Some time has passed since the Bagmundi tragedy rocked us one morning, then kept revisiting our minds for the next few days, and finally started fading into a juicier discussion about bare female bodies. Thanks to their incredible power to rule over our thoughts, the media have been able to divert our attention from the death of three young people to a spicy story about sex, adventure and sexual adventure.

As a girl in her early twenties — an age close to that of the five who faced the brunt of nature’s fury at the Daurigarha Nala in the foot of Ayodhya hills — and born and brought up in the lap of the eastern Himalayas where landslides are as common as waterlogging in Calcutta, I wonder how the accident got lost in the jugglery of words. Newspapers kept speculating about how Bappaditya’s cellphone could continue to function in the water and why the bodies of the two girls had no clothes on. Ask any mountaineer and he will tell you that keeping cigarettes and valuables like cellphone in waterproof polythene packets is a common practice among seasoned trekkers and Bappaditya was one.

The fact of the bare bodies would not be surprising to one who has been in a similar situation. When one gets swept by a gushing stream, there is a high chance of his dress getting hooked to a branch, which will eventually be torn apart by the force of the water. And, once in water, the body can get bloated to such an extent that, let alone the outer clothes, the seams of even the inner garments might burst. Girls’ innerwears generally come fitted with softer elastic compared to that of boys, in keeping with the relative softness of their skin. So, isn’t it natural that the innerwear of the two girls would give way in the face of the mighty flood?

The blatant ignorance in reporting the story has driven readers to indulge in cheap gossip rather than try to fathom how the flash flood actually killed the young adventurers. Consider the destructive power of a flood, couple it with the lightning speed and unpredictability and one can get an idea of how dangerous flash floods can be. As little as six inches of water coming in with such force can be enough to topple and throw away a person.

Bappaditya Chatterjee, Kaushik Sarkhel and Swati Das were trained mountaineers. Two out of the three trained trekkers survived. Bappaditya survived by hanging on to a tree trunk and, thanks to his presence of mind, he managed to get his cellphone recharged and call for help.

The Sobha is a narrow mountain stream whose water does not usually rise much above the knees. But when in spate, it can easily throw away drowned bodies far away from its shore. This is a characteristic of mountain rivers — a fact that most mountaineers are familiar with. In fact, the water rose to almost 15 feet when the disaster struck. The waters flattened or uprooted the trees and vegetation on both sides of the river.

Needless to say, the flood that hit the trekkers was not a common flash flood. Some of those (not from the media, thankfully) who visited the spot a day after the accident, called it a “mini tsunami”. I am surprised at the speculation in the media over the scratches on the bodies of the drowned. Is it too difficult to close your eyes and imagine an encounter with boulders in a gushing stream?

A girl, silenced by death, has now been reduced to a woman of questionable character after the accident. Her privacy has been invaded and her bare body has become her only identity. Why is nudity such a taboo when that is how we are born? Why is it being used as a bait to woo readers? Why have the young trekkers been transformed into commodities to entertain us? Why do we forget our humanity and not grant the respect that is due to the dead? I raise these questions before the people, who, along with the media, have been savouring every little detail with vicious delight without sparing a thought for the family of the dead.