"It was 10pm and I'd just laid down to sleep," Purna, a 29-year old from India's recently flooded Bihar district tells me. We sit on a grassy patch overlooking the dry riverbed where just two weeks ago the Koshi River flowed.

Purna has a boyish round face and dimples. His skin shows through the holes in his weathered blue t-shirt. He speaks slowly, shaking his head. "First I heard my mother scream, 'Water, water!' Then I felt my blanket get wet. A minute later, the water was five feet high."

Several hours before water entered Purna's home, Nepal's largest river, the Koshi, broke through its eastern retaining wall. Instead of continuing down its normal path, 90 percent of it flowed through the broken wall. The water first hit Nepal's Sunsari district then continued south, crossing the border into India's northern Bihar district.

The water submerged villages, rice paddies, and roads in its way. It forced 3 million people like Purna to flee their homes. And it swallowed at least 65 people and thousands of livestock who were not quick or lucky enough to escape in time.

Purna and his family spent the night of Aug. 18 on the roof of a local school. The next day they walked for three hours to reach Nepal's Saptari district, which offers higher ground and a larger network of relief agencies than their home district of Bihar in India. He and his brothers carried their three goats and a bag of rice on their heads. His mother carried wedding pictures she'd salvaged and a bag of clothes.

I travelled to this flood-hit district as an information fellow with the International Rescue Committee in Nepal - one of the first agencies to respond to the disaster - to help assess the situation and coordinate our response to the disaster.

Purna is one of roughly 7,000 Indians who has crossed the border into Nepal's Saptari district since the Koshi changed its course. There are 25,000 displaced people in Saptari altogether, and hundreds of Indians continue to arrive in Nepal each day.

Nepalese seem to have welcomed their Indian neighbours. Indians of Bihar and Nepali of Saptari share a common language, Maitheli. And many have family on both sides of the border. "There is a border on paper, but on the ground, we are all the same" is a refrain I hear repeated by both nationalities.

The distribution of aid is as equitable as these sentiments. Purna's family received the same blue tarp and bag of food as the Nepali family in the tarp next to them.

But we sense hints that there are limits to the Indians' welcome. A Nepali woman from an aid agency tells me, "We must help ALL flood victims, not just those from our country." She pauses, lifts her finger for emphasis. "But once the immediate emergency is over, India should take care of its own people."

I ask Purna when he expects to return home. His brow furrows and he looks up at the sky. "It depends on the rains."

The monsoon rains will end in a couple of weeks - they always do - and by then the waters should recede. Purna's future, and the futures of thousands of others like him, is less predictable.

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