Writers Room | The Wake of the Nepal Flash Floods: Keeping Each Other Alive

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Please note: this short story discusses cancer, climate catastrophe, mass death, and sexual assault. It may activate folks with similar lived experiences, beyond what feels safe to spend time with. Please engage with this story how/whenever it feels safe for you.

"Where did all the horses go? In Tamang mouth, ghost, and blossom come from the same root. In Tamang Tongue—there is no way to say this / in English."

—Samyak Shertok, “Mother Tongue: A Haunting”

***

Not many can say they’ve survived three flash floods, let alone in the same day. 

At 8:37 a.m. local time, as my mother slept just minutes away from her alarm, she drowned in the Gorkha district of Nepal, along the Nepal-Tibet border. As ice and rock collapsed from a glacier high in the Himalayas, water surged downstream via the Lhende Khola, Bhotekoshi, and Trishuli rivers, sweeping her home away with chunks of bridge, building, and road. Here in Canada, around 6:30 p.m. local time, a second flash flood rushed, unwanted, between my legs, in a dark supply closet at the end of my residency shift in the pediatric ward. The third poured as blood, minutes later, from a mouth a few floors down where my best friend was dying from cancer. 

That amount of water pressure should have powdered my bones. 

I limped out of the closet into the washroom across the hall, fell to the floor in the stall, and wept so there would be room for oxygen in my body. I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes, my friend was sitting across from me, bare ass on the floor under her hospital gown, wiping crystallized tears off my face with her thin thumbs. The ceiling fan swished the stale air; the sound of waves coming again and again. My mouth tasted like salt.

“I’m going to bloody kill him,” Gelly said, her Irish accent thicker, it seemed, to compensate for her body’s withering. 

“I can’t take any more death today, Gelly.” Dr. Williams, the lead physician on the floor, had been making comments to me for months. This time, after the news broke from Nepal, he told me he wanted to comfort me—that he wanted to make me feel better. Still in shock, I vaguely remember giving in to him touching me. Soon, his want took over, and he was too strong to stop. I hadn’t told Gelly this yet. 

“I know, love, I’m sorry.” She paused and, maintaining a serious face, said, “We should’ve shaved my hair tomorrow instead.”

I couldn’t help but smile, yet it felt wrong. And I still didn’t know what to do—I was waiting for more news, more information. My mother was dead. My childhood home was erased.

“How did you get up here?” Gelly snuck out often to see me, as long as she was physically able. More and more often, she wasn’t.

Gelly looked at me long and hard. “I told the receptionist the truth.”

I nodded, but didn’t say much in reply. The homesickness washed nausea over me, and I quickly spun around to throw up in the toilet. I could feel Gelly’s hands on my back as a brace. When I’d finished, she said: “Well, maybe you have room for my plan now?” 

“Your plan?” 

“Aye, my plan. I made a new friend downstairs. She’s a cook.”

I looked at my watch: 2:13 a.m. “Gelly, I need to go home and sleep.”

“No, no, no. Well, yes. But not quite yet. Right now, you need yam curry.”

“Yam curry? How do you figure on making yam curry?”

Gelly pulled me to my feet, tidied my thick black hair, took my hand, and led me down the hall. The hospital lights were still on, but many were sporadically dimmed. It was an eerie place to be on a quiet night, especially after such a violent day. Everything was still functioning, but not quite fully, as if run by ghosts. It seemed there was less colour in the already drab labyrinth of hallways, diluting and draining away like my tethers to Nepal. The burn of disinfectant from whoever had mopped the floors made my eyes water as we rounded the corner to the staff kitchen.

A nurse, maybe a few years older than me with long black braids and warm brown skin, stood with her back to us. She was organizing ingredients on the table with a tender touch: Purple yam, ginger and garlic paste, asafoetida, ground turmeric, salt, cumin, and coriander, Kashmiri chilli powder, chopped tomatoes, bhat, Greek yogurt, Tama Ko Achar, and Hariyo Khursani Ko Achar. How she found these ingredients, I had no idea, let alone how she snuck them into the hospital. There was a Nepalese grocer in the city, but I’d always figured I was the only one in the building who knew where it was.

