She knows her 21-year-old son is deceased, but she did not have the opportunity to see him before his body was placed in its cremation shroud.
While knowing his fate after the catastrophic floods that killed over 1,000 people in Nepal and China offers some comfort, all she could manage was touching his shroud briefly to say goodbye before his cremation on Monday.
At a mass burial ground in Nepal’s Chitwan district, the Hindu rituals surrounding death—cremation, prayer, the final farewell—are being lost due to the sheer scale of the disaster as overwhelmed authorities are burying unidentified bodies because there are too many to keep or identify individually.
Twelve more bodies were fished out of the Narayani River in Chitwan, downriver from the flood-affected areas, within the last day, and fatalities continue to rise.
Another body arrives. Another gurney. Another journey across the sodden earth. Officials carry the gurneys, the stark white of their protective suits contrasting sharply with Chitwan’s lush green landscape, as the deceased keep arriving.