An Agonizing Wait for a Migrant Worker’s Final Journey Home

When the body arrived, weeks after the laborer’s death in a faraway country, it was almost 9 p.m. and the village was dark.

Because so much time had passed, and no one could be sure of the remains’ condition, the family did not risk a stop at home. So the truck, trailed quietly by a crowd of villagers, drove to the banks of a dried-out river, where men were building a pyre.

There, under the soft light of the moon above, villagers opened the coffin of the laborer, Rakesh Kumar Yadav, with pliers and axes. “Show us his face,” a man shouted. Once it was revealed, the laborer’s widow, Renu Devi Yadav, struggled to pull her children away, kissing her son on his wet cheek. The flames stood ready in the distance.

In the small Himalayan nation of Nepal, hundreds of thousands go abroad every year in the hope of building a future out of the country’s deep poverty, an outflow so strong that overseas remittances make up more than a quarter of the Nepali economy.

And each year, hundreds of these migrants die — unraveling, in an instant, delicate dreams thousands of miles away. Mr. Yadav, 40, died while employed as a security guard in Dubai. Others work as laborers or drivers in places like Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. In Qatar, which is hosting the World Cup, migrants from Nepal and other countries, mostly in Asia, were the backbone of a yearslong construction blitz for the world’s biggest soccer event.

In life, men like these face layers of inequality and vulnerability. It stalks them on the final journey home, too. Struggling countries like Nepal have little leverage to expedite the return of bodies lingering in the morgues of rich nations. Bereaved families find themselves at the mercy of middlemen, government clerks and even a harsh mountainous terrain.