The woman turned around and smiled kindly, just enough to see her dimples propping up a spray of freckles.

“Seti, this is Niimi, my nurse downstairs.”

Niimi placed her hands on her hips. “Seti, would you help me?”

Exhausted, delirious, and still gripping Gelly’s hand, I nodded. Gelly let go, stepping shakily off to the side to sit in one of the kitchen’s chairs. I made eye contact, aware of her exertion, but she nodded toward the table and smiled. She was so thin that her entire face wrinkled, though she was only 23. It was her wisdom, laughter, and kindness made visible; I wanted to believe. 

I walked slowly toward the table, guided by my hands as if they were a puppet’s. I started peeling the yams, cut them into one-inch chunks, and covered them with water to preserve the colour and texture. I heated the oil, slowly folding in the ginger and garlic pastes until they softened. Into the pan I dusted the turmeric, yam, and salt until shimmering golden brown. My fingers slid in the chilli powder, cumin, and ground coriander to cook for a few minutes, then the tomatoes to cook for a few more under the lid. As I removed it and sprinkled in the fresh coriander, I became aware of my mouth. It watered not only because I was hungry, but because I’d been speaking of my mother the whole time. 

Gelly and Niimi had been asking me questions about Nepal—about my parents, about their horses, and about my mom’s recipes and flower garden. How she loved the chef Santosh Shah, but thought he didn’t quite make yam curry right. Niimi handed me ingredients as Gelly asked their names and origins in Tamang. I scooped the steaming curry onto 3 paper plates, complete with bhat, Tama Ko Achar, Hariyo Khursani Ko Achar, and Greek yogurt.

When I finally sat down, deeply sore in body, mind, and spirit, I looked into Gelly and Niimi’s faces. Gelly was dying far from a home scarred with war and oft-forgotten colonial violence. Niimi’s tribe’s lands were being sold for military and economic development. We had known such loss, and yet, we each remembered something that very early morning: Curiosity about life in the face of death; offering an able body as Earth, the largest we know, cries for help; and making from ancestral memories while devastation and violation threaten to unmake them. My hands had become my mother’s in this small kitchen across the world.

There’s a poem I adore from Nepalese poet Samyak Shertok, called “Mother Tongue: A Haunting.” One line has settled uncomfortably in my heart for a long time: “If to speak one’s mother tongue is to keep one’s mother alive, / I kill my mother daily.” Earlier in the poem, he also writes: “In Tamang mouth, ghost, and blossom come from the same root.”

There is formal support, I know, for sexual violence, grief, and palliative care. The way Gelly and Niimi are looking at me now, eating our makeshift yam curry, I know I won’t have to find or approach help alone.

I can’t speak Tamang fluently, but the best nourishment that evening was the grief and love cooked into the meal—ingredients as containers. Right now is all we have sometimes. Right now, maybe, is all we need to keep each other, and by extension my family, alive in the way we know how.

Resources:

• Red Cross

• Tear Fund

• Canada Helps

Poet’s Corner: Two Poems from “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets” curated by Laura Kraftowitz & Edward Salem for Poetry Magazine

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

“In the Bathroom” by Raafat Hekmat, translated by Zyad Altaghlbi, and “A Timeline of Exile” by Maryam Ala Amjadi appear in “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets,” curated by Laura Kraftowitz & Edward Salem. Read the whole folio in the July/August 2026 issue of Poetry.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: These poems are not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read them. 

A few months ago, I came across Maryam Ala Amjadi’s poem, “A Timeline of Exile,” and Raafat Hekmat’s poem, “In the Bathroom” (translated by Zyad Altaghlbi), via Poetry Magazine’s folio featuring exiled poets. As Iranian and Syrian writers, respectively, their words have a particular heft now. 

