A San Diego husband and wife have been identified as two people still missing, a week after the deadly flooding that swamped Nepal.<\/p>\n
Gaurav Menon’s family shared a video of him and his wife Alka Malhotra smiling in New Delhi, India. It was the night before they headed to Nepal for a spiritual trip of their dreams to Mount Kailash.<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s a very new experience for me. Just the energy of the place,” you could hear Alka say in the video.<\/p>\n
The pilgrimage is a sacred 33-mile trek for Buddhists and Hindus.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was spiritually very enlightened, in the sense that when you hear of monks giving up the luxuries of life and going to live in an ashram or going and living in a monastery. He was not attached to things,” said Anu Peshawaria, Gaurav\u2019s aunt.<\/p>\n
Hours after that video was taken, the San Diego couple disappeared in the flooding that killed at least 1,100 people, with nearly 4,000 still missing.<\/p>\n
Peshawaria\u2019s been in contact with her family in India, where he was born, before coming to the States for graduate school.<\/p>\n
Gaurav, 50, is an electrical engineer who holds multiple patents and works in the tech industry. His wife, Alka, 49, works as a scientist. <\/p>\n
The family\u2019s worried now that his phone’s no longer ringing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey may be somewhere under the mud, or they may be somewhere gone in the water,” said Peshwaria.<\/p>\n
Families of the missing U.S citizens are now bonding together over their shared loss, petitioning the U.S. \u00a0Secretary of State to increase family support, as well as search and rescue efforts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are requesting setting up units, sending drones, asking them to send specialized people, having to organize things in both India, Tibet, and Nepal, ” explained Peshwaria.<\/p>\n
As the drumbeat for help gets louder, and the days continue to pass, family is remembering the couple as lovebirds who are still together in one way or another.<\/p>\n
They were always together. And that’s how we probably feel they went together,” said Peshwaria. \u201cWe just pray that there is a miracle, and we find them somewhere, you know, where they survive, or maybe the river they reached somewhere, and somebody has given them some treatment.”<\/p>\n
The couple was supposed to return home on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Their family is hoping to find their bodies, so they can bring them back to the States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A San Diego husband and wife have been identified as two people still missing, a week after the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[644,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-452345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-flooding","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}