If destruction had a colour in Nepal, it would be the colour of mud. The muddy Trishuli that crashed down on homes and people, the buildings torn apart and caked with mud all the way up to the fourth floor, the trees with their exposed roots choked with shredded and clumped clothes, all covered in mud. And then, a dash of colour — a family of seven staring out of a photograph, smiling, joyous.We found the photograph at the foot of a tree. It was the only sign of life in Betrawati, a village around 80 km north of Kathmandu that was among the hardest hit by the flash floods that struck the country on August 26. Most people here were either on the list of the dead or missing, or had left for relief camps or the homes of their relatives in the higher reaches. We took photographs of that moment and moved on.The smiles in the photograph stayed. It’s the only time since we arrived that we had seen smiles that weren’t wistful or painful. The questions remained, too. Who could the family be? Were they still together? Had time, and distances, done what they do to relationships? Had the flood separated them? Where were the children? The ones in the foreground, in the red and blue dresses, with matching hair-bands? The matriarch in the back row?The date on the photograph said July 1, 2009. There was little to go by.The search for a family of sevenFour days later, we returned to Betrawati to look for the family.A two-wheeler ride on the highway that usually takes less than two hours from Kathmandu took us more than six hours, as our SUV lumbered through backcountry trails of mud and stones, weaving through forests and mountain routes.Betrawati, a village split between Nuwakot and Rasuwa districts in central Nepal, stands on the confluence of the mighty Trishuli and the gentler Falakhu river. It is home to the Uttar Gaya temple, a holy pilgrimage site for people from Nepal and India. The historical 1792 Treaty of Betrawati, which ended the war between Nepal’s Gorkha Kingdom and China’s Qing Dynasty, was signed here.Story continues below this adLittle had changed at Betrawati since our last visit. Only a few buildings stood in what seemed like a vast ocean of mud. Remnants of life had been washed up onto the terrace fields where villagers once grew maize and paddy — mangled trees, a school bag, a stray slipper, pillow covers, a mannequin. An auto rickshaw was lodged precariously high on one of the trees that still stood, its twisted canopy holding the vehicle along with boulders and large portions of concrete walls. A school bus now stood nose-down in the mud. Visuals of a school bus swept away after the Nepal flash floods (Express photo by Tashi Tobgyal)An eerie silence had settled over what was once a bustling pilgrimage destination. Only the hiss of the muddied river as it flowed nearby, and the muffled conversations of the few police personnel on duty with their sniffer dogs, hoping to find signs of life in the rubble. The only other people were those looking for their family members. They walked around with heads lowered, eyes scanning the slush and the debris. Like us, all of them held a photograph or two, asking anyone they encountered if they had seen the people they were looking for.According to Nepal’s Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, as of September 8, 5,326 people remain missing since the floods, and 1,357 are confirmed dead. Chini Maya Thapar Magar’s house, on the side of the Bhote Koshi river in Rasuwa district (Express photo by Tashi Tobgyal)On the road leading to the village, we waved down a few cars and motorbikes and asked about the photo, but got no leads. Enquiries at a few open shops yielded no results. Then, someone suggested that we go to the relief camp a little down the hill, where some villagers had taken shelter.Story continues below this adThe camp, with a dozen blue and green tents, had been set up by Chinese relief organisations on what used to be paddy terrace fields. It now sheltered around 70 people who had fled from neighbouring villages.We approached a group of older men sitting in a circle and smoking. They shook their heads as they passed around the photograph we had printed. Our hopes sank. As we were making our way out, stopping every now and then with the photograph, someone exclaimed from behind, “Chini Maya.”Social worker Ishwar Thapa Magar, 40, it turned out, was a relative of the family. Taking a closer look at the photograph and pointing to the elderly woman in the back row, Magar said, “This is Chini Maya.”The photograph suddenly came alive. China Maya Thapar Magar, then 51, shared the frame with her daughter Srijana, son Nirmal, daughter-in-law Sunita, granddaughters Sakshi, 10, and Samriddhi, 8, and a relative’s baby.Story continues below this adEveryone was safe, it turned out. Except Chini Maya. She was missing.(Google Street View of the China Maya’s house before the floods)A festival, and a group photoAt a cafe in Tokha, on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Chini Maya’s granddaughter Samriddhi, now 25, says, “My grandmother hung this photograph on the wall by her bed. I remember the day it was taken.”October 9, 2009, was a busy day at Chini Maya Thapar Magar’s house, which stood on the other side of the Trishuli river in Rasuwa district. It was the festival of Dashain, one of the biggest festivals in Nepal, a variation of the Dussehra celebrations in India. Her son Nirmal Pyakurel and his family had come down from Kathmandu to celebrate the festival.Story continues below this adThe women were racing against time for the morning puja. Srijana, Chini Maya’s daughter, then unmarried, and daughter-in-law Sunita were cleaning and decorating the house, while Chini Maya supervised a simmering pot of khasi ko masu (goat curry). Sakshi, in a blue Chinese silk dress, and Samriddhi, in a blood red one, had got into a fight over their eyeliners.Everyone was in their best clothes, except Chini Maya, who was still fussing over the khasi curry. An uncle asked them to assemble for a group photo. Nirmal wore a pair of sunglasses, and Srijana put a strand of gajra in