumpets its entry into open society as a 'victory' of the gun, the start of copycat militancies, the near absence of state administration, a police force lacking in any semblance of motivation. That is the country that the man from Bangladesh walked into. Even if of sound mind, he would perhaps not have understood the mania that had gripped the masses by the spring of 2009.