Nepal father walks 352km for missing son

Talka Sada, a 50-year-old farmer from Saptari in Nepal’s Terai region, has walked for days across mountains, borrowed $13 and worn out his shoes to search for his 19-year-old son Vinod, missing since devastating flash floods tore through northern Nepal on August 26.

Vinod had been working as a laborer at a hydropower plant in Rasuwa district, the area hardest hit by the floods. He mixed cement and did odd jobs alongside four other young men, all aged 17 to 19, who are also missing. The floods destroyed homes, schools, bridges, and power plants across a wide stretch of northern Nepal. Sada’s family, like many in the Madhesi community—an ethnolinguistic group with distinct cultural and caste identities in southern Nepal—has been left in limbo, torn between grief and desperate hope.

Sada’s exhaustion and frustration are visible. Wearing a faded white shirt, black pants, and an orange plastic bag as a makeshift raincoat, he carries a grey backpack and a crumpled handkerchief with less than $13 in borrowed Nepali rupees. He borrowed the money at 20% interest and traveled from Saptari to Kathmandu by bus, a nine-hour, 292-kilometer journey due to Nepal’s rugged terrain. In Kathmandu, he and his brother searched hospitals and morgues, where bodies often arrive decomposed or unrecognizable. No trace of Vinod has been found.

With no sign of his son, Sada walked another 60 kilometers toward Nuwakot, closer to where Vinod worked. Along the way, he passed Trishuli, a town where the market is buried under mud and debris. The journey has left Sada hungry, angry, and emotionally drained. “My wife is howling in grief. I am in deep pain myself,” he says, wiping tears. Every step is fueled by the faintest hope that Vinod might still be found—even as the odds grow slimmer with each passing day.