India, June 2 -- After spending more than 18 years as political prisoners in a Bhutanese jail, Chatur Man Tamang and Hasta Bahadur Rai began their journey back towards Bhutan on Tuesday evening, exhausted and disheartened after being denied entry into Nepal.

The two men, who were among the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese expelled from Bhutan in the early 1990s, had hoped to return to the refugee camps in eastern Nepal where they spent their childhood. Instead, they found themselves stranded at the Nepal-India border without any identification documents and with no country willing to accept them.

Tamang was about six years old and Rai around eight when they were forced out of Bhutan in 1992. More than three decades later, their memories of tha...