When I boarded the flight for Agartala, I knew as much about the city as any other Indian who has gone to school would — that it is the capital city of Tripura, one of the seven States constituting northeast India. I knew one more thing, because of a close look at the map — that it sat right on the Bangladesh border, perhaps the only State capital to be located along an international border.

The farmlands that came into view as soon as the plane prepared for landing were all waterlogged, and I wondered if I had come to Tripura at the wrong time; Assam was reeling under floods and it was quite possible that parts of Tripura would be inundated too. I decided to ask the man in the next seat.

“Hello, are you from Agartala?”

“No, I am from Dhaka,” he smiled, “I saw you this morning at the Chennai airport.” So, he too had taken the Chennai-Kolkata-Agartala route.

“Ah, interesting,” I said, “what brought you to Chennai?”

“Business. I work with a cement company, we make Seven Rings brand of cement. I had a meeting at the L&T office in Chennai yesterday.”

“And you are now headed for Dhaka?”

“Yes, Dhaka is barely two hours by road from Agartala. But I think I will spend the night at Agartala. If you are free in the evening, let’s catch up?”

“Sure.”

“My name is Mujibur Rahman,” he said, shaking my hand.

I asked him about the flooded farmlands.

“What you see below is all Bangladesh. No floods in Agartala,” he assured me.

Later that evening, a Border Security Force (BSF) officer told me that many Bangladeshi citizens, when they travelled to India on business, preferred to cross the border at Agartala and take a domestic flight. If they flew directly from Dhaka, they would have to travel on an international flight, which would cost them a lot more.

As regards dealing with the BSF, this time — unlike during my visit to the border village of Digaltari in West Bengal — I had made sure that I did not present myself at the BSF offices or camps as a total stranger. I had worked my contacts — a classmate from school , now a senior BSF officer — and currently a plainclothesman waiting at the Agartala airport with a placard bearing my name.

Two things struck me instantly about Agartala: the greenery and the laidback charm. It seemed to me a city without ambition, content with the way it was, having long made peace with the fact that it hardly mattered to the world outside of the northeast, showing no great desire to find prominence on the map of 21st-century India. A place with such an attitude can only be endearing, especially when much of urban India is changing beyond recognition every new morning.

It took me less than 20 minutes to the reach the BSF mess where, after a satisfying lunch of rice, rotis, daal and beans curry, I set out for the flag-lowering ceremony at the Akhaura border-crossing. Akhaura is the town on the Bangladesh side of the border, which is barely a couple of kilometres from the city’s centre.

The ceremony was to begin at five, and I arrived at the BSF check-post on the Radcliffe Line half an hour early, to be instantly served with tea. A signboard there informed me that Bangladesh was “0 km” from where I sipped the sugary tea. A BSF inspector told me that two buses now ran daily between Agartala and Kolkata via Dhaka; apart from that, 100-150 citizens of each country crossed the border on foot every day.

I saw Bangladeshis, easily distinguishable by their lungis, showing their passports to the sentry and strolling past the barricades into their land. Most people crossing the border on foot usually visit their relatives living nearby, but on the opposite side. If one has a visa, it is possible to live in Akhaura and shop in Agartala — many do that as well, as evident from the bulging plastic bags they carried.

About a dozen plastic chairs were soon arranged on the pavement for people to watch the lowering of the flags. I got to sit in the front row. On the other side too, men, women and children had gathered. No foot-stamping or high-kicking here: a sombre and relaxed ceremony that ended with people from both sides pressing close to the barricades.

One elderly man asked from Bangladesh, raising his voice, asked the people on the Indian side, though to no one in particular, “Bhalo achhen toh? Bhalo achhen toh [how are you]?” The women began talking to familiar faces across the border:

“How your daughter has grown up! She was just a child until the other day.”

“Everybody fine at home?”

“Come home someday, it’s been long since you last visited us.”

It was the kind of chatter that takes place when you run into someone familiar in a neighbourhood shop. The women stood barely 10 feet apart, but couldn’t get any closer because Sir Cyril’s pencil mark stood between them.

“You want to have a picture taken with the BGB officer?” the BSF inspector asked me. BGB stands for Border Guard Bangladesh, formerly known as BDR, or Bangladesh Rifles.

“Oh sure,” I handed him my camera and walked up to the BGB officer and told him, in Bengali, that I would like to pose with him. We smiled at the camera and then I shook his hand, which I felt was a little too soft for his profession. But his face more than made up for the softness of his hand: he clearly looked like the man in command, stern and dignified.

“How is your relationship with the BGB?” I asked the BSF inspector as I claimed my camera.

“Very friendly at the moment,” he said, “It all depends on which party is in power there. Usually, our relationship is cordial when Sheikh Hasina is in power. Things are a little different whenever Khaleda Zia comes to power, but on the whole we remain friendly.”

