Kathmandu, Sept. 12 -- For four months, Tulsi Ramrai has walked the same circuit through Singha Durbar, Nepal's central secretariat in Kathmandu - Foreign Affairs, Labour, Finance, and back again. He is trying to bring home the body of his son-in-law, Santosh Rai, who died in a Phnom Penh hospital in May and has been lying in its morgue since.

The obstacle is not paperwork. It is $7,335 - what Nepal's embassy in Thailand calculated it would cost to fly the body home. Santosh had travelled to Cambodia on a visit visa, which put him outside every state mechanism that might have paid it. Tulsi, who left his village in Rautahat and has been back only once since, has spent those four months being told by one ministry to try the next.

"On the...