As dead bodies overwhelm Nepal’s Chitwan, relatives face a new protocol to find loved ones

BHARATPUR, NEPAL/BENGALURU - Biresh Kumar Sah was seated on a red carpeted floor. Like many other Gen Z youth, the 18-year-old wore a Japanese manga T-shirt and had his eyes glued to a screen. But what Sah was looking at is something no teenager should ever have to see.He was scouting for images of his dead father and younger brother on a morbid slide show playing in an endless loop on a TV at a temporary body identification camp in Bharatpur, the largest city in Nepal’s Chitwan district. On display were photos of swollen and mutilated bodies recovered in and around the district following the devastating flash flood in Tibet and northern Nepal on Aug 26. If he happens to recognise anyone, the authorities would take his DNA sample to match with those they had collected from the dead before temporarily burying them.This new procedure is a first for Nepal, as it attempts to manage the surge of decomposing bodies. The flood has taken more than 1,000 lives and the Nepali government hopes that this protocol offers an organised and dignified way for relatives to identify their loved ones.Sah’s missing relatives are presumed to have been killed when a school in Betrawati in Nuwakot district, where Sah’s father worked and brother studied, was washed away in the mudslide that came hurtling along the bed of the Trishuli river.Sah came to Bharatpur on Aug 30 from his home in Siraha district, located on the country’s southern lowlands and on the border with India, hoping to find their bodies. Poring over the photos of the dead has been “too difficult” an experience, but something he has endured nonetheless in his desperate bid to find his father and brother. Sah, unfortunately, had no such luck that day. “Whatever little hope I had, that too has gone now,” he said.Chitwan, a district in southern Nepal and on the border with India, is over 200km from Rasuwa and Nuwakot, two other districts worst hit by the flash flood in the north. Famed for its eponymous national park that is home to the single-horned Asiatic rhinoceros, Chitwan is now an epicentre of the fallout from this tragic disaster. Biresh Kumar Sah (left) outside the temporary body identification camp in Bharatpur on Aug 30. His father and brother are missing since the flash flood. ST PHOTO: DEBARSHI DASGUPTANearly 300 bodies have been recovered here along the Trishuli and Narayani rivers and more are washing up each day, transforming the life-giving streams into conveyor belts of dead bodies.Distraught family members from across Nepal and even abroad are now in Chitwan to search for their loved ones, as overwhelmed local authorities struggle to cope with the sudden downstream surge in bodies. Bodies are also washing up farther downstream in India.A senior bureaucrat in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh bordering Nepal told The Straits Times that 21 bodies were recovered from the Gandak River – as Nepal’s Trishuli is called in India. The bodies had drifted downstream to the Kushinagar and Maharganj districts in India, five days after the flood more than 160km away in Nepal. In the Indian state of Bihar, too, where the same river flows, flood-affected bodies reportedly washed up, but ST was not able to confirm the total number. The small riverside towns are all struggling to manage hundreds of fast-decomposing bodies. In Nepal’s Bharatpur, a derelict government building was transformed into a temporary home for the dead, as the city’s morgues ran out of capacity.Pots with tags that will be used to identify each body in its burial site in case it needs to be exhumed following a DNA match with any living family member. ST PHOTO: DEBARSHI DASGUPTAAir-conditioners had been requisitioned and dry ice brought in, but Anil Thapa, an inspector with Nepal Police in Chitwan, told ST that they struggled to maintain sub-zero temperatures to preserve the bodies. “Bodies are decomposing and it is very difficult to keep them in the holding centre or hospitals because the smell from the bodies ends up going… into the society, to the community,” he said. On Aug 30, there were 103 bodies at the Bharatpur centre until it was cleared out later in the evening. The stench of the dead hung in the air outside the centre, wafting over the lemony fragrance of floor cleaners and sanitisers. “It is so strong that I don’t know when I will fall sick,” said a police official deputed there on the condition of anonymity. Anil Thapa an inspector with Nepal Police in Chitwan, told ST that they struggled to maintain sub-zero temperatures to preserve the large number of dead bodies. ST PHOTO: DEBARSHI DASGUPTAAs the bodies rapidly decompose, the authorities in Chitwan are now following a new protocol approved by the Nepali government. Once pulled out from the river, the victims’ bodies are no longer kept in a morgue. They are buried in body bags in a cleared forested patch in Devghat, where a temporary mass grave has been prepared for hundreds of bodies. The authorities are doing so after photographing them and retaining DNA samples from each body, so that the bodies can be exhumed if they match with family members in the coming weeks.Suraj Sharma, a forensics expert at the government’s Bharatpur Hospital, said they have retained samples from teeth or from a bone in case bodies show up headless.On Aug 30, when ST visited the site of the mass grave, Thapa said 199 bodies had already been “managed” under the soil – or buried temporarily – there. At least 60 more bodies were expected that day. At times, a body has just amounted to a hand or a leg; others had shown up without a head. “It is very difficult to see, very difficult to manage, very difficult to take photographs,” Thapa added. “Even the (civil) photographers we have sought support from are not able to click more than five or six photos.”The post-mortem unit at Bharatpur Hospital in Chitwan district. ST PHOTO: DEBARSHI DASGUPTASteel plates with identification numbers were laid out at the edge of the burial site, to be used later as grave markers. The tag count in Devghat had already touched 291, and Thapa added that the grave site