Stranded in Iran for 11 days, Bengal mountaineer finally returns home in Kolkata

As the Air India flight from Delhi touched down in Kolkata around 8 am on Monday, one passenger was struggling to contain a surge of emotions.

Advertisement

It took 40-year-old Falguni Dey, amateur mountaineer and a geography professor from Kolkata, 11 days of uncertainty and trauma to escape the conflict-torn terrains of Iran, which included some 3,000 km of road travel through the war-ravaged country in his bid to cross its borders, and return home to his wife and two-and-half years old daughter.

Awashed by a curious mix of relief, happiness, a hangover of trauma and a whole lot of gratitude for the Indian government which managed his rescue as one among the 2,295 citizens it has evacuated so far from the conflict-affected areas in West Asia via Operation Sindhu, Dey said he is simply glad that his nightmares in Iran are finally over.

Thanks to the efforts of the Indian embassy in Iran, Dey was among the 292 Indian passengers put on a special flight of the privately-owned Iranian airline, Mahan Air, which took off from the Mashhad international airport around 11 pm local time on Monday and reached Delhi around 4 am IST on Tuesday.

Dey then boarded a connecting Air India flight to Kolkata.

“Since the flight operator was an Iranian airline, we could fly over the Pakistani airspace, which is currently closed for Indian airliners, and reach Delhi in just three hours,” Dey said.

But that bit of relief aside, Dey had been running from one land border outpost in Iran to the next with hopes of crossing over to neighbouring nations since June 16, when he made a desperate attempt to escape from Tehran by road, only to find his applications getting turned down by one country after another.

PTI has been closely following and reporting on Dey’s ordeals ever since the mountaineer returned to Tehran on June 11 after his failed attempt to summit the volcanic peak of Mount Damavand in the northeastern fringes of the city.

He was supposed to fly out of Iran on June 13, but got stuck since the Tehran airport was shut down the previous midnight in the wake of the country’s conflict with Israel.

PTI had also reported how Dey, in his desperation to escape the city which was being bombed by Israeli missiles and drones, made a perilous 500 km journey on road to reach Iran’s Astara border with Azerbaijan on June 17, only to be frustrated by the Azerbaijani authorities who wouldn’t allow him to cross over without a special immigration code which he was eventually denied.

“I spent five nights at the commuters’ lobby at the international border crossing terminal at Astara with no money to afford a hotel. I ate at roadside eateries there and often gulped down the dry rice they cooked with soft drinks,” Dey recounted.

“After my cross-over permission to Azerbaijan was declined, I applied for a visa to Armenia, from where I could take a flight back home. But they, too, turned down my application. I had already made plans to travel another 600 km to the Armenia border by road on June 21, but realised that wouldn’t yield any result. So I took the same cab to make a non-stop 20-hour journey and travel another 1,600  km to reach the Iranian city of Mashhad from where Indian authorities were arranging evacuations for its citizens,” Dey continued.

But the nightmare wasn’t over yet. Dey was stopped by the Iranian police at Neyshabur, about 75 km ahead of Mashhad, thoroughly searched and interrogated for over two hours.

“They rummaged through every article of my luggage, found translators to go through my diary entries and even checked the apps on my mobile phone to ensure I wasn’t a foreign spy. I reached my hotel in Mashhad past midnight,” Dey said.

The tourist was hosted by the Indian embassy in Mashhad for the next two nights.

“The embassy fronted my lodging and food bills at Hotel Ehsaan where I was putting up. The entire hotel and some six other hotels in the neighbourhood were booked by the Indian government for its citizens seeking evacuation,” Dey said.

Dey added that he received a call from the embassy on June 23 informing him that he would be put on a special flight to Delhi later that evening.

“Five buses, each having some 60 people, reached the Mashhad international airport around 8 PM and put on the Mahan Air flight, which left around 11 pm. I was pleasantly surprised to see two officers of the West Bengal government who had come to greet me at the Delhi airport,” Dey said, adding, “no praise for the Indian government is enough”.

His nightmarish experience notwithstanding, the adventure sport enthusiast said this wouldn’t deter him from responding to the call of the mountains.

“I have plans to scale Mt Giluwe in Papua New Guinea in October. I have no intention of cancelling that trip,” Dey smiled.