Victims of the 2015 earthquake gather their belongings, rendered homeless a second time after the Kathmandu police on March 14, 2017, demolished the largest settlement camp where 100 displaced families were staying. Pic/AFP

On a visit to Kathmandu last week I met the interesting 81-year-old recently retired surgeon, Dr Sudip Bhattacharya. Though ethnically Bengali, his family has lived in Nepal for four centuries. His childhood schooling was in Bihar, in the Darbhanga twin-city of Laheria Sarai, where my paternal grandparents had a house when they left our village in 1955; he attended Zila school (the district school was then called North Brook Zila school) though he attended medical school in UP. He then went to the United Kingdom to be a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, but in 1967, returned to Nepal to work in Biratnagar (Nepal's second largest city, six kilometres north of the Bihar border). There was much in common with my 81-year-old father, who attended Darbhanga Medical College and migrated to the UK to be a Member of the Royal College of Physicians that I felt a pang of remorse: Dr Bhattacharya's three children had also become doctors. How disappointed my father must be.