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Mehadi Hassan was fixing a bracket for a bed.They were at different construction sites \u2013 Miya in a half\u2011constructed home, a little higher up the hill, while Hassan was on the ground floor of Ganesh Hotel, closer to the Trishuli River that flowed through Syafrubesi, a bustling market town near the Nepal\u2011Tibet border, now wiped off the map by the August 26 flash floods.More than 1,200 bodies have been recovered since then, at least 4,000 people remain missing, and more than 13,000 have been rescued.\u201cFirst came the terrifying loud sound. Then the ground trembled, and dark clouds descended upon us,\u201d recalls 34\u2011year\u2011old Miya, who ran further up the hill with his phone and slippers that morning, five or six others running alongside him.Hassan, lower on the slope, did not wait to reach for his slippers or his phone. He just ran, climbing a narrow, stair\u2011like path, up the hill, stopping only when he reached roughly 60 metres (200ft) above the road.At some point, Miya and Hassan found each other. Around them were 60 to 70 other survivors who had also gathered high up on the hill.A decade earlier, Miya had arrived in Syafrubesi as a carpenter. Three years later, he brought Hassan with him \u2013 both men from Bihar\u2019s Bettiah district. Over the years, they built the town\u2019s interiors \u2013 sofas, beds, almirahs, and kitchens for hotels and homes.On that Wednesday morning, they watched all of that washed away. The multi\u2011storey hotels where they had worked \u2013 Red Panda, Garden Hotel, Buddha Hotel, Sunrise Hotel \u2013 were all swallowed by the flood.\u201cThe town was gone in a blink,\u201d Miya recounts, now sitting in his home in Turhapatti village of Bihar, India, just across the Nepal border. \u201cThere were only three kinds of people who survived that day: Those who were out of town, those who were at work and managed to run, and those who lived a little higher up the hill.\u201dBased on what he witnessed, Miya says only a few hundred people in Syafrubesi, a town that had a population of 2,271 in the 2011 census, likely survived.Miya and Hasan are among them. Three of their close friends and colleagues, also migrant workers from Bihar, are not.Neyaz Miya (far right), with his wife Rijwana Khatun, his mother Rubaida Khatun, and his father Doshahmad Miya. Neyaz survived the floods, but lost his masonry tools, worth almost $1000 [Jyoti Yadav/Al Jazeera]A workday like no otherWhen the floods reached Syafrubesi, the men were already at work: Their shifts began at seven in the morning.\u201cTo start at seven, we would wake up at four or five,\u201d Miya recalls. They would leave with empty stomachs and were fed tea with doughnuts or biscuits at the construction site by building owners. Their first break came at 11am, when they returned to the rented one\u2011room space (3,500 Nepali rupees or $23 a month) that housed five to seven migrants at a time.On the morning of August 26, they left for work alongside 34\u2011year\u2011old Arman Ansari, 20\u2011year\u2011old Samir Ansari, and 52\u2011year\u2011old Mukhtar Ansari, all migrants from Miya\u2019s Turhapatti village.In the rented room, two teenage boys, Arman\u2019s 14\u2011year\u2011old son, Salman Alam, and his friend Shibu Alam, 17, remained asleep. They had come a month earlier to visit the hills.\u201cMy father had cooked meat bhaat (rice with meat),\u201d Salman recounts. He was waiting for his father to return at 11am so they could eat together.Arman, his father, was working beside Hassan on the ground floor, pasting sunmica onto the same bed. Samir and Mukhtar were on the top floor of the Full Moon Hotel.When Hassan ran out of the under-construction building and up the hill, he believed Arman was behind him. But by the time Hassan and Miya met higher up, there was no sign of the other three: Arman, Samir and Mukhtar.Miya and Hassan found the boys, Salman and Shibu, terrified, on the hill. \u201cSalman was crying, howling and searching for his father,\u201d Hassan said.The flood, which came with a high speed, took half an hour to recede. Soon, helicopters started hovering above them, airlifting the critically injured.The four of them \u2013 Miya, Hassan and the boys \u2013 walked down the hill on foot to search for the three missing in the debris. They found nothing but sludge. Miya\u2019s furniture-cutting tools and machines, worth 80,000 Nepali rupees ($530), were buried in the debris.When they got back to their room, perched high on a slope, they found that it had survived.But the army had taken charge, and soldiers herded survivors away from tenements near the river. \u201cThey said it [the flood] might come again,\u201d Miya recalls.They slept that night in a government school building in a village, he says. \u201cAt night, we were given daal bhat (rice and daal), and we wrapped ourselves in tarpaulin and slept.