http://ads.indiatimes.com/ads.dll/popserv?otid=107&msid=974365&cid=621&mstype=2 NEW DELHI: On February 5, Sujata Koirala slipped out when the government guards outside her home in Kathmandu's Mandikhatar were changing shifts "or getting drunk." "Then I stayed with a friend for two days and we plotted my escape." Two days later, she dressed in a pair of jeans and a shirt, wore a friend's helmet and zoomed out on a craggy mountainous route towards Chitwan, 135 km south of the Nepalese capital. "There was a lot of checking and the Army and the Maoists were fighting. We saw them firing at soldiers from a mountain top as we rode by," she says. But with her face covered and a rucksack slung on her back, few soldiers suspected the woman, dusty after a nine-hour ride, to be one of the country's leading politicians and a key functionary of the Nepali Congress, trying to get an SOS to the outside world. At daybreak on February 9, she rode pillion again for another four hours to reach a village called Madi on the Indo-Nepal border in Bihar state. "I thought since I had successfully sneaked past so many checkpoints, I could slip past the border too," she says. But her friends in Madi warned against it, saying the border was teeming with military and intelligence men who were sure to recognise her. "So I began this nine-hour trek through a jungle that even villagers don't go into." The leafy forests around Madi, dark even during the day, are home to the Maoists, who are fighting to get rid of Nepal's archaic monarchy. But worse, these are now the hunting grounds for the military and of course there are the tigers to reckon with. "We saw pug marks," she says looking for an assurance at a friend who escorted her out of Nepal. "When I entered Bihar, I could barely walk. I asked an old man who was cycling home to his village if I could ride on the carrier," she says embarrassedly with the twitter of a naughty 16-year-old. Then from there she rode a vehicle that she had never seen before. "They call it jhajha. It's a tubewell pump attached to a wooden platform on wheels. But by that time I couldn't even stand, so the villagers made a bed of hay for me on the jhajha and I lay on it all the way to Ramnagar." On Friday, she arrived in New Delhi by train, the first stop on her journey to tell the world about how the king and his son were torturing Nepal. "I also want to go to London and of course to Shantiniketan, where I did all my schooling," she says. Sujata Koirala hopes that Indian politicians will help her and Nepal's democratic leaders to restore a representative government. "The people are trapped between the army's gun and the Maoists' barrel."