The massive earthquake of April 25 has shocked us all. The biggest tremors in 80 years have destroyed houses, monuments and have even swept whole villages. I feel lucky to be alive, but sadly for more than 7,000 people, luck was not on their side that day.
I’ve been photographing what I’ve seen since then. A week after the earthquake, I headed to Sindhupalchowk District. This was where more than half of the total casualties took place. I started from Sankhu and ended up in Chautara. The further I went, the more destruction I could see. No one knew the exact scale of loss.
I also saw that there were more than enough relief materials but there was problem in distribution. Accessible places had received enough relief materials but, according to locals, more remote places, to which one has to walk a few hours to reach, had got nothing.
On the road, at some point, partially damaged houses and even collapsed houses became a very common sight for me. In most of them, there were people searching for their belongings in the debris. Just before I reached Chautara, the sight of a village named Sapkota Gaun made me cry. The whole village was collapsed. Not a single house was standing.
I met Narayan Sapkota who was clearing the debris of his collapsed house. He was in Kathmandu at the time of the earthquake. His father and mother lived there. His mother is safe but his father who had gone to Chautara was missing till that day. Moving a little further to the other part of the same village, there was that putrid smell of corpses. A villager told that there were dead animals and a dead body still buried in the rubble. They couldn’t take dead bodies of 17 people to the river for cremation; so they buried all those bodies in a jungle nearby.
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This was just a small portion of the total fatality that I saw in a single day. And all those places had access to roads. What might have happened in the more remote places is something I don’t even want to imagine.
Amidst all the chaos, I had stopped at Bhotechaur at the beginning of my journey in the morning. Sarita Chaulagain was cooking in front of her collapsed house while her in-laws were constructing a temporary place to stay. Even though everyone in the family escaped without injury, they lost their house.
After talking to them for a while and taking photographs, they offered me something to eat before leaving. Even during such a time of grief, hospitality was something that came naturally to them. When I refused, her mother-in-law insisted that I have at least a glass of milk.
I told her I would come back when everything was okay and bade them goodbye. Now that I’m back in Kathmandu, I often think about them and all the other families I met and keep my fingers crossed that someday I shall be able to keep the promise I made to that loving, old lady.
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