Early on Wednesday, Sudipto Bhattacharya received what would be the last message from his wife. It showed a departure stamp in her passport: immigration at the Nepal border was done. We are waiting to enter China, she wrote, at 07:57 ( ).
Six minutes later, at 08:03 local time, the messages stopped. Subhrasree Chakraborty and the group she was travelling with had been waiting to cross into Tibet for the next stage of their pilgrimage to Mount Kailash, the sacred Himalayan home of Hindu god Shiva that Subhrasree had dreamed of visiting for years. The 43-year-old is now among at least 290 Indians reported missing after deadly flash floods struck along Nepal's border with Tibet.
Many of those unaccounted for were on the pilgrimage, which resumed last year after being disrupted by the pandemic and then by tensions between India and China. Several thousand Indians have been making their way to Mount Kailash for years. Subhashree was travelling without her family, as part of a group of about 30 people.
A medical technologist working in critical care at a city hospital, Subhrasree was used to emergencies. She knew CPR and intensive-care procedures and, according to her husband, was physically fit. But none of that has brought her husband Sudipto Bhattacharya any closer to knowing what happened after that final message.
"After 08:03am, what happened? We don't know anything," he says. Subhrasree had been looking forward to the journey for years.
The photographs she sent home from Kathmandu, taken just days before she went missing, capture something of that excitement. In one, she stands in a blue tunic in the ornate courtyard of a temple, smiling gently at the camera. In others, she is dressed in red, posing amid the ancient brick-and-carved-wood architecture of Kathmandu valley's historic Durbar Square.
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