Tsering is 12 years old. He looks directly into the camera, curious about the equipment and the people gathered around him, seemingly unaware of why they have stopped to film him.
He does not know what the adults around him already know.
According to NDTV, Tsering is currently living with his grand-aunt, Mingmar Dolma, and his paternal grandmother in Kathmandu. He is among hundreds of people displaced from Rasuwa after devastating flash floods swept through their communities on August 26.
The disaster, triggered after a mass of glacial ice and rock broke away near the Nepal-Tibet border and surged down the river valley, has killed more than 1,300 people in Nepal alone, with thousands still missing and entire settlements wiped away, as reported by NDTV.
Tsering’s mother was Kammi. His father was Fursang. Both are dead.
But Tsering has not been told.
Instead, the adults caring for him have told him that his parents are somewhere in the forest. They tell him the roads have been destroyed and that it could take a year or two before his parents are able to return.
He believes them.
Sometimes, when Tsering sees the adults around him crying, he asks them why they are upset. At times, he cries too. When he asks about his parents, he is told that they have gone into the forest and that there is still no way to reach them.
Mingmar knows the truth.
“His parents are no longer in this world,” she says.
Tsering does not.
For now, the 12-year-old continues to wait for his parents to come home.
About 520 people from Rasuwa are now living at a monastery in Kathmandu after the floods destroyed their homes and communities and damaged roads and bridges, NDTV reported.
The grief is difficult to escape inside the monastery.
It can be felt in conversations between survivors, in groups of elderly people sitting together, and in parents watching over their children. Even when nobody speaks, there is a powerful sense of everything that has been lost and of the lives people were forced to leave behind.
Yet the monastery has also become a place where everyday life has had to be rebuilt from almost nothing.
At the entrance, an information centre records the names of people who have arrived. That list could eventually help families locate relatives who remain missing.
Further inside, medical staff attend to the displaced residents. Bathrooms and a communal dining area have also been arranged, allowing elderly people, parents and children to gather for meals. Some sit on plastic chairs, while others sit on the floor.
According to NDTV, a community kitchen prepares food for the hundreds of people staying at the monastery. Between the dormitory and dining area, sacks of grain, vegetables, crates of supplies and bottled water are stacked and kept ready for distribution.
The monastery has become more than just temporary shelter. For those who have lost their villages and homes, it is now a place where they are trying to survive while facing an uncertain future.
For the children, however, there are brief moments when the tragedy surrounding them seems to disappear.
There is a trampoline. There is a football. There are small tents for younger children, filled with building blocks, toys and games.
Older children run around and play, while younger ones sit inside the tents, absorbed in whatever is in front of them.
For a short while, the monastery becomes less about what has been lost and more about what children naturally do.
They play.
They laugh.
They run around.
They occupy themselves with toys and games.
And for those few minutes, the memory of the floods recedes from view.
They are simply children.
The play cannot undo what happened to their families or communities. It cannot bring back the people they lost or restore the homes that disappeared.
But, as reported by NDTV, these moments provide them with a brief reprieve from the grief surrounding them.
For a few minutes, they can simply be children again.
Shyam Bahadur Tamang, 40, had spent around 35 years living in his family home with his wife and children.
It was the place where they had built their lives, managed their expenses and raised their children.
On August 26, Shyam was travelling towards his village when he received a phone call warning him that a flash flood was coming and telling him to save his family.
He stopped his motorcycle and looked towards the village.
By then, he says, everything was already being destroyed.
His mother, elder brother and eldest daughter were at home.
When his brother saw the approaching flood, he told Shyam’s daughter to run. She hesitated, and her uncle pushed her towards safety.
She reached a place where the water could not reach her.
Then she turned back.
By that time, the house was gone.
So were her grandmother and her uncle.
Shyam says his brother had stayed behind with their mother.
“Which son would leave his mother?” he says.
As reported by NDTV, Shyam’s wife and children are now staying with him at the monastery. His mother and brother are not.
The family home that had stood for 35 years has disappeared, along with three settlements, the village below and the local market.
Many people were killed.
For families like Shyam’s, the disaster has not simply destroyed buildings. It has erased the physical foundations of lives built over decades.
When asked what returning home would mean now, Shyam says:
“How will we build? Where will the money come from?”
Before the flood, he says, his family lived within its means. They ate, managed their daily expenses and educated their children.
Now, he says:
“We have come down to zero.”
There are many families at the monastery in a similar situation, NDTV reported. They have lost their homes, livelihoods and the structures that once provided stability to their lives.
They now have to begin again.
Bujung is one of the volunteers helping survivors at the monastery.
But he is also a survivor carrying the loss of his own community.
He lost more than 50 people from his extended family, his village and among his friends.
His village had around 43 houses. But those homes represented much more than buildings. Families were connected across generations through fathers, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins and in-laws.
When the flood arrived, it tore through that entire network.
Bujung was away when the disaster happened.
He tried to return, but communication was almost impossible. There was no electricity in the village and no mobile network, leaving him unable to contact his family.
He spent hours waiting for information, unable to find out what had happened to the people he loved.
Now, at the monastery, he sees the same grief surrounding him.
During the day, Bujung says, people sit together and talk. Simply being around others who have experienced the same tragedy provides some comfort.
But when they are alone, the grief comes back.
They cry.
They remember their families.
They remember their homes.
They remember their villages.
“Even me also, I really miss my family. I really miss my village, my hometown,” Bujung says.
His words capture a grief that cannot be measured simply by the number of people missing or the number of homes destroyed.
For survivors, the disaster is personal. Every missing person has a name, a family, a story and a place in someone’s life.
Then there are the photographs.
Bujung begins placing them across a table, one after another.
Some belong to people from his village, people he knew and grew up with.
But the photographs are not only his.
They also belong to other survivors staying at the monastery.
There are photographs of mothers and fathers, children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, relatives and friends.
The faces continue to accumulate until there is barely any space left.
Eventually, the table runs out of room.
The table is simply too small for the scale of the loss.
According to NDTV, more than 50 people were lost from Bujung’s extended family and community alone, while about 520 survivors are now living at the monastery.
But numbers cannot fully communicate what it means to lose someone.
A photograph can.
Each face represents a life that once occupied an important place in someone else’s world.
A mother.
A brother.
A child.
A spouse.
A friend.
Each absence has changed the shape of a family.
The photographs make the scale of the tragedy visible in a way that statistics cannot.
By evening, the monastery begins to change.
The children have tired themselves out.
Families return to their sleeping spaces, carrying whatever they have managed to hold on to through another difficult day.
Some have photographs.
Some have a phone that might still ring with news.
Some have nothing except their memories.
Outside, Kathmandu continues with its daily rhythm.
Inside the monastery, however, around 520 people remain suspended between the lives they once knew and whatever comes next.
There is no village here.
No familiar mountain road.
No family home waiting for them.
No certainty about when, or whether, they can return.
There is only the monastery, holding them for now.
And there is the waiting.
For some, it is waiting for a home.
For others, it is waiting for roads to reopen.
For some, it is waiting for news about missing loved ones.
And for one 12-year-old boy, according to NDTV’s account, it is waiting for two people who will never walk through the door.
Tsering is still waiting for his parents.
He does not yet know that they are never coming home.