Kathmandu— Nine days after his father went missing in catastrophic flash floods that swept northern and central Nepal on August 26, killing more than 1,200 people and leaving almost 5,000 others missing, 23-year-old Sujan Achhami carried an effigy to the bank of the Bagmati River beside Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu and performed last rites on a stone used for corpse rituals. The priest read mantras and directed him to wash the body and offer a clay lamp and flowers, but the body was not real; it was made of sacred kusha grass, as grieving relatives are forced to say goodbye without remains.

Symbolic Rites On The Bagmati

Sujan Achhami laid the effigy on the Brahmanal stone next to Pashupatinath Temple while a priest conducted the ritual. The ceremony mirrored traditional Hindu practice, with washing, offerings of a clay lamp and flowers, even though no remains were present.

Khim Bahadur Gharti Magar performed the same symbolic last rites for his uncle Tham Bahadur Pun, 71, a former British Army soldier, and aunt Chausara Pun, 64, who were on a pilgrimage in northern Nepal when the flood hit. “We searched for them everywhere,” he says. “We couldn’t find them.” He said 17 buses were in the pilgrimage group and four other dead bodies from the group were found during the search, prompting the family to cremate symbolically. Sher Bahadur Pun, the deceased man’s son-in-law and a senior health official with the Nepal government, said the family has given DNA samples to police in the hope their identities might be traced later.

Families Search Amid Uncertainty

Dinesh Achhami, 41, a driver from Barabishe municipality in northern Nepal, was in Rasuwa — the district hit worst by the floods — when surging waters came down from Tibet. “We looked everywhere because we had no clear idea where he was hit,” says his uncle Raju Achhami.

Maniram Tharu narrowly survived the flood while working at the Upper Trishuli 1 hydropower project. His 30-year-old brother Dipendra, also a hydropower worker employed downstream, and sister-in-law Phool Maya Tamang, in her 40s, have been missing since the flood. “I cannot find their names on the list of those reported safe,” he says. “We don’t know where to go, what to do. We are worried. They have small children who are safe because they are living with other family members.”

Overwhelmed Authorities And Temporary Burials

The scale of the disaster has overwhelmed authorities. Nepal Police spokesman Abi Narayan Kafle says storing recovered bodies remains a major challenge. “The proper way would have been to preserve bodies until identification is established but we are not in that condition,” he says. “Many bodies are already in very bad shape, decomposed, some even in pieces, and cannot be preserved for extended periods.”

Authorities are temporarily burying unidentified bodies with the aim of exhuming them once identities are established. Out of 1,344 bodies recovered so far, a total of 1,030 bodies have been buried in this way. Just 96 bodies have been handed over after being identified by families, authorities say. According to Kafle, the bodies have been properly numbered and buried at various sites in Chitwan, Nuwakot, Rasuwa, Kathmandu, Pokhara and other regions of Nepal. He said police have collected DNA samples from all bodies found so far before burial “to enable identification and matching with families later”.

Religious And Public Reaction

Many in Nepal have been outraged by the government’s decision to carry out mass temporary burials of the deceased, describing it as going against Hindu religious traditions.

At the bank of the Bagmati next to Pashupatinath Temple, a veteran priest tells Al Jazeera that the past two days have been among the busiest he has witnessed since the 2015 earthquake, in which nearly 9,000 people died. Then, he said, most families “at least had bodies” to cremate. As Nepal deals with its latest humanitarian crisis, the priest is helping carry out symbolic cremations and says they’re legitimate according to Hindu scriptures. “It’s a terrible scene here,” he says.

Fewer than one in ten recovered bodies have been formally identified, and families continue to perform symbolic cremations on the Bagmati while authorities maintain temporary burials and DNA collection in hopes of later identification and return of remains.

(With inputs from Al Jazeera)

Originally published on abcnews.com.np.