When the body arrived, a few weeks after the worker’s death in a faraway country, it was nearly 9 p.m. and the village was in darkness.
Since so much time had passed and no one could be sure of the condition of the remains, the family did not risk stopping at home. So the truck, quietly pulled by a crowd of villagers, drove to the bank of a dry river, where the men were setting up pyre.
There, under the soft moonlight, the villagers opened the coffin of janitor Rakesh Kumar Yadav with pliers and axes. “Show us his face,” one man shouted. When the incident was revealed, the worker’s widow, Renu Devi Yadav, tried to pull her children away and kissed her son’s wet cheeks. The fire is ready from afar.
In the small Himalayan country of Nepal, hundreds of thousands of people go abroad every year in the hope of building a future out of the country’s deep poverty, an outflow so strong that remittances account for more than a quarter of Nepal’s economy.
And every year, hundreds of these migrants die — unraveling, instantly, fragile dreams thousands of miles away. Mr. Yadav, 40, died while working as a security guard in Dubai. Others work as workers or drivers in places like Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. In Qatar, host of the World Cup, migrants from Nepal and other countries, mainly in Asia, are the backbone of a yearlong construction attack for the biggest football event in the world.
In real life, men like these layers unequal and vulnerable. It also stalks them on their final journey home. Struggling countries like Nepal have little leverage to speed up the return of bodies left in the morgues of rich nations. Bereaved families have to rely on the mercy of middlemen, government employees and even the harsh mountainous terrain.
The simple wish for a dignified cremation—the prompt completion of rites immediately after death is central to salvation in the Hindu faith—became a tribulation.
Mr Yadav, whose coffin was delivered this spring to his village in southern Nepal, died three months after arriving in Dubai and before sending the money home.
When his wife asked a recruitment agent what happened in Dubai, the agent gave a simple answer: Her husband “couldn’t wake up from sleep”. The death certificate from the United Arab Emirates attributed his death to “heart failure and difficulty breathing”.
Mr. Yadav has turned to a variety of jobs abroad, borrowing thousands of dollars to pay employers each time his contract expires, as opportunities at home are limited. The fertile land of his village shrank after each flood; The only off-farm job he could find – as a substitute teacher – wasn’t enough to make ends meet.
The Yadav family, in search of a better life, lived separately in three places.
When Mr. Yadav worked hard abroad, his three teenage children lived in a rented room in the town closest to the village, where they attended a private school. His wife remains the breadwinner at home: She looks after her elderly in-laws, negotiates to be patient when creditors in the village knock on the door, and stays within budget by packing vegetables, lentils and rice for the kids when they come home for the weekend.
Their three little worlds are lonely, connected by occasional video calls late at night and by the belief that this is the path to stability. if the kids graduate and become doctors or engineers.
In the glitzy city of Dubai, Yadav works as a security guard at a hotel. He sent the family a photo in his new uniform: his heels together as if they were being noticed by the military, the bottle of Fanta he uses to drink water visible in the corner of the frame.
During his family’s late-night phone calls, he complained that he didn’t have enough shifts to help cover the growing debt at home.
The last time his son Ram Bikash spoke to Mr Yadav was near midnight on March 9, when his brother and sister were sleeping in a shared room. The video call lasted about 15 minutes.
Ram Bikash said: “’Good night,’ he told me before ending the call. “He is smiling.”
When Mr. Yadav died the next day, the ramifications occurred immediately. What will happen to the children’s education, to their future? Who will pay the debt of tens of thousands of dollars with interest compounding every month?
But before anything could be reckoned with, the family had to bring the body home for final rites.
During the pandemic, with limited flights, families feel lucky even though it takes months to receive the body of a loved one. Hundreds of others are faced with the fact that the cremation will take place abroad. Most did not even receive the ashes.
More than a dozen insurance agencies offer death and disability insurance packages to migrant workers. In the event of an injury, different amounts are paid based on whether the worker lost a toe, finger, or hand or foot. In the event of death, insurance covers transportation costs up to $800 and the family is paid about $10,000.
In the past decade alone, Nepal, a country of 29 million people, has authorized more than 4 million workers to work abroad – and that number does not include millions more working across its open border with the country. neighboring India.
The Nepalese government has helped bring back about 3,500 bodies over the past five years. Heart-related problems are often cited as the leading cause of death, followed by other illnesses, traffic and workplace accidents, and suicide.
When Mr Yadav’s body finally arrived in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, on April 13 – five weeks after his death – the coffin was pushed out on a stretcher from the side gate of the airport terminal, near the entrance. exclusively for migrant workers.
The coffin was then raised to the back of the truck, and the driver, Purna Bhadur Lama, tied the coffin to the left side of the truck with a rope. He began his eight-hour journey, winding and relaxing through the lush hills, to the family village.
Lama has his own migration story: his last stint began in 2006 in Qatar, where he spent only a year and a half.
He said that in 7 years of transporting coffins, he has transported about 1,500 bodies. He gets about $15 per delivery. Depending on the number of bodies arriving, some months he makes around $230, other months $270. It was a solitary job, often with only a dead body in the background. Once, during the height of the pandemic, he drove 500 miles with only one jar of ashes.
After Mr. Lama arrived in the village with Mr. Yadav’s body, Mrs. Yadav cried as she hugged her crying son and daughter.
When the coffin was opened on the riverbank and Mr Yadav’s face was revealed, many villagers covered their noses. A woman moves in to place a kiss.
Finally, the women and children began to leave, their cries fading into the village. The men crouched by the pyre, throwing into the fire any wood they could find, including the lid of the coffin.
Gradually, the riverbank took on a strange feeling – the chirping of crickets and the soft chatter of men waiting for Mr. Yadav’s fire to go out, the flame and its crackling just a speck in the shadow. immense dark.
Mr. Lama, the truck driver, turned around and started the long journey back to Kathmandu. By 9 a.m. the next morning, he had to go to the airport again: another body was coming.
In the months since, the Yadav family’s dream has gone up in smoke.
Most of the roughly $10,000 they receive from insurance is used to cover funeral and cremation costs, and provide food for guests. Creditors in the village continued to knock on Ms. Yadav’s door to demand $20,000 that the family owed.
She was unable to pay six months of tuition for her sons, who feared they would not be allowed to take their final exams if the balance could not be settled.
As usual, the first victim was her daughter Anisha. Ms. Yadav kicked her out of 8th grade at a private school. She returned to the village to live with her mother and attended a public school.
“I used to dream of becoming a doctor. It was also my dream,” Anisha said. “Now, I don’t think my mother can arrange the money to go to medical school.”
