Dubai Nepali Resident Mourns More Than 100 Friends and Neighbours Lost in Trishuli Floods
A Nepali living in Dubai told The National he lost more than 110 friends and neighbours when the floods hit his hometown of Trishuli Bazar — the diaspora's grie
By Nepalese Events Australia Editorial
Published: 2026-09-30T07:00:00.000000Z
Category: Nepal Flood Disaster
The flood disaster's human scale has a number that stopped the UAE's Nepali community cold: more than 110 friends and neighbours — the toll one Dubai-d Nepali man counted from his own hometown of Trishuli Bazar, in the account he gave to The National.
The report
The National's September 3 report described how the man's hometown was devastated when the flooding struck — leaving him, like thousands of the UAE's Nepali residents, mourning an entire community's losses from thousands of kilometres away. Trishuli Bazar, in Nuwakot district, sits in the river-belt geography the August floods hit hardest.
A number like 110 isn't a statistic to someone from a small town — it's a mental map: the people whose shops you know, whose children went to school with yours, whose families would have been at your own family's Dashain this October. The diaspora's grief works differently from the homeland's: there's no funeral to attend, no community mourning gathering, just the phone calls and the count of names.
What it reveals about the UAE community
The story also exposes the specific geography of UAE Nepali life: the community isn't a cross-section of Nepal but an archipelago of hometowns — Trishuli, the Bhotekoshi belt, the districts that supply the Gulf workforce — which means a disaster that strikes one river valley in Nepal becomes, in Dubai, a concentrated grief shared by everyone from that valley who now works abroad. The consulate's lamp-lighting ceremony and the story of the bus driver who gave up her ticket home are the same grief in different registers — the community's collective response and the individual's private sacrifice.
For the diaspora watching from the UAE, this season's Dashain will be observance inside mourning — tika received with empty chairs at the family table. Our UAE desk continues covering the community's response.
Trishuli's migration link to the Gulf
Nuwakot district — of which Trishuli Bazar is the commercial centre — is one of the hill districts whose out-migration to the Gulf runs deep: the town's trading families and the villages around it have sent workers to Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar for two decades, which is why a single flood there produces grief clusters across the Emirates rather than isolated individual loss. When the man's hometown flooded, he wasn't watching a news event from afar — he was watching his entire social world inundated, at a remove that lets him neither mourn with family nor help on the ground.
That's the particular cruelty of diaspora disaster: the people best placed to send money home are often the people least able to be physically present for the funerals, and the community's response machinery — the consulate's memorial programme, the associations' relief drives — exists partly to give that distant grief somewhere to go.
There's also a practical aftermath the reporting doesn't fully capture: for families in the hit districts, the next months are about rebuilding and identification, and for the diaspora it's about sustained support — remittances redirected from celebration to recovery, the relief drives the associations run through autumn. The memorial moment passes; the need doesn't, which is why the community's institutions are treating this as a season-long response rather than a single ceremony.
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