\u201dThe next morning, a helicopter took them to another village. From there, another helicopter carried them to an army compound in a town. In the evening, they teamed up with five other migrants and hired an SUV to reach Nepal\u2019s capital Kathmandu, each paying 3,500 rupees ($23).The next morning, on August 28, they hired another SUV, which charged them 950 rupees ($6) each for a distance of 290km (180 miles) to Birgunj, a town on the India-Nepal border. They then crossed the border on foot before boarding buses for their villages.It wasn\u2019t the homecoming Indian migrants who work in Nepal usually plan.A lane in Turhapatti village, Bihar, India, where the migrant workers are from. It is a village where almost every family has a story of migration [Jyoti Yadav/Al Jazeera]\u2018No regular work\u2019 back homeTurhapatti is among thousands of villages tucked along the 1,715km (1,066-mile) stretch of the India-Nepal border, where generations have crossed back and forth in search of work.The two countries share an open border, and on both sides, especially in Bihar, the bond is known as a roti-beti ka rishta (a relationship of food and daughters), alluding to ties of livelihoods and matrimonial kinship. People live, work, and marry across the border.Kathmandu is as close to Turhapatti as is Patna, the capital of Bihar. Per its 2021 Population and Housing Census, Nepal had 700,000 foreign-born residents, 97 percent of them from India.Miya and Hassan say the wages for a carpenter or a mason on the Indian side are between 600-700 rupees, while for the same work in Nepal, wages are about 900 rupees. That drives migrant workers from India over the border into Nepal.Nepal, for its part, is facing a major out-migration crisis \u2014 its per capita income is the lowest in South Asia, barring Afghanistan, and hundreds of thousands of young men and women leave each year to find work elsewhere. This creates a demand for migrant workers from Bihar, India\u2019s poorest state that lies just across the border.In Turhapatti, Miya owns only 0.03 hectares (0.06 acres), not enough to feed his family of six children, wife and parents. In recent years, he transitioned from being a carpenter to a contractor, which allowed him to bring in more workers from Bihar.He had been sending 30,000 Indian rupees ($315) back to his family every month.Hassan has even less back home: He inherited a 6\u00d78-metre (20\u00d725ft) room from his father and no agricultural land. \u201cThere is no regular daily work here,\u201d he says. He would send 15,000 Indian rupees ($157) home from Nepal each month for his wife and four children.Their story echoes in most homes in Turhapatti. The village had a population of 16,000 people in the 2011 census, India\u2019s latest one. In nearly every household, men have left to work in other parts of India and abroad as carpenters, masons, or labourers mixing cement and sand into mortar.The destinations are Kashmir, where close to 700 men from the village work; Nepal, with nearly 600; and thousands scattered across Indian cities: Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai. About 100 men have migrated to Dubai, Oman and Saudi Arabia.The houses they built in Turhapatti stand in stark contrast to those of those who remain in India. The marble-fronted and iron-gated homes belong to men working in the Gulf, while semi-permanent dwellings belong to those who stayed behind.Migrants in Nepal fall in between: Miya has been able to raise a brick house.Sahrun Khatun, Arman\u2019s wife, with her eldest son Salman (holding the youngest child) who survived, her mother-in-law, and two younger children, outside their home in Turhapatti, Bihar, India [Jyoti Yadav/Al Jazeera]\u2018My body shivers at the thought\u2019This economic reality is what drove Arman Ansari to Syafrubesi. On July 26, Arman left for Nepal with Samir and Mukhtar. Arman\u2019s son and his friend Shubu went with the three adults; the teenagers were on a trip to the hills.Now, Arman\u2019s brother-in-law. Jameel Miya, a carpenter in Kathmandu, scours the city\u2019s hospitals for Arman\u2019s body, telling authorities that his brother-in-law\u2019s right hand and chest had deep scars, cut by shards of glass when he was young.Arman\u2019s wife,\u00a0Sahrun Khatun, has only her last phone call with Arman to hold on to. They spoke two hours before the floods swept him away. \u201cHe was about to get his wages on September 1 and return home,\u201d she says.Salman, who had tagged along with his father to see the hills, hasn\u2019t been able to sleep since the flood.\u201cThe moment I close my eyes, I feel the flood is coming for me,\u201d he says.Mukhtar\u2019s family lives a few lanes away.Since the floods, Kasmun Khatun, Mukhtar\u2019s wife, has been glued to the internet for any news of her missing husband. Joining her in that remote search are her daughter Asmana (18) and son Sadre Alam (14).Her eldest son, Osama, 25, a tailor in Kathmandu, has been busy searching for his father in city hospitals.\u201cAfter waiting for a week and watching the videos, I submitted my DNA samples,\u201d he says over a phone call. Osama manages to send home 6,000 rupees ($63), but that is no longer enough \u2013 his mother needs eye surgery that has already been delayed and cannot be put off much longer.\u201cThe guardian has gone, all of a sudden,\u201d he says, referring to his father.At the far edge of Turhapatti stands the home of Samir Ansari, the youngest among the missing migrants and youngest of his five migrant brothers.The Ganesh Hotel project he was working on was only three days from completion.\u201cHe said he found another site to work on,\u201d recalls his father, Hasmuddin Miya, remembering their last phone call on the evening of August 25.Samir was a mason who specialised in marble tiles, a skill he had learned in Kashmir while working under his elder brothers at construction sites.The three families are preparing to host a bhoj, the funeral feast \u2013 a custom of feeding hundreds of people \u2013 having given up on hope.Meanwhile, the two survivors, Miya and Hassan, are already making calls to find work again. This time, their search turns towards Nepal\u2019s plains. 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