Early on Thursday morning, he received a call about a disastrous landslide in his village. Upon hearing the news broken to him by a friend from Australia, he became terrified and rushed towards his home. However, he found no trace of his home or his family.
"My mother, wife, daughter and granddaughter - the thick debris took them all away," he lamented. "I had adopted my granddaughter when she was only 13 months. She had recently turned 13," he sobbed, adding, "If only I could see her one last time."
Devokata's biological daughter was 17 and his wife 60, while his mother was over 80. Police personnel reached the site only on Thursday evening and started the recovery operations.
Another victim, Sanjeeta BK, also lost most of her family. Like Devilal, she also had survived the catastrophe only because she was not home at that time. Sanjeeta had been staying at her uncle's home to pursue higher studies. She recently passed the SLC exams.
"I couldn't bear to watch the police excavating the site where my home had stood just a day before," said Sanjeeta. Unable to watch the salvage of the bodies of members of her family, she has been sheltering at her neighbor's house.
Sanjeeta lost her 80-year-old grandfather Basanta, grandmother Batuli,her mother Cheej Maya, brother Samil, and sisters Samjhana and Salina. Her father, Ram Bahadur, is currently working in Saudi Arabia and he might not have been informed about the disaster yet.
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