Rasuwa, September 3
Suchit Joshi of Bidur Municipality-1 was at work as usual on August 26.
A staff member at Tribhuvan Trishuli Multiple Campus, Joshi was busy helping enrol undergraduate students when he received a phone call from an elder relative warning him about a flood.
“A huge flood has come. Syabrubesi is about to be swept away,” the relative told him.
Joshi, who lives in the riverside area, initially thought it was another flood like those he had seen before. He did not expect the warning to mean anything on the scale that was about to unfold.
Then he heard the roar.
When he saw the flood surging towards them, he panicked.
“The flood is here. Run, run!” he shouted at everyone at the campus before rushing away on his motorcycle.
Amid the chaos, Joshi tried to find out what was happening to his family.
He saw his brother riding away on a scooter and assumed that meant the family was safe. If his brother had managed to get away, he thought, the others must have reached safety too.
They had not.
“I put a bank security guard on my motorcycle and headed uphill. I had no idea that my family was still down there,” Joshi told Onlinekhabar.
Of the eight members of his family, four remain missing.
His wife, Manju Shrestha; his seven-year-old daughter, Sumansingh Joshi; his brother’s wife; and his brother’s son have not been found.
Joshi has searched for them relentlessly. He has ridden his motorcycle through areas hit by the flood, returning again and again to places where he thought they might have been.
“I tried everything to find them. I went around the areas where the flood had entered on my motorcycle, again and again. But I couldn’t find them anywhere,” he said.
His brother’s infant child survived. The baby’s mother managed to carry the child with her to safety.
Since the flood, Joshi has searched almost everywhere he could think of—from early morning until late at night.
His face is worn from exhaustion and grief.
“I feel like my mind has gone blank. I search everywhere, but I can’t find them,” he said.
At one point, he even tried to enter the Trishuli River himself to search for his family. Police officers and friends stopped him.
There have also been moments that gave him reason to keep hoping.
While searching for his family, Joshi found his nephew and uncle. Two locals had rescued his nephew.
Finding him gave Joshi renewed courage.
“I kept searching to see if there was anyone else,” he said. “We found three more people.”
Among them was his uncle, Ram Joshi, whom he helped rescue.
His search gradually turned into a wider rescue effort. Five people joined his team, and they began helping others trapped by the flood. They rescued an elderly woman who had been stranded in the floodwater in front of her own house and took her to safety.
But every rescue brought him back to the same painful question: where was his own family?
Unable to find them, Joshi says he reached a breaking point.
“I screamed. I shouted. I called their names. I became almost like a madman,” he said. “There was no voice coming from anywhere.”
He even tried using whistles, hoping the children might hear them and respond.
Nothing worked.
“My every effort went in vain,” he said.
Joshi later joined security personnel in searching for his family.
During the search, they recovered three bodies from the Trishuli. They were badly damaged and could not be identified.
“We found three bodies in the Trishuli. They were in a condition where we couldn’t recognise them. There were insects on the bodies. Their heads had been crushed,” he said.
The bodies were recovered from behind his house. Jewellery was also found nearby.
Joshi believes the jewellery may have belonged to a neighbour who runs a jewellery shop.
But the hardest part of the search remains his daughter.
Seven-year-old Sumansingh was a Grade 1 student at Gyan Kunj School.
Joshi frequently breaks down when he remembers the things she used to say to him.
Whenever a helicopter flew overhead, she would point it out to him.
“Whenever a helicopter came from above, she used to say, ‘Dad, a helicopter has come,’” he recalled.
He also remembers the small gestures that once seemed ordinary.
“When I see other children scratching their fathers’ heads, I remember how my daughter used to scratch my head,” he said.
His daughter’s photograph is still the wallpaper on his mobile phone.
Every time he opens his phone, he sees her face.
And every time, the loss feels new.
Four members of his family remain missing, but Joshi has refused to stop helping others.
Even as he searches for his own loved ones, he has been trying to comfort other families caught in the disaster.
Drawing on his own experience, he urges them not to lose hope.
“My situation is like this, but I am enduring it and still continuing with the rescue work,” he said. “So please, don’t panic either.”