By six o’ clock, it was dark and the border-crossing looked deserted. Stray dogs had now taken over the zero line, as if the stretch belonged to them. No one would ask them to produce passports. But had a stray cow been spotted there, instead of the dogs, the BSF men would have swung into action. Cows are not supposed to be hanging around on the Bangladesh border.

*

The next morning, a senior BSF officer offered to take me to some of the border villages in Tripura, far away from Agartala. As we passed vast paddy fields — one of the most picturesque locations in the whole of India — we discussed challenges faced by the BSF in Tripura.

One of them was to prevent the smuggling of the cough syrup, Phensedyl, which is sold in ‘dry’ Bangladesh at four times its original price. Another big challenge was to prevent the smuggling of cows. Cows stolen or smuggled from India, he said, landed in abattoirs in Bangladesh and their meat was exported to the Arab countries — a hugely lucrative business. He also said that the smugglers’ code-word for calves, whose tender meat fetched more money, was 'Pepsi'.

From time to time, as we crossed settlements, I found Durga idols under construction. Tripura is a Bengali State even though, once upon a time, its population was mostly tribal. “Until 1947, 70 percent of its population was tribal and 30 percent Bengalis. Today the figures have reversed,” the officer said.

The tribal population is dominated by the Tripuris, who trace their origins to western China and who ruled Tripura from the 15th century until 1949, when the kingdom merged with India. Even though their language is Kokborok, they maintained great respect for the Bengali language and brought Bengalis to the kingdom for administrative work and to conduct religious rituals. Two Tripuris are known — and revered — across India: Sachin Dev Burman and his son Rahul Dev Burman.

Soon we were in the town of Sonamura, and there, in a village called Srimantapur, I saw large trucks arriving from Bangladesh, most of them laden with cement bags. Zakir Ahmed, a driver, had just finished offloading 400 bags of Tiger cement at the customs yard and was now headed back home — to Khulna.

“I make 10 to 15 trips in a month,” he said. A shopkeeper, who was in an inebriated state (his shop was right on the border), pestered Zakir to help him sell his chocolates in Bangladesh, where they are supposed to be expensive.

Zakir chided him, “I have driven trucks in 20 places around the world, including four countries in Europe, but never have I come across a character like you!”

As his truck faded away into Bangladesh, I gazed at the now empty road. It led to the city of Comilla and it looked inviting. There was even a signboard at some distance, which said ‘Swagatam’ in Bengali. But I was restricted by the pillar at my feet.

*

Once upon a time, in the village of Boxanagar in West Tripura district, four brothers built a house each — the houses formed a square, facing one another, with a common courtyard at the centre. Then one day, shortly after Partition, government servants came and planted a pillar in one corner of the courtyard, and one of the four houses went to East Pakistan.

Today none of the brothers are alive, but their descendants continue to live in those houses. The one that fell across Radcliffe Line looked frozen in time, made of brick and mud, while the other three looked relatively prosperous.

Arfat Ahmed, who lived in one of the houses, brought out chairs for us when I arrived there with the BSF officer. We sat in the courtyard, drinking tea and eating biscuits. Arfat lived in the house with his parents, wife and three brothers, and taught mathematics in a government school.

“Are you constantly reminded that you live on the border?” I asked him.

“Since the BSF people keep coming, we do feel so,” he laughed. For Arfat, who is 33, living on the border has been a way of life. The same goes for his father, Haji Naseeruddin, who was born nine years after the Partition. But the father has memories of the war that led to the birth of Bangladesh: he was 14 years old then.

“The Mukti Bahini would go through this courtyard to fight the Pakistan Army. They would come at night — back then the village was backward, no electricity, only lamps,” recalls Naseeruddin. “We could hear the battles being fought.”

Naseeruddin’s grandfather was among the four brothers who had built the four houses. When the officials had come to plant the pillar, Naseeruddin’s father had even objected. “My father asked them to move the pillar slightly westward, so that the entire family could remain in India. But the official told him, ‘I am following the map. If you make too much of noise, I am going to put this pillar inside your house.’”

I asked Arfat if I could briefly step into the house on the Bangladesh side — just to take a look. He led me in. The air smelt stale. The middle-aged woman I had spotted at the door when we had arrived was nowhere to be seen. I heard no sounds either. In the room we stood in, there were wooden benches, where he held tuitions for his students; Arfat would teach in an Indian school and give tuitions in Bangladesh. That’s how it is in Boxanagar. There are so many moss-coated boundary pillars amid houses that if you took a stroll through the village, you would be walking in and out of Bangladesh countless times.

Back in the BSF mess at Agartala, I typed ‘Tripura’ into Google search and clicked on the ‘news’ category. I was curious to see what kind of news emanates from a place as quiet as this. The news of the day: “Tripura HC bans private tuition by govt. teachers.” It seemed I had inadvertently met a teacher affected by the decision, that too in one of its remotest villages.