Floods killed Narayan BK. He was buried as Prem Pun
This is a tragic story from Dhorpatan west of Baglung district where floods and landslides this year have killed 17 people while 21 went missing. Some have lost their entire families, while others are left only with children. Many have become squatters overnight, with nothing left of their own.
It was difficult to identify the deceased from the September 2 floods as their newly-unearthed bodies had rotten. This delayed their last rites.
As if losing his young son to the floods was not enough, Tul Bahadur BK of Dhorpatan-9 found that his 22-year-old son Narayan BK was mistakenly buried. “My head spun when I found out that my son had been buried by some other family,” he says.
The incident came to light after it was discovered that local police had handed over Narayan’s body to the family of another person—32-year old Prem Pun—who had also gone missing in the area. After Narayan’s body was handed over to Prem’s family by mistake, they buried it at Burtiwang Ghat on the same day. The next morning the police found Prem’s real body. The body was also handed over to the Pun family after postmortem. The family entered the real Prem Pun this time. But this deprived Narayan’s family the right to perform his last rites or even to see his deceased body one last time.
BK says he came to know about his son’s burial only after the completion of Prem Pun’s funeral. “Now it’s hard for us to accept that he is dead. We would have somehow accepted his death had we seen his deceased body. That chance of closure has now been denied to us,” says BK.
Even though he realizes that similar ages and body structures of the two dead youths might have led to the confusion, BK still finds it hard to come to terms with the incident. He is also livid with the police for handing over the first unearthed body to Pun’s family without informing him. “A family had to perform the last rites of their son twice and I did not even get to perform them even once for my own son. How should I console my family now?” he asks. BK has shaved his head after it was ascertained that his son’s body had been cremated. To compound his misery, his daughter-in-law and granddaughter are still missing from the September 2 flood.
The floods washed away 80 houses in Dhorpatan. Some evacuees are now living with relatives, while others are putting up in cattle sheds and makeshift tents.
