At first, the smell is overwhelming. Then, they open the book of the dead

Kathmandu: Relatives with the grim task of identifying their loved ones missing in Nepal’s catastrophic floods go filing through the gates of Kathmandu’s Maharajgunj Medical Campus, uncertain of what they will see, or what they want to find.

The morgue is a stopover for many of the bodies recovered from remote Rasuwa and Nuwakot, the worst hit districts . Forensic teams take DNA samples and attach tags, then send the bodies to temporary mass graves outside the capital, making way for the next batch.

For families whose desperate combing of the hospital have come to naught, each load of bodies at the morgue holds closure or promise.

“I hope he is still alive and I don’t find him here,” says 24-year-old Bakhat Pariyar, who is checking for his little brother, Laxman. “But if he is dead, we need to take him home to perform our rituals.”

Laxman last made contact with his family at 7.30am on August 26, the day of the flood, near the wiped-out village of Timure. Pariyar says his brother was almost certain to be granted a study visa for the United Kingdom and had wanted to go trekking in the spectacular mountains one last time.

He is not among the 47 bodies inside.

“We will come back when more bodies come in,” Pariyar says. “I don’t know what I will do if I find him.”

The first thing confronting searching relatives is the smell, an utterly overwhelming mix of decomposition and disinfectant.

Next, they must pore through A4 sheets of paper, stapled into a booklet, containing the forensic photos of bodies presently being processed.

Such photos are also posted on a wall across the road. Most images on both wall and in booklet are of figures so mangled by the flood and bloated from days in the sun and mud that it is difficult to see how any of them may be identified this way.

An official at the morgue says 24 have been identified since last week, though none yet on Friday.

The volume of death is so great for Nepal’s limited resources that bodies lie exposed. We travelled by chance behind a police bus ferrying bodies on Thursday afternoon, and see it again, parked at the morgue, close to 24 hours later with what an official confirms are some of the same bodies (and two rice sacks full of body parts) only now being unloaded.

Seven Australian Federal Police identification specialists are due to arrive in Kathmandu at the weekend, adding to a 15-member disaster assistance response team that landed on Friday .

A short walk away, people are giving samples of their DNA in the hope they may be able to retrieve family members from the mass graves, and afford them proper Hindu or Buddhist cremation.

The precinct at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital also contains the great wall of grief , on which relatives attach posters of their missing. When we visited soon after the disaster, the wall contained a couple of dozen posters. Now, there are hundreds, with more still being added.

School boy Bibek Pariyar, on short post-exam break, has taken on the responsibility of helping people stick on their posters and fixing the ones coming undone.

It is not particularly complex. But it is important. And with the wall almost completely covered, climbing onto the ledge to reach remaining space can be dangerous.

He doesn’t take payment, and when this masthead gives him a small amount of money for lunch and a drink, he tries to refuse. “I feel good doing this,” he explains.

Nearby, Champa Kumari Marchana is holding the photo of her husband, who is missing in one of the tunnels of the Trishuli hydropower network. She has not provided her DNA. Doing so invites the unacceptable notion he may be dead.

Another woman approaches the wall and strokes the photographs of a young man and a teenage boy.

A man asks us if we have any information about his relative, a British citizen missing in Tibet. He says the embassy can’t help because China is releasing so few details .

Unfortunately, we can’t help him either.

More than 5500 people are dead or missing in Nepal and Tibet. The number includes at least 36 Australians .

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter .

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.