LAXMIMARGA, Nepal — Santoshi Tamang's nightmares repeat.
Someone brings her deep into the tangled woods outside her small town in southeastern Nepal and leaves her there, alone.
Then she sees the pyre where the body is burning. The body reaches for her, pulling her into the flames.
It is the body she burned in these same woods — the body shipped home after her husband, a migrant worker named Subash, was declared dead in Saudi Arabia more than five years ago.
Santoshi remembers only flashes of the funeral she saw between blackouts.
The body, wrapped in a white shroud. The line of Buddhist monks, neighbors and relatives, slowly carrying the body into the woods. Her young daughter and son, trailing behind.
They believed that setting the body aflame would free the soul. Instead, it now haunts two families, forever connected by the macabre events that began unfolding in a desert 4,000 miles away.
Santoshi said she always held onto the hope that somehow Subash would come back to life.
"But then I'd remind myself — I watched his body burn," she said. "It's not something that could happen."
Until it did.
