The water started rising on the night of 18 August when everyone was asleep, within an hour it was more than a metre high. "The children were scared and all our grain got wet. I was afraid too," she says.
No one died in the village, but it took weeks for them to be rescued by the Indian military. They were taken to high ground in Galmar where a camp was set up in a school building.
"We slept with more than 100 people per room but it was safe and all families got rice and lentils twice a day," recalls Gauri Devi. The men went back once a week to check on houses and belongings, but after six weeks the camp was closed.
Most of the 500 people living in Gauri Devi's village are now back. The Kosi flows through the surrounding farmland, and the villagers wade knee-deep in brown water to get from one house to another.
Boys laugh and dive off the backs of water buffalos, but the grownups are worried about the future. "How can we stay here if we have no land to farm?" Gauri Devi asks.
A local NGO distributes supplies in a village, a 40-minute walk across flooded roads. Salt and other essentials need a day's roundtrip to nearby villages. The village lacks medicine and food the most. Safe drinking water is a problem because the tube wells are flooded.
How quickly life will get back to normal here will depend on how quickly engineers can channel the Kosi back to its old course upstream in Nepal.
All panoramics are digital composites.
 Three months after the waters rose, this is still the only dry patch connecting the village of Galmar to the rest of flooded Mahdepura district. |
 Bihar is amongst the poorest states in India, eight out of ten people are dependent on agriculture. The Kosi catastrophe is expected to make Bihar even poorer, and force farmers to migrate for work. |
 Villages in Nepal and India are cut off from access due to broken bridges and damaged roads. Getting food and medicine is difficult and often requires long travels on many different means of transportation. |
 Gauri Devi returned to her village in Madhepura after a relief camp was closed down. She has returned to her flooded home with four children. |
 The flood waters are knee deep in what used to be Satender Yadav's rice field in Parwah Navtol in Madhepura district of Bihar. The flooding has submerged 1,100 sq km of farms here. |
 Plugging the breach in Kosi embankment that unleashed havoc in Bihar is proving to be a massive challenge for Indian and Nepali engineers. They are trying to divert the river upstream to its original channel so they can repair the breach. |
 Subha Kanta Jha, 55, was living in a relief camp in Supaul district in Bihar. After a night of heavy rain, he went out to check on his banana plantation but drowned on the way. |
 Here in Patarghat, the main road has disappeared. As in Nepal, dangerously overloaded boats help people cross to the other side. |
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