San Francisco Frontiers - Nepali families hold symbolic funerals for missing after floods

Rozel Shrestha, 12, set fire to a tiny effigy made of straw and barley, representing his missing father, at Kathmandu's Pashupati temple on the banks of the Bagmati river.

His father, 37-year-old Krishna Shrestha, was in the worst-hit Rasuwa district when the floods struck on Wednesday. He has been missing ever since.

"We searched everywhere, went to morgues across the country, but could not find his body," his brother Jeevan Shrestha told AFP.

"So the family sat down... and decided we have to do our traditional rituals to liberate his soul."

Nearly 4,000 people are missing in Nepal following the collapse of a Himalayan glacier on the border with China that triggered a tsunami-like wall of freezing water and debris that killed more than 1,000 in the region.

The family of Chandra Bahadur Newar also conducted his funeral in a similar manner.

Truck driver Newar, 35, was in Nepal's border town of Timure en route to China when the disaster struck. He last spoke to his family the night before the floods.

"He had called after dinner as he always did," said his wife, Dolma Newar Tamang. "He had said he would be back in not more than a week."

When Tamang did not receive her husband's customary morning call, she thought he must simply have been busy.

"But then I saw the news and called him," she said. "I called repeatedly, but he never picked up."

- 'Set his soul free' -

Newar's family frantically searched for him.

Some headed north towards the site of the disaster, while others went downstream where hundreds of bodies had been swept away.

Tamang made multiple visits to hospitals and morgues in Kathmandu, where the family lives.

She said she finally made peace on Monday with the possibility that her husband may never come back.

"We had to do this to set his soul free, so that he is at peace and happy wherever he is," she said, flanked by her sobbing son.

At a cremation site in Kathmandu, the family of Mahesh Dangol prepared to bid farewell to him after delaying the funeral by a few days.

Dangol, 30, was one of the few people rescued from the almost wiped-out town of Betrawati, but he died of a lung infection in a Kathmandu hospital two days later.

His family had held off the cremation in the hope that there would be some news of his missing parents, wife and daughter, who were all swept away when the floods came roaring down.

But the family was told by hospital authorities on Tuesday that they could not keep his body any longer because they were running out of space, said Dangol's cousin, Sunil Dangol.

Only a handful of the more than 1,000 bodies recovered by authorities so far have been identified, stretching Nepal's already limited morgue capacity.

"It is unlikely anybody else will be found, so we have decided to go ahead with the rituals for the entire family," said Sunil.

Z.Sanchez--SFF