A chilly breeze blew through the rutted lane when Deepjyoti Neog, 26, left his house on the morning of 23 December 2023 without informing his mother, Pramila Neog.

She didn’t think much of it until later, for he occasionally spent nights with friends.

A little later that day, roughly 2 km away, Munmani Borgohain repeatedly called her husband, Biswanath Borgohain, 34, on his mobile phone. He had stormed out after a heated exchange between the two.

The Neogs and the Borgohains live in Chapakhowa, a town in the Sadiya subdivision of north-eastern Assam’s Tinsukia district, which sits on the foothills of the Himalayas, more than 470 km east of Guwahati.

Biswanath Borgohain finally answered his panic-stricken wife’s calls around 7.30 pm. He was in Roing, he told her with some irritation. Roing is a town in neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh, a 30-minute drive north of Chapakhowa, and he was celebrating ahead of the new year.

“He was drunk, miffed at me for calling him frequently, and said he wouldn't return home ever,” said Munmani Borgohain, in her early 30s. “He switched off his phone.”

Around the same time, a cloud of anxiety descended in Manoj Buragohain’s house, in the Nijarapara neighbourhood of Chapakhowa. Manoj Buragohain, a bus driver plying on the road between Assam and Arunachal, always returned home on time, but that evening phone calls to his number went unanswered, said Priyanka Buragohain, his wife.

A television news bulletin the following morning said Deepjyoti Neog, Biswanath Borgohain and Manoj Buragohain, all three former Assam State Transport Corporation (ASTC) employees, were injured in police firing. The three had been on their way to Myanmar to join the proscribed United Liberation Front Of Assam-Independent (ULFA-I), according to the report.

The ULFA-I is an armed separatist group that broke away in 2011 from the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA).



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