Four-year-old Murli was in a hurry to reach home on Tuesday after arriving at the state government's relief camp at Raxaul so that he could get his chocolates.

Murli has been pestering his mother, Archana Sharma, for the past five days with the same demand. Over the past five days she was a witness to so many scary things that she did not even pay attention to her son.

Archana has seen the house in which she used to live with her husband, Arun Sharma, and two children, cracking. She silently saw umpteen cremations just in front of the camp in which she had been putting up with her family since Saturday, the day the first earthquake hit Nepal.

A resident of the Patna City area, Archana, her husband, son Murli and nine-year-old daughter Nibha reached Raxaul, a sub-divisional town in Bihar on the India-Nepal border, around 210km north of Patna, on Wednesday. She would take a train to come back to the city.

Archana used to stay in the Kupundol area of Kathmandu in Nepal. Her husband, Arun, worked for a private firm.

Saturday was like any other day. Arun left for some official work in the morning and the two children of the family were watching TV.

Those were very tough moments but fortunately my family could come out of the house safely
Arun Sharma
(till his wife and children came out of their house in Kathmandu during the earthquake on Saturday)
It was tough spending days and nights in the tent as continuous stench of bodies being burnt nearby used to fill our senses. Fear of epidemic was also looming large and I was really concerned about my children
Archana Sharma

As soon as Arun moved out of the house, Archana locked the main gate. As she walked inside, the temblor hit the Nepal capital.

Arun came back running towards his home and saw his wife and two children running towards the gate. But Archana had forgotten to pick up the keys. She again went inside to get them.

"Those were very tough moments but fortunately my family could come out of the house safely," Arun told The Telegraph at the relief camp set up at Raxaul by the state government.

The agony of the family did not end there. They had to stay in tents set up for the quake-hit people.

"It was tough spending days and nights in the tent as continuous stench of bodies being burnt nearby used to fill our senses. Fear of epidemic was also looming large and I was really concerned about my children," Archana said, trying to overcome the mental stress she is facing in wake of the natural disaster.

It was she who kept on asking Arun to return to Patna. The southward journey - Raxaul is about 280km south of Kathmandu - was not smooth as 14 people huddled in a Maruti van for the journey. "We had little option but to accept the uncomfortable journey as bigger trouble was staring at us in Kathmandu," Arun said, narrating his experience of the journey from Kathmandu to Raxaul.

While the couple was narrating the harrowing experience and Murli was continuously asking for chocolates, Nibha, the couple's daughter, was busy enjoying the watermelon and cucumber having been given to the family at the Raxaul relief camp.

Having virtually buried one episode of their life's journey across the border, the family was also enquiring about a train to start afresh - a journey on this side of the border to reach their home.

And the queries of many such families on way back home did suggest that life doesn't stop, be it a quake of whatever magnitude. The one that hit Nepal was 7.9 on the Richter scale.