Renée Ranchan/ The Buffet Box
 
The television was on, of course. It is always on in our house, usually at a volume that suggests the anchors are addressing the nation from inside the drawing room rather than from a studio several hundred miles away. I was doing what one does while watching television without quite watching it—half-listening, half-attending to the business of the morning—when Nepal began pouring into the room.
It was Wednesday, the 26th of August.
High in the Himalayas, around 9 that morning, an enormous mass of ice and rock broke loose near the Nepal–China frontier and plunged into the Lhende Khola river. The exact mechanics are still being studied, but the consequence was immediate: a furious surge of water, mud, boulders and debris raced downstream, swelling the Trishuli River by metres in minutes. What followed was less of a flood than a wall of water with a memory of everything it had touched.
The images were almost overwhelming in their power. A bridge stood there and then did not. Trucks near the border were tossed about like toys. Roads painstakingly cut through the mountains vanished beneath a brown, roaring cascade. Buildings disappeared into the torrent. The Rasuwagadhi border complex was destroyed; bridges and stretches of road were swept away. The Bhote Koshi became the Trishuli, the Trishuli the Narayani, and eventually the Gandak—carrying the Himalayan fury into India.
A catastrophe, like water, has a way of finding its level. But among the images of shattered roads and uprooted buildings, there was a school.
At Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in Nuwakot, Wednesday morning had begun like every day. Children were in class, teachers were teaching, buses were ferrying students in. Principal Rajendra Dawadi was doing the rounds when the warning flashed. A friend upstream telephoned to say that a village had been swallowed by the river. Then a parent arrived, saying the water was rising rapidly.
Dawadi had minutes, not certainty.
He sounded the school bell and ordered the children out.Then, his voice tight with panic, he began calling the drivers of the buses still on the road, ordering them to turn back before the flood cut them off, and get to safer ground…One bus had already reached a bridge when the conductor saw the water rising; it managed to cross only moments before the bridge gave way. All 1,643 students somehow escaped to higher ground.
Then the school itself was swallowed up. The three-storey building, the primary block, the compound—all were swept away. Children who had been sitting in classrooms minutes earlier took refuge beneath a bodhi tree while the river tore through the place where their school had stood. Dawadi, who had once been a student there himself, lost his own home as well, yet the loss of the school was irreparable…
A school is never merely walls and furniture. It is the scrape of chairs, the smell of chalk, uniforms drying in the sun, the bell between periods, friendships made in corridors. It is the geography of childhood… To watch it carried away must be like watching a piece of one's own past being erased before one's eyes.
At another school, more than 370 children and teachers were having breakfast when a stranger came running down the road, screaming at the top of his lungs: a wall of water was hurtling towards them. In an age of satellites and sensors, a human voice running breathlessly down a road may still be what saves a life, what saves a child…
And then there is the geography again—the awkward, inescapable irony of China and Nepal sharing mountains, glaciers and rivers while information, responsibility and borders remain separate. Nepal and China had discussed Himalayan floods and glacier risks months before the disaster. Afterwards, Chinese authorities warned of another possible flood from a newly formed barrier lake upstream. The issue is too complicated for easy accusations, but the irony is plain: the mountains are shared, the rivers are shared, the danger is shared, yet the systems for seeing that danger are not always shared in the same way. The water did not stop at the border.
By the time it reached India, the Gandak was rising, and Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were put on high alert. In Maharajganj and Kushinagar, people watched the river with the dry-mouthed apprehension of those who know that its waters can change its mind in an instant.
On the 27th of August, a rescue team patrolling the Gandak saw something floating in the water. It was the body of a woman—ballooned, maimed, unrecognisable. By the weekend, ten bodies had been recovered from the Gandak in the two Uttar Pradesh districts, believed to have been carried down from Nepal. Their identities, of course,  were unknown…
That image stayed with me longer than the numbers.
Because numbers, however dreadful, have a way of becoming wallpaper. Hundreds dead. Thousands missing. Children displaced. Bridges destroyed. Hydropower workers trapped. The mind haphazardly absorbs the figures and then, mercifully or shamefully, stops being able to grasp them.
But a woman floating down a river is different.
A school disappearing is different. A principal standing on higher ground, watching the building in which he had once been a child, being swallowed by a river, is different. Those things have faces. That is our peculiar human limitation: we grieve the face we can see, the name we can remember; we struggle to grieve the numbers that represent them...
I watched the visuals, as I suspect millions did. For a while, the terror was in the room with me. I imagined the roar of the water, the children running uphill, the panic of knowing that the ground beneath your familiar life had become treacherous. Then the phone rang. Someone wanted something. There was lunch to think about. A message arrived. The doorbell ding-donged.
Life, with its astonishing insistence on the mundane, resumed.
It is tempting to call this apathy. Perhaps, usually, it is. But it may also be the human mind protecting itself. We cannot live even temporarily at the pitch of another person's grief. Naturally, the suffering of the world is too vast, and our lives keep making their own demands.
Yet, there is something troubling about how quickly the distance closes between, ``How terrible’’ and ``What shall we have for lunch?’’ The children could not look away. The principal could not undo what had happened. The woman who came floating into Uttar Pradesh could not come back to life. For those of us watching from afar, the tv could be switched off. The people of  Nepal had no such distance from the devastation.
We watched… the river rage. We watched bridges vanish. We watched a school disappear into mud and water. We watched grief arrive in our sitting rooms from a place that, until that morning, may have been little more than a name on a map.
And then we looked away…
What happens to another person's tragedy when it leaves our television screen?! Does it become less real because it is no longer visible?! How long does compassion survive without a picture to feed it?!
Perhaps that is the hardest thing the Nepal floods have left us with—not only the spectacle of nature's fury, but the uncomfortable knowledge of our own limits: how deeply we can feel for a stranger, and how quickly we must, or choose to, return to ourselves.
The water took lives, homes, bridges and schools. It also crossed every border we had drawn. Perhaps our grief should learn to do the same.
(Dr Renée Ranchan writes on socio-psychological issues, quasi-political matters and concerns that touch us all…)