No hands to dig, no time to cremate

Sankarshan Thakur, TT, Sindhupalchok (Northern Nepal), April 29: This is where nature often marinates havoc before serving up tragedy for Bihar - the confluence of the Indravati and the Sunn Kosi which collaborate to make a frequent killing field of the Kosi's benighted floodplains downstream.

It isn't their turn to wreak turbulence this season though, at least not yet. Death has sprung from underneath them and cannoned into the skies, ripping whatever fell its way - habitations, cattle pens, orchards, vegetations, mountain bends and causeways, often plain rock.

To see the state of boulders pounded, you'd think 'rock solid' isn't a metaphor to use for impregnable strength anymore.

Where the quake passed, it plundered the mountain to powder and sent it down in showers. What survived the tremor underneath was buried from above.

Destruction has leapfrogged the hills of Sindhupalchok, scoring stab wounds in remote crannies that will take days, even weeks, to discover, much less heal.

"We've been left to ourselves all this time," Bishnu Tamang, a Nepal police constable, told us in Sangha Chowk, a remote hill hamlet. "Everything has collapsed, how much can we dig with human hands, people and cattle are still buried under. We haven't heard of help, we haven't been able to call for help."

Tamang, a strapping lad, his blue fatigues stained with the rigours of desperate rescue, complained, but he also spoke with faith and fortitude: "The truth is there's destruction everywhere, our turn to be found and helped will come."

They were a team of eight jawans, he said, too few hands to make a difference to the mayhem that had taken hundreds of families in its grip.

About 120km north-east of Kathmandu, Sindhupalchok is among Nepal's northern-most districts. It is also, in many parts, hard to access.

At Tatopaani, higher up, Sindhupalchok abuts China on a "Friendship Bridge" manned by the red-hatted People's Liberation Army (PLA); it's where the road to Lhasa leads from. But the road to Tatopaani currently lies breached by avalanches and rock falls.

There are too many parts of Sindhupalchok defying access; when they are finally reached by search and rescue teams, it may well turn out this patch was especially favoured for devastation. The toll from these parts has mounted swiftly over the past three days; it's estimated by district authorities to cross 2,000.

"Hundreds of villages are affected, we do not even know precisely which," said Ganesh Shreshtha, a junior, but only official at the sub-district offices in Chautara. "It is impossible to have an estimate of those dead or affected but bad news is coming all the time, and we do not have many resources, not even enough men."

Families escaped from affected villages were camped in Chautara's open spaces, left to their own devices. Some had pulled vinyl sheets overhead, one group had found a length of corrugated roofing. They had lit wood fires, the women cooked what there was, sitting haunched. The children rolled in the red dust.

From the gorge of Dolalghat, where the Indravati and the Sunn Kosi meet, we had climbed a steep road to come upon the windy spur of Sangha Chowk; it had been blown off its perch like a straw thing in the wind. On both sides of the road, the rubble of what were homes rolled down the slopes.

Under a surviving tree lay the body of a dead man, covered over in a sheet of plastic held down by bricks. Nobody had claimed the body, nobody seemed to know who the man was. Probably just a passer-by taken by shock. They would have to cremate him sooner, but nobody in Sangha Chowk seemed to have the time.

Just across from the dead man under the tree stood Ganesh Giri amid the ramshackle mess of what he had been able to salvage from his fallen home - a dresser, its mirror miraculously intact, a wrought iron television rack with the television gone, a few bowls and ladles, dust-laden cushions, torn bed sheets, his granddaughter's stuffed monkey toy.

Alas, the quake buried the girl, just six; by the time they got to pull her out, the rubble had asphyxiated her. "There are too many people down the hill and everywhere and there is no way to rescue them," Giri wailed.

"And there are lots of cattle heads and goats and material. People are so afraid for their lives, they would not even go into rescue because they fear another tremor will strike and they will be gone. Why can the government not come to help? Why do the helicopters just fly by and never land? Why have we been forgotten?"

Forget what doses of strife the Indravati and the Sunn Kosi might offer Bihar post-monsoon, at the moment the recipes are being readied for Nepal - a hot pot of public anger with liberal sprinklings of dereliction.