“No matter how much I cry, they are not coming back. All this crying, waiting, hoping, praying has turned my heart into stone.”

Sankha Bahadur Gurung refused to perform funeral rites for his sons because he had not seen their bodies. When his sister died people started calling his family impure, relatives would not accept water from members of the Gurung household. He was prohibited from touching his own sister. “I performed the last rites for my sons with a very heavy heart. If I had not done it, my entire family would have been ostracized.”