A ll of six seconds. That’s how long the video lasts. In a dark jacket and a wide-brimmed hat, against clear blue skies and the vast, rocky Kailash mountain range, Priyanka Choudhary on a pony, waving at the camera, wearing her brightest smile.

These six seconds now fill her mother Madhu’s hours as she watches the video on a loop at her home in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh. She sometimes attempts to pinch the screen and zoom into her face. But it’s a video, she fails, so she starts all over again.

It’s a video of Priyanka shot days before the catastrophic floods that hit Nepal on August 26. The 40-year-old public health specialist was one of 77 pilgrims and three volunteers from an Isha Foundation pilgrimage group that was on its way back from Kailash Mansarovar, when a giant wall of water, mud, ice, and boulders struck the Gyirong immigration office on the Tibet-China side near the Nepal border, levelling the entire complex.…