RESIDING IN BHUTAN: A WEATHERY STORY

 With the changing of seasons, winter arrived. Winter in Thimphu is no laughing matter. The cold is enough to make ice-creams of someone's blood. It is difficult to survive without proper heating at home. There was not a single day during this season when we didn't find the water in our taps frozen along with the drainage. For early risers it is literally hell, so we always made sure that we rise after 9 o' clock something so that we don't have to heat the pipes for washing ourselves.

                                                          

A Snowy Day

                  

A snowy day never meant a holiday for our father, on the contrary it was just another day with blood freezing cold and knee deep snow. 

                                                

Our Father on Duty

                

Our father being the maintenance in-charge of The Embassy as a defence personnel had to handle everything from power cuts to minor maintenance. Of course, as a result there was never a holiday for him since wherever humans live something or the other always tends to break by itself. Some of our father's additional responsibilities were handling of road maintenance and road development projects. These were handed to him because he was working under the GREF on deputation. The road maintenance responsibility included clearing rocks after a landslide on the roads. 

There was a site called Chhapcha where a road development project was underway. This area consisted of very thin roads and at times there were no roads at all. Even communication was difficult due to its high altitude and this was practically the most blood freezing area thousands of feet above of sea level and an utterly isolated area with no human beings in sight.

                                                     

"File:Phuentsholing and Chapcha milestone.jpg" by Bernard Gagnon is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

                                  

Our winter vacation soon ended and we were back to our quarter in Jaigaon, West Bengal, on the Indo-Bhutanese border. As I have mentioned before in one of my previous posts, our quarter was basically a tin shed which had been covered with plaster. Still some parts of it were still completely tin like our kitchen. And with the continuous problem of rats which were kind of our extended family, we lived in that quarter. I believe this situation has been faced by many other army families. In addition to this was our father's long absence which was interrupted by daily mobile calls. 

                                          

Me and My Friends in my tin shed kitchen in my tin shed home

                  

In those days, a Nokia mobile phone with a calculator like screen and BSNL connection was the norm in army families. There's one thing that I really like about BSNL is that you can get its signal on the most unthought of places like a Himalayan hill top. With the internet not much prevalent in the country and those mobile phones, there was no absolutely no video call.

                                                   

"File:Nokia 3310 phone.jpg" by Santeri Viinamäki is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

                   

There were many things we had to learn ourselves in the absence of our father like cycle riding. This way we grew in three years. We were really lucky than some of our friend's families who had not seen their father for over three years. It is quite common for army servicemen to not even realize when their kids grow up in their absence while they were serving on duty.

TO BE CONTINUED...........................................................