Gorkha, September 2
Seventy-five-year-old Dataram Devkota was among those scheduled to travel from Palungtar to Gosainkunda on a pilgrimage on August 26. His participation had been confirmed only the previous day.
Devkota had been told that the pilgrims would gather at 4 am and leave at 5 am. He spent the night packing his belongings and did not finish until around 1 am.
He had barely fallen asleep when he heard commotion outside. He stepped onto the veranda and saw that the bus had already arrived. “By the time I looked at the clock, it was already 3 am. I shouted, asking why they were leaving so early,” Devkota recalled. “I tried to stop the vehicle when it reached my house, but it did not stop. It drove straight to Mahadevatar and stopped there.”
He had told the people on the bus from the veranda that he would be joining them and asked them to wait. But the bus moved on without him. “The bus stopped at Mahadevatar for a while. I came out carrying my bags,” Devkota said. But just as he was about to leave, he suddenly remembered that he needed water. “I went into the kitchen to get a bottle of water. It took me some time to find it,” he said. “When I came back outside, the bus was no longer at Mahadevatar. It had already left.”
That brief detour to the kitchen to fetch a bottle of water meant Devkota missed the bus that was supposed to take him to Gosainkunda. That coincidence may have saved his life. “After missing the bus, I put all my belongings back inside the house and rested for a while. I kept regretting that I had missed the chance to go to Gosainkunda,” he said.
But after having breakfast that morning, panic suddenly spread through the village. “News came that the bus that had left without me that morning had been swept away,” Devkota said. “Until then, I had been feeling disappointed. After hearing that, I thought, ‘Thank God, I survived.’”
Devkota now feels that he was saved by divine intervention. “I feel that God blocked my way to save me,” he said. His son and daughter-in-law had also planned to travel to Gosainkunda that day, but they did not go either, he said.
Although Devkota survived by what he considers a stroke of luck, he remains devastated that 32 people from his village were swept away by the flood. The village of Naukhor is also mourning those who were carried away with the same bus.
