On Wednesday, Nirajan Poudel held five funerals for five members of his family.

There were no bodies to cremate.

Instead, Poudel and his cousin made effigies from kusha grass—a sacred grass traditionally used in Hindu funeral rites—and took them to Pashupati Aryaghat.

They performed the last rites for his father, mother, uncle, aunt and cousin, who were swept away in the Bhotekoshi floods on August 26.

Eight days after the disaster, the family had received no word of their whereabouts. With little hope of recovering their bodies, Poudel said, they had no choice but to perform the rituals with kusha effigies and begin mourning.

But even after completing the funerals, another problem confronted him: where to observe the mourning period.

His home in Sole, Bidur Municipality-7, was gone. So were the homes of many others from his village. With nowhere to return to, Poudel came to Kathmandu and eventually found a room at the Kiriyaputri Bhawan of Rudramati Mahadev Temple in Tarakeshwar-5.

“After we could not find any other place to stay during the mourning period, we came here,” Poudel said. “We somehow managed to get a room.”

The room is not only a place to mourn. For Poudel, it is all that remains of a home in which he can perform the rituals for five members of his family.

The Rudramati Mahadev Temple and Kiriyaputri Bhawan are still under construction. But after families affected by the Bhotekoshi floods began approaching the temple committee, asking for somewhere to observe the mourning rituals, the committee opened the unfinished building.

“The entire country is in mourning,” said Raj Kumar Phuyal, treasurer of the temple management committee. “To help the relatives of the victims, we opened this Kiriyaputri Bhawan after the floods.”

The unfinished building has quickly filled up. Eight groups are currently observing mourning rituals there, with each group having lost several family members in the floods.

“There is no space to accommodate even one more family,” said local social worker Sudarshan Chapagain. “So many people have come asking for a place to observe the mourning rituals, but we have not been able to accommodate them.”

The building has taken years to construct because of a lack of funds. Tarakeshwar Municipality provided Rs1 million, while residents contributed donations to build the three-storey structure.

The shortage of space is even more acute at the nearby Kiriyaputri Bhawan of Gupteshwar Mahadev Temple.

All eight rooms there are occupied by families who lost relatives in the floods. After people kept arriving in search of space, the management committee erected tents and created six additional rooms.

“Now we do not have any room available until the current groups complete their mourning,” said Rishi Prasad Nepal, a member of the management committee. “We keep receiving phone calls from flood victims asking for a place to mourn, but we simply do not have one to offer.”

Some families have been forced to share rooms meant for a single mourning household.

Rajan Raila, also from Bidur-7, lost his mother, younger brother and sister-in-law in the flood. On Wednesday, he performed their funeral rites with kusha effigies at Pashupati Aryaghat before coming to Gupteshwar to observe the mourning period.

He and his brothers were given a single room for the three deceased family members. Even that room was not immediately available.

“We got only one room for the mourning rituals of three deceased family members,” Raila said. “Even that room has not yet become available. We will get it only after those whose 13th-day ritual is completed today leave. Until then, we have to wait outside.”

At the facility, relatives of different victims have had to share the limited space. In one room, the mourning rites for as many as seven people who went missing from Sole have been conducted together.

The use of kusha effigies has become increasingly common among families who have lost relatives in the flood.

They say they have little hope of finding their loved ones alive. Even recovering bodies does not necessarily mean bringing closure, they say, because identifying badly damaged remains can be difficult. With authorities also burying unidentified bodies, families fear they may never know what happened to their relatives.

For them, a symbolic funeral has become the only way to begin mourning.

In Sole alone, residents estimate that around 100 people remain missing.

“There could be many more,” said Ram Chandra Dhakal, who was displaced from Sole. “We do not know how many people who were staying indoors, walking along the roads or working at construction sites were swept away.”

Dhakal’s brother Uttam is observing the mourning rites for their mother at the Gupteshwar Kiriyaputri Bhawan. Their mother was also swept away in the flood. Her body was eventually recovered and cremated, but the family still had to come to Kathmandu to observe the mourning period.

“There is no house left in the village where we can observe the rituals,” Dhakal said.

That is the cruel double loss confronting many flood survivors: the disaster took their relatives, and then took away the homes in which they would traditionally mourn them.

Families who fled to Kathmandu and are staying with relatives or in rented rooms have also found that they cannot simply observe the mourning period there. They have instead been forced to search for communal Kiriyaputri Bhawans, only to find them full.

The Kiriyaputri Bhawan at Gumba in Balaju-16 is also occupied by families affected by the floods.

Near Pashupati Aryaghat, all 40 rooms of another Kiriyaputri Bhawan have been taken by flood victims. Officials have even made eight to 10 rooms originally intended for flower sellers available for mourning rituals. There is no additional space to offer.

“The demand for space to perform the mourning rites surged only after the Bhotekoshi flood,” a Pashupati Area Development Trust official said. “Under normal circumstances, it is not difficult to find such space.”

The trust has decided not to charge cremation fees to families who lost relatives in the disaster.

But for many families, the question is no longer about the cost of the rituals. It is about how to perform them when there is no body, no home and increasingly, no place to mourn.

More than 1,200 bodies have been recovered from the August 26 floods, while thousands remain missing. Pilgrims, tourists, engineers and residents are among those still unaccounted for.

The floods swept away more than 7,000 houses and left many of the surviving homes uninhabitable. Roads and dozens of concrete and suspension bridges were destroyed, while settlements along the Trishuli riverbanks were reduced to debris and riverbed.

For families like Poudel’s, the disaster has already forced them to accept what they cannot confirm.

Five members of his family are gone. Five bodies have not been found.

So they made five bodies of grass—and began mourning.

The story has been updated.