There are moments in a person's life when leaving home is not really a choice.
In this Katha Hijo Ko interview, an elder remembers the uncertainty surrounding his departure from Bhutan during the political turmoil of the 1990s. His memory does not come to us as a neat timeline. It comes through fragments: conversations, warnings, soldiers, a home left behind, movement from one place to another, and eventually Nepal.
That is often how lived history survives. Not as a list of dates, but as the moments a person never forgot.
When staying became uncertain
One of the clearest memories in the interview is being told that he could no longer continue living as before.
He remembers warnings that he should not remain there. The message, as he recalls it, was serious enough that staying was connected with fear for his safety.
“You cannot stay here.”
The interview repeatedly returns to the presence of the army and to the atmosphere surrounding those days. What had once been ordinary life had become uncertain. Decisions about where to live, whether to remain at home and where to go next were no longer ordinary personal decisions.
The army came
He remembers the arrival of soldiers and the sight of a military presence around the area. In his telling, the arrival was not an abstract political event happening somewhere far away. It reached the home itself.
The transcript preserves fragments of a moment in which people were preparing to leave and belongings, food and the household became part of the confusion. Some details of this section are difficult to hear clearly, but the central memory is unmistakable: the security situation had entered everyday life.
Home no longer felt like a place where the future could simply continue.
Leaving home
Eventually, departure became part of the story.
The interview describes movement away from Bhutan and towards India before Nepal became part of the journey. It was not presented as an organised migration with everything prepared in advance. The recollection is instead filled with uncertainty — where to stay, how long they could remain somewhere, who would accept them and what would happen next.
Those details matter because the word migration can sound simple when written many years later. For the person living through it, however, it meant leaving familiar surroundings without knowing where life would settle again.
Through India and towards Nepal
India appears repeatedly in his recollection as part of the route after leaving Bhutan. From there, the journey continued towards Nepal.
The surviving transcript contains references to periods of waiting, moving again and questions about where people could stay. Exact durations and numbers are unclear in the available transcription, so they have not been reproduced here.
What is clear is the larger experience: leaving one country did not immediately produce safety or permanence. There were further movements before Nepal became the place where the next part of life unfolded.
Arriving in Nepal did not erase what had happened
Reaching Nepal changed the geography of the story, but it did not erase the memory of Bhutan.
Throughout the conversation, the speaker moves backwards and forwards between what happened there, the people involved, the journey away and the situation that followed. Years later, those experiences remain connected.
For someone listening today, it can be tempting to reduce a story like this to a political event or a movement of people between countries. Oral history gives us something different.
It shows what those events looked like from inside one person's life.
A history carried by the people who lived it
Official histories can record governments, policies, borders and dates. Personal testimony records different details: the warning somebody gave you, the sound or sight of soldiers arriving, the decision to leave a house, the uncertainty of the road and the question of where you would be allowed to live next.
Those memories are not separate from history. They are part of it.
This interview is one such record — a recollection of leaving Bhutan during a period of upheaval, passing through India and eventually reaching Nepal.
It is also a reminder of why these conversations need to be preserved while the people who experienced them can still tell the story in their own voices.
Editorial note: This article is based on the original Nepali-language Katha Hijo Ko interview and has been organised into English for readability. The available transcription contains several unclear passages. Names, dates, numbers and other details that could not be established confidently from the testimony have intentionally been omitted rather than reconstructed or guessed.
