• 5,130 people are still missing
I keep coming back to that number. Not because I can comprehend what 5,130 people means, but because I know that each of those numbers belongs to someone who is waiting for an answer.
As I write this, 1,388 people have been confirmed dead following the floods and landslides that have devastated parts of Nepal over the past few weeks. We have become accustomed to seeing these numbers in the news: the death toll, the number missing, the number rescued, the number of houses destroyed. They give us a way of measuring a disaster, but they don't tell us much about what happens to the people who are left behind.
Over the past few weeks, I have watched countless videos and read numerous reports about what happened. But I also had the opportunity to see some of it firsthand. I went to Nuwakot and later to Chitwan, where bodies were being collected and identified. I met people who had lost entire families, parents who had lost their children, people who had lost their homes and livelihoods, and people who were still looking for their pets.
What stayed with me was not the destruction. It was the uncertainty surrounding it.
We tend to think about disasters in terms of a clear division between those who died and those who survived. But when someone is missing, there is no such clarity. Their family is left somewhere between hope and grief, unsure whether they should continue waiting or begin accepting that the person they love may never come back.
I saw what that uncertainty looked like in people I met.
There was a mother who had been waiting for her son. After days of hoping, she had finally reached a point where she no longer believed he was coming back. She could talk and even smile, but then suddenly she would break down. Watching her, I realized that grief does not always look the way we expect it to. It doesn't necessarily mean crying continuously or appearing visibly devastated. Sometimes it means carrying on with an ordinary conversation while something inside you has completely changed.
I met men who barely expressed any emotion. They were physically strong, well-built men who stood quietly amid the destruction. I had no way of knowing what they were feeling, and perhaps that was one of the most difficult things about being there. We can observe someone's reaction, but we can never really know what is happening inside them.
I met a 19-year-old who could barely speak. She had lost her father and was waiting to reconnect with her sibling. I tried talking to her, but there was very little I could say. It made me uncomfortable to realize how often we rely on phrases like "stay strong" or "everything will be okay" when faced with someone else's suffering. Sometimes neither is true, and sometimes the only honest response is to admit that you don't know what to say.
Then I met a family whose son was missing. His father was giving a DNA sample so that, if his son was among the dead, they could at least identify him.
That was perhaps the moment when the scale of the numbers became real to me.
"5,130 missing" sounds like an enormous statistic. But a father giving his DNA to identify his own son is not a statistic. It is a person waiting for an answer about someone he loves.
And this is the part of disasters that I don't think we talk about enough.
We document the moment everything collapses. We film the floods, the landslides, the destroyed houses, the rescues and the bodies being recovered. We count what can be counted. But there is much less attention on what happens once the immediate crisis begins to fade.
What happens to the people who are rescued but have nowhere to return to? What happens when your home is gone, your belongings are gone and the people who made that place feel like home may be gone too? What happens when the cameras leave and the news cycle moves on?
Eventually, most of us return to our routines. The videos disappear from our feeds, the headlines move on to something else, and the numbers become part of the record of this disaster. But for the people I met, there is no simple return to normal. For some of them, the life they knew before the disaster simply no longer exists.
This was the first time I had been this close to a tragedy of this scale. I don't want to pretend that I understand what these people are experiencing. I don't. But being there made me realize how easily we turn human tragedies into numbers because numbers are easier to comprehend.
A death toll is easier to process than a father waiting for his son. A missing-person count is easier to understand than a family spending days searching for someone they love. A photograph of a destroyed house is easier to look at than the person standing in front of it trying to figure out where they will live tomorrow.
Perhaps that is why I keep thinking about the people who were still waiting when I left.
Someone was waiting for a rescue. Someone was waiting for a phone call. Someone was waiting for a name. Someone was waiting to find out whether the person they loved was alive.
And someone was waiting to find out whether they should finally begin to grieve.
(Bickey Kr. Chaudhary is a filmmaker based in Kathmandu. He was in Nuwakot and Chitwan accompanying international media teams, assisting with their coverage of the disaster while also documenting the aftermath for a documentary project of his own.)