could manage as many as 500 bodies. The decision has been controversial among Nepal’s Hindu population who cremate their dead, and among families of missing foreigners who fear they will not be able to receive the mortal remains of their loved ones. But Ajay Uprety, a humanitarian worker from Nepal, who is now based in Kabul, Afghanistan, told ST that Nepal is simply following “a universal protocol called management under the soil”, used in war and disaster-hit areas across the world. It is a working procedure that has been used by agencies such as the International Committee for the Red Cross during the Ebola crisis, and the World Health Organisation in other countries, he said. A team from the Nepali army on patrol along the bank of the Trishuli river in Chitwan district on Aug 31. ST PHOTO: DEBARSHI DASGUPTAAlthough Nepal has been hit by other disasters in the past, like an earthquake in 2015, this is the first time the country is storing bodies under-the-soil. The 2015 earthquake killed over 8,900 people, but Uprety who was a frontline worker rescuing people then said that most bodies were found just under the rubble of their own houses or workplaces, with bodily identifying marks still largely intact. The flood presented unique problems that required this new solution. “The bodies being pulled out now have been exposed to water and would be decomposing fast because of bacterial infections. Moreover, people’s bodies have travelled far from their home districts, so the relatives are not around to identify them,” said Uprety, who hails from Nuwakot and has himself lost family members. Deepak Chapagain, founder of Volunteer Corps Nepal that is conducting rescues and distributing relief materials in Nuwakot and Rasuwa, the worst hit districts, told ST that the district hospitals and morgues here did not “have the capacity to keep this many bodies in cold storage. So we are sending them to specific areas, where the Nepal police and army follow a nine-step process to collect DNA and details before temporarily putting them under the soil.” Curious onlookers look at the swollen Narayani river in Bharatpur in Chitwan district. Many bodies washed downstream from northern Nepal have been found along its bank. ST PHOTO: DEBARSHI DASGUPTAMost bodies his team pulled out were naked, Chapagain told ST, as the flood’s force had ripped their clothes off. “Without clothes, jewellery, any IDs or wallets, an unconscious person or dead body is that much harder to identify.”The nine-step procedure outlined by Nepal’s Ministry of Health and Prime Minister’s Office for unidentified victims starts with a detailed profiling of the dead, including recording the geolocation of where the body was found, and any marks or IDs like passports. Photos are taken, and then a post-mortem done to verify the cause of death. The identification is formally established with family members. If this does not happen, fingerprints, DNA or forensic samples are collected, and the body is kept under the ground in a body bag, with overground signage to mark the location. In Chitwan, as this sobering process was underway for hundreds of people, the country seemed to rise together in grief and solidarity. A union of tuktuk drivers offered free services to devastated families looking for their missing ones. Another union of hotel owners offered them free lodging and food, while a local Internet service provider pitched in with free Internet for them.Volunteers too came forth, working selflessly for hours including at the help desk in Bharatpur set up with support from the Chitwan Association of Industries. Shweta Dhakal, 30, a local healthcare activist in Chitwan, was helping families trace bodies.“At first it was quite difficult to see and handle, but at least, I feel I am contributing, that I am not sitting at home just like that and scrolling (through my feed),” she said.A Nepali army personnel, leading a team of rescuers in Chitwan, admitted that it had been traumatising to retrieve bodies from along the river banks. “We feel the pain inside but we cannot express it,” he added without sharing his name, while on a search mission along the Trishuli river in Devghat’s forest. “If we cry, others will cry even more.” In Dhading, Chapagain said his friend who worked as a human resources manager in a hydropower project was missing, and her husband, an armed police official who was coordinating rescues in the same region seemed to be working in the desperate hope that “everyone he pulled out would turn out to be his wife.” In Bharatpur, around 160 bodies were on display on the slide show on Aug 30, chosen by the local authorities because they stood a chance of being identified. Yet, for many, they looked disturbingly alike; all were naked, bloated because of decomposition, skin peeling off and wounded. It was near impossible to tell them apart. Relatives in the outreach centres across Nepal kept their eyes peeled for any discernible trait on the bodies: a woman with a gold tooth in her upper jaw, another with a square gold earring, a man with a Maori tattoo on his right arm and a boy with his navy blue school tie embossed with its initials UPESS still on his body.Several bodies have been claimed by more than one family, a dispute that the authorities will resolve in the coming weeks using DNA tests. Shiva Khadka, 40, who has been coming to the camp in Bharatpur daily since Aug 27, thought he had spotted in the slide show the face of his cousin, Santosh Khadka, a truck driver reported missing from Rasuwa district. Shiva Khadka (left) has been coming to the temporary body identification camp in Bharatpur daily since it was set up on Aug 27, looking for his missing cousin Santosh Khadka. ST PHOTO: DEBARSHI DASGUPTABut when he asked the police to check if the body had a tattoo that read “My love Muna” on the right arm, the authorities told him there was no such marking. The tattoo was his 35-year-old cousin’s statement of love for his wife. Even in the morbid, devastating scenario around him, Khadka looked for that indelible ink on the photo of every dead body. There have been a few miraculous survival stories. He hoped his loving cousin would be one of them.