Mukti Patel, 27, has refused to speak of her missing relatives in the past tense.
She has spent days gathered with loved ones at her parents’ Richmond, Virginia home since catastrophic flash floods along the Nepal-China border swept away the hotel where her father, sister, and two other family members were staying. “I shouldn’t talk in past tense yet,” she said in a phone interview Friday. “We don’t know anything.”
The Patels were among 47 people — 40 guests and seven tour guides — traveling with Himalayan Glacier Adventure and Travel Company, a Baltimore-based tour operator, when disaster struck Wednesday. All 47 are now missing, said Sanket Pandey, the company’s managing director. On a Zoom call Thursday night, frantic family members pressed him with desperate questions about whether they could reach the site themselves and whether survivors might be trapped inside air pockets.
“It’s really difficult to have nothing,” Pandey said.
The flash floods have killed hundreds and left more than 2,000 people missing, according to official counts. About 90 Americans are among the unaccounted for, the U.S. State Department reported.
Patel’s father, Umesh Kumar, 56, had dreamed of this Himalayan journey for years and traveled through India to Nepal, where he met up with her sister Akanksha, 32, and Akanksha’s husband Ishan, 32. Ishan’s mother Shilpa, 59, rounded out the family group. Ishan and Shilpa Patel hold dual Canadian and U.S. Citizenship, while Umesh Kumar and Akanksha Patel are Canadian citizens, Mukti Patel said.
The timing carried cruel irony: Ishan Patel turned 32 on Wednesday, and the family had called to wish him happy birthday. That conversation was their last contact.
Jiwan Jyoti, 50, a U.S. Citizen from Lexington, Massachusetts, was also traveling with Himalayan Glacier and had stopped in Timure, Nepal before planning to cross into Tibet for a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash, a sacred site for Hindus, Buddhists and others. Her longtime friend Manmeet Singh Meet said Jyoti called her family from breakfast Wednesday morning as she prepared to make the crossing.
The call ended “at around 8:40 a.m. Local time in Nepal, and then I think around 8:45, this flash floods came, and then our world turned upside down,” Meet said. He later learned the hotel where Jyoti had stayed — and where her location was last recorded on the Find My iPhone app — had been destroyed. “She was essentially almost in the epicenter over there,” he said. He added that he is losing hope his best friend of 15 years will be found alive.
Vaasavi Unnava, 31, a PhD student, initially believed her parents had already crossed into Tibet with the same tour group when news of the flooding broke. “I was not really that worried, but I just sent them a text like to be sure,” she said. The WhatsApp message never delivered.
Her father Hanumantha Rao Unnava, formerly dean of the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis, and her mother Vasundhara Unnava, a former lecturer at the same university, had embarked on a retirement trip. They planned to spend two months in India with family after visiting Mount Kailash. The couple from Woodland, California, is among dozens of U.S. Citizens now missing.
“They were so, so excited. My dad was talking about finally getting to spend time with his mother,” Vaasavi Unnava said. She described her father as “disciplined and duty-bound” but also “a big joker,” and her mother as “spontaneous and playful” and “the smartest woman I’ve ever met,” She added: “They have just changed so many people’s lives for the better.”
Between tears, Mukti Patel painted portraits of the relatives she is clinging to hope of seeing again. Her sister Akanksha, a psychiatrist who wanted to break stigma around mental health problems, has been her lifelong role model. “Everything I’ve done in life has been off the blueprint of my sister,” she said. “There’s no ounce of meanness in her.” Her father she described as a joyous person who helped victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her brother-in-law, an orthopedic surgeon, “has brought great happiness to my sister’s life.”
Mukti Patel said she wants more countries to join the rescue and recovery efforts as families endure the agonizing wait for any word.