Laura Kraftowitz and Edward Salem, who curated this folio, wrote in their introduction that each of the ten contemporary poets has “faced persecution, war, or genocide, as well as threats to their safety because of their writing.” In both poems, we visit the private places that these experiences burrow into the body and soul.

The lines in “A Timeline of Exile” wind and spill as the bloodline does. That first stanza brings everything in it to a “a single trembling point”—a question mark, line break, and stanza break simultaneously. How much more could a line tremble with what it holds and holds up? Later, we face that question, at least in part: What is the difference between red versus black and white lines? The poem posits this by noting both, but doesn’t quite ask or answer it. The ‘point’ is where everything starts: The red lines are crossed, whereas the words ‘border,’ ‘black,’ and ‘white’ imply impervious binaries and blockages. A border “can’t” be transgressed without moving from one ‘state’ to the other, irreversibly in time. The vulnerability of the assured readiness, addressed to a ‘you,’ is stark and frightening, but steadfast. It trembles, but it doesn’t hesitate, which threads through Hekmat’s poem. 

“In the Bathroom” shows us the preciousness of privacy and a longing to escape surveillance. There’s desperation, too, in the employment of bits of cotton or chewing gum to plug holes. And still that trembling, reverberating from Iran to Syria. Hekmat can’t guarantee privacy in this bathroom, and even if he could, would the body believe it enough to process it as such? This is trauma: The em dash points like a sniper gun with a zoomed-in visual from somewhere he can’t distinctly identify. In other words, the threat is everywhere. 

Ovid in Exile. 9.46 x 12.50 cm oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner

This poem also tethers nakedness—literally and metaphorically—to threat. To move within the range of hatred, control, and continued colonial violence is terrifying as the reach of eyes, weapons, and surveillance only seems to expand. The poem itself seems to be fighting to move within the range of anything else, to believe that it can one day live outside the range of the sniper, shell, or nearby explosion. And by the poem’s existence alone, it both does and doesn’t.

Together, these poems consider: Can we cross any line, whether through sacrifice, bravery, or safety, that’s far enough away or a sturdy enough door? Will that crossing ever feel far or safe enough in this world? How are these questions different for Maryam Ala Amjadi, Raafat Hekmat, me, and you?

And how does reading poetry help?

The trauma always lingers, forever the remainder in war’s cruel long division. “Broken Lines,” as the folio is titled, can refer to everything from lineages/ancestry, those crossed in protest, borders crossed in escape, taboos and the perseverance of derogatory names/stereotypes, tethers to worlds/lives, bones, healthy attachments to body/place, and ultimately, the line breaks of poems as poets write through real-life enjambment.

By reading these poets, we bear witness. We see language, craft, choices, and reality. We feel the draw of hope rather than despair, and how everyone has lines to break—lines that will allow us to build something like a poem in real life. That crossing, perhaps.

In tandem, I’d love to recommend Transient Worlds (Copper Canyon Press, 2026) by the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze, and Poem-a-Day’s translation-focused curation, woven together by Maya C. Popa—a dear mentor—for September. Translation, of course, is in conversation with exile, war, borders and the way language can face them. My favourite is Nikola Madzirov’s “Silence Comes Somewhere Else,” about which he writes what feels like a perfect closing to this short essay:

 “Absence is not silent. Poetry is the archaeology of unburied memories. Often, in my dreams, I see my dead mother coming home with bags full of fruit, while I run towards the apricot orchards. The scars of the unsaid appear on our faces while we sleep. My father still uses [my mother’s] old toothbrush to clean the edges of her picture frame on the gravestone and the letters of his own name engraved beside hers. This is his way of feeling more alive … like a poet trying to revise his already published poems, to create a new history.”