her hair. Sakshi and Samriddhi ended their fight just in time and managed to smile.Chini Maya, still in her nightie, picked up Siyana, a relative’s child whose family was visiting them. The family assembled on the street outside their house and the uncle clicked the photo on a cybershot camera. The camera, however, got the date wrong: 1.7.2009, said the photo when it was finally printed.Afterwards, the families of Chini Maya’s sisters as well as other relatives and friends came over, and everyone had a good time eating goat curry, drinking Chini Maya’s home-brewed raksi, and playing rounds of the card game teen patti.Story continues below this ad Chini Maya’s granddaughter Samriddhi, and other members of the family look at the photo (Express photo by Tashi Tobgyal)At the camp in Betrawati, 60-year-old Dil Bahadur Magar, who is from the nearby village of Kuvindi, says Chini Maya’s father used to run the village flour mill and the family had a prominent house.“I remember going to their house to get our grains cleaned and sifted,” says Dil Bahadur.The family had eight daughters, so the girls, including Chini Maya, “grew up like boys”. Chini Maya, the third of the siblings, never went to school, but learnt to be useful around the house, cutting grass for the cattle and collecting firewood.She married at 21, but her marriage didn’t last. She later built a three-storeyed house by the river and ran small businesses — a utensils shop on the ground floor and rooms for rent on another floor. She would generously hand out her home-brewed raksi, but also sold some part of it.Story continues below this ad Dil Bahadur Magar from the nearby village of Kuvindi (Express photo by Tashi Tobgyal)Chini Maya’s granddaughter Samriddhi says she has always known her grandmother and her sisters to be fiercely independent — “at times, even aggressive”.She recalls an incident from the 2000s, when the country was under Maoist rule. “Soldiers used to bully villagers a lot those days. Once, at a weekly market in our village, my grandmother got furious when she saw a soldier hitting a villager, so she chased him across the bridge, entered the bus he had fled into, brought him out and thrashed him in public, before the villagers calmed her,” says Samriddhi, who works as a Class 3 teacher while also pursuing a postgraduate degree in sociology. Social worker Ishwar Thapa Magar with the photo (Express photo by Tashi Tobgyal)Samriddhi’s mother Sunita, who lives in Japan with her elder daughter Sakshi, spoke to The Indian Express from Tochigi prefecture about how Chini Maya’s house in Betrawati was a huge draw.“All her children and grandchildren, as well as her sisters and their families, used to gather at her place during festivals. Local politicians would come to her house to eat the fish she cooked and discuss village matters. Her house was where everything happened since it was so large and she loved cooking for everyone,” says Sunita Onta Shreshtha of her mother-in-law.Story continues below this adIn 2017, Sunita, her husband Nirmal and elder daughter Sakshi, moved to Japan, where they did a series of odd jobs. Two years later, she says, Nirmal moved back to Betrawati to take care of his mother Chini Maya. Sakshi, now 27, works as a tattoo artist in Japan.Talking to The Indian Express from her home in Jackson Heights, New York, Chini Maya’s daughter Srijana Deuja, now 40, says her mother and the rest of the family shared a special relationship with the Falakhu river that’s barely 100 metres from the house.“When Sakshi and Samriddhi were young and came visiting from Kathmandu, they would spend all their time by the river, swimming and making mud houses on the banks,” says Srijana, who works in a beauty salon.Samriddhi remembers those holidays by the river fondly. “It used to flood then too, but we were never scared. Floods just meant more fish to catch and cook,” she says. Samriddhi says she has always known her grandmother and her sisters to be fiercely independent (Express photo by Tashi Tobgyal)The day of the flood, and afterwardsDays before the August 26 flood, five of Chini Maya’s sisters had come to Betrawati for the festival of Gain Jatra.That day, Chini Maya’s nephew called from Kathmandu and alerted the family of a massive flood that was coming their way. The nephew once worked at a hydropower project, so he knew what he was talking about. Chini Maya hung up, shouted out to her son Nirmal, who was on the floor below, and told him and the others to run. Nirmal ran out, believing his mother, aunts and their elderly domestic help were behind him.Minutes later, a barrage of water and debris thundered down the Trishuli, surging into the Falakhu. Within minutes, the valley witnessed something unprecedented: a whirlpool of brown water, boulders, and debris, four storeys high, stood churning where the two rivers met.When he finally reached higher ground, Nirmal looked around for the rest of the family. His mother and their help was missing. ⠀Days later, Chini Maya’s house in the village, though battered, is among the few that still stand. The ground floor is buried under mud. The room on the first floor, where the fridge would always be stocked with her famous raksi, is now bare and knee-deep in mud. Only the ceiling fan, its wings twisted out of shape, remains. A mangled bike has made its way to the second floor, deposited there by the waves.Days after the tragedy, with no trace of Chini Maya, the family had to make the difficult decision of carrying out her last rites. They had spent the last few days scouring websites with lists of survivors, the missing, and the unidentified dead.Despite that, says Samriddhi, she hopes her grandmother will turn up one day at Betrawati, walk up to her house by the river. “When you called and asked about Chini Maya, I thought for a minute that she had been found,” she tells us.Samriddhi says Chini Maya knew the river better than most people. “She used to say, ‘Dui phan ma khola paari pugchu (In two jumps, I’ll cross the river).’ She would also say, ‘Moh maareyo bhani, khola ma morchu (When I die, the river will take me).”