A spoonful of rice, an indelible hum and a swaying chandelier.
Then, a thought: This is it. This is it.
“It” was the end of a life only 16 years lived. Except that, mercifully, it wasn’t.
Just a few minutes before noon on April 25, 2015, Yajyoo Shrestha was sitting down to eat with his family in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal and a city that nearly 1.5 million call home.
He had just scooped a first helping of lunch onto his plate when two of Earth’s own began violently scraping against each other roughly 50 miles to the northwest. The resulting energy, which would register as a 7.8-magnitude earthquake, raced toward Kathmandu.
Shrestha can remember the swinging of the light fixture above, the certainty it would plummet at any moment. He can call to mind “the weird humming that the Earth makes” when it quakes, the way it blended with the screams and shouts of family and neighbors to form a terrible ensemble that eventually dissipated but still reverberates.
