Three times a month, 40-year-old Shobhita Kolita leaves her home in Tinsukia, Assam, and travels more than 100 kilometres across bumpy, hilly terrain through what has been called, since World War II, Hell Pass, a three-kilometre dirt track that links the remote town of Nampong in Arunachal Pradesh, India, with Pangsau village, in the northern Burmese Kachin State.

For Kolita, Hell Pass—officially Pangsau Pass— is hardly malevolent. Crossing this international border on foot with nearly 10 kg of merchandise filling her bhikhu (not to be mistaken with the Buddhist bhikshu), a conical cane basket worn on the back and supported by an attached woven headstrap, is a source of income. She’s on her way to the ‘international market’ held in Pangsau on the 10th, 20th and 30th of every month.

Most of Kolita’s journey from Tinsukia to Nampong and Pangsau involves a bone-rattling bus-ride along the 60-odd-kilometre stretch of National Highway 153, which is part of the Ledo Road (renamed Stilwell Road during World War II). Though the highway barely deserves to be called a road at certain points, it is the closest thing to a trade artery in the area. The Stilwell Road begins at Ledo, Assam, passes through Jairampur—the Assam-Arunachal Pradesh border check post—and after meandering through forests of dark green bamboo and fields of golden elephant grass, reaches Nampong.

On the Indian side of the border, the Tangsa tribe still lives in machangs, traditional platform houses on stilts that keep them safe from the monsoon floods, and subsist on food they grow themselves. They rely on Marwari, Bengali and Assamese traders for stuff not locally available— batteries, mobile phones, and salt carted from Guwahati, Kolkata and even Delhi.

For the Tangsas who live on the other side of the border, where Stilwell is rechristened ‘Burma Road’, traders like Kolita are the sole source of these goods. “The road is so bad,” says Kolita. “It’s really difficult. Some [of us local] traders go all the way to Tinsukia because it’s cheaper. We buy at wholesale prices there.” Even so, she says, the cost of transporting goods over difficult terrain makes it hard to turn much of a profit, and far as she’s concerned, the blame falls squarely on Stilwell’s shoulders – the road, not the man. But when I ask the obvious question, she says, smiling bashfully, “I’m not sure who it is they named the road after.” she says, a bashful smile on her face.

The eponym refers to an American WWII general, Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, who oversaw the road’s construction by 15,000 Allied soldiers and 35,000 Chinese, Burmese, and Indian labourers, from December 1942 to October 1944. The purpose of the exercise was to carve a path through Burma to bail out the Chinese resistance of the Japanese, led by general Chiang Kai-shek.