Film Review: Dear You

by Alaina Zhang ​for The 44 North, Newsletter & Reviews Editor

Via Sixth Tone

“One must have integrity—those without it are not worth knowing.” —Ye ShuRou, From Dear You (2026)

Growing up, I often wondered about my family’s history. The tales of lost generations and ancestors seemed to reside behind a screen of mist. I liked to ask my parents about their youth, what my hometown was like back then, and compare it with the history I’d learned myself. Sometimes the two accounts stand in stark contrast. Other times, they’re a mirror. Either way, these tales always had a mythical quality, as if they belonged in an otherworldly space and time. 

Watching the 2026 Chinese film Dear You with my family made me feel similarly. Dear You follows the journey of a grandson from Chao Shan, China, who ventures to Thailand in search of a grandpa he’s never met. What this journey unveils is a series of buried history between three characters—his grandmother Ye ShuRou, his grandfather Zheng MuSheng, and a mysterious woman named Xie NanZhi.

When the film begins, it has been forty years since Zheng MuSheng’s last letter to Ye ShuRou, in which a single photo of an unfamiliar woman and a group of kids is enclosed. Therefore, throughout the past forty years, Ye ShuRou has held onto the belief that Xie NanZhi, the woman in the photo, is Zheng MuSheng’s second wife in Thailand. From then on, all correspondence has halted between the family in China and Thailand. 

Instead, the truth is that Zheng MuSheng died a few years after arriving in Thailand, and Ye ShuRou had been a great friend of his there, helping him draft letters back home. The film depicted a history I had never known. Due to the Chinese Civil War, many ‘peasants’ decided to cross the ocean to Southeast Asia in search of better opportunities, and Zheng MuSheng, although a fictional character in the film, embodied that experience. 

Having grown up watching many Chinese films, I’ve realized just how entangled the history of a nation is with the personal fates of individuals. The era in which characters reside often determines the trajectory of their lives. Hence, lost relatives, untold family narratives, and misunderstandings are not rare occurrences. Each family has its own secrets and regrets—as China lurches forward, the ghosts of its past don’t simply disappear. 

At the same time, I was drawn to the film’s portrayal of literacy and education in tandem with immigration and family. Because many Chinese immigrants were illiterate, those who could read and write took up the responsibility to not only teach those who couldn’t, but help them draft letters back home. While Zheng MuSheng doesn’t know how to read, he’s the one who encourages Xie NanZhi, someone with Chao Shan heritage who grew up in Thailand, to learn the language and eventually become a teacher. Xie NanXhi then goes on to draft many letters for him to send back home to Ye Shurou. These literate individuals were crucial in leaving a written documentation and archive of just how much loved ones missed each other across the wide ocean that divided them. 

https://youtu.be/abeSQSbNXSk?si=E_Wjm-hEBbFx8VmJ

Dear You is a film about family, history, and education. But it’s also a film about two women and a man. What I loved most about it was the director’s intentional decision to steer clear of the idea that Xie NanZhi and Zheng MuSheng harboured romantic feelings for each other, making that Xie NanZhi’s motive for helping Zheng MuSheng write letters home. Instead, I appreciated the fact that while Zheng MuSheng was the thread that tied the characters together, all three protagonists are central to the story. Even after Zheng MuSheng dies, the string remains intact, and the two women meet each other in Thailand in their old age at the end of the film.

This simple narrative depicts an unconventional love story that’s so prevalent yet rarely portrayed in popular media. “Love stories” aren’t always about a couple—they can be about two friends, two families, people of the same origin in a foreign place, or even strangers who have never met. By defying gender norms, this story helped me see through the mysticism of stories from the past and how relationships between strong men and women were not always soap opera romances, but rather examples of incredible strength, mutual aid, and collective care that we can all learn from and lean on today. And even though times have changed, the medium of letter writing throughout Dear You shows how writing and language continue to be a beautiful way for people to connect and to express their love for each other. Sitting next to candlelight and reading the handwritten words from a loved one helps bridge the vast distance and time that stands in between. 

Sometimes, there’s no real villain in our past—only a series of unfortunate circumstances, misunderstandings, and lost voices amongst the rushing tide of history.