‘You Burned This Country Down’: After Arsons, Nepal Reckons With Its Future

Asia Pacific|‘You Burned This Country Down’: After Arsons, Nepal Reckons With Its Future

The mob descended on the former Nepali prime minister’s house around noon on Tuesday. One person uncorked a plastic bottle filled with gasoline and doused the curtains. A match was struck. The flames moved fast.

The former prime minister, Jhala Nath Khanal, was not at home in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. But other household members raced up the stairs from one floor to another. Mr. Khanal’s son escaped from a balcony. His mother, Ravi Laxmi Chitrakar, a science professor, was trapped on the fourth floor, which broiled like a kiln. Smoke seethed around her.

By the time a rescue team found her, she had suffered extensive burns, including to her hands and face. Ms. Chitrakar’s airway was singed by the smoke, her lungs deeply damaged.

Ms. Chitrakar was transported to Nepal’s only specialized burn unit, where she remains in intensive care, despite various media outlets reporting that she had died. The burn unit in Kirtipur Hospital in Kathmandu is a critical resource in a country where fires maim and kill with shocking regularity.

There were 34 acute burn patients admitted there on Friday, including seven who were injured in the frenzy of arson that blazed nationwide this week when protests spread rapidly. The tumult unseated the government before a new interim leader was appointed on Friday.

The burn victims from the rioting include those targeted in the conflagrations, unlucky bystanders and arsonists who were harmed by their own deadly devices, said Ujjwal Bikram Thapa, known familiarly in Nepal as the Burn Guy for his advocacy on patients’ behalf.