सिंहदरबार संवाददाता
Sarlahi. Last Friday, 18-year-old Basant Kumar Sah of Haripurwa Municipality-2 of Sarlahi died forever after being buried in a landslide in Jhaplekhola, Dhunibesi Municipality-9, Dhading. Basant was both the support and trust of the financially poor Sah family. From that day on, the family not only lost their son forever, but also lost Sahra, who was dreaming of finding happiness for the family. Basant, the eldest son of the family, was very hardworking in his studies.
‘He always reminded me not to worry that he would remove the family’s sorrow,’ his father Bharat Sah said, sobbing. ‘His dream was to become a big man by studying a lot, marry two sisters and teach a lot to one brother. That dream died before it was fulfilled.’ Bharat, who was mourning his son, said that his family was devastated with the death of his son. ‘A pillar of the house has collapsed, who will support this house now?’, Bharat said with tears in his eyes.
45-year-old father Bharat has a general grocery store. This grocery store is the only basis for the family’s upbringing and education. The food grown in the meager fields barely covers the family’s expenses for the whole year. ‘I thought that the days of sorrow were over now because my son was studying well, but suddenly there was a thunderstorm. Since the day of the incident, not only the house, but the village has been in mourning. Total darkness has enveloped the family. The mother has not regained consciousness properly,’ he said.
Basant studied up to grade 6 in the village school. He studied from class 6 to SEE at Prabhat Secondary School in Chitwan. After passing the SEE exam in the last academic session, he came to Kathmandu to study classes 11-12. He studied science at Liverpool College in New Baneshwor, Kathmandu, living with his sister Bibha Kumari Sah.
He came to Chitwan only last Thursday after the campus asked him to bring some educational certificates of SEE and was returning. After reaching school on Friday morning and collecting documents, while returning to Kathmandu by microbus in the evening, he contacted his sister Bibha, who was in Kathmandu, at 1:25 pm, but then he lost contact forever.
‘I had asked my brother on the phone where we had arrived. Sister, I am coming, I got stuck in a traffic jam in the middle of the forest at night. I will come soon if the traffic jam clears, Anand said to sleep, but the phone was disconnected while he was talking about his brother. I tried to contact him by phone, wondering why he hung up without even saying he would hang up, but the phone was not ringing,’ said Didi Vibha, ‘Did the phone go off for some reason? I thought. There was no sign of my brother until the next morning. It was raining continuously. Since news of the road being blocked by floods and landslides was coming in unison, we started searching, hoping that he might have gotten stuck in a traffic jam somewhere. We also informed our parents about everything. We panicked after the news that a bus and a microbus had been buried in the Jhayaplekhola landslide in the afternoon. Security personnel started frantically removing the bodies.’
From Sunday, Basant’s father and brother-in-law also went out in search. While searching the landslide site from Chitwan, security personnel deployed in Jhayapla Khola advised him to go there as they had taken the body to Kathmandu. Father Bharat said, “We could not go immediately as the road was damaged by the landslide. We sent relatives in Kathmandu. The body of his son was identified on Monday morning.
After a moment of silence, he said, wiping away tears, “I don’t know how I reached home with my son’s body. My big dream, the lamp of hope, was lost in the mud of the landslide. My father said that he would become an engineer and serve the government and bring happiness to his family, but everything was shattered.”
प्रतिक्रिया दिनुहोस्