Tags:
Journalism of Courage
After a few months of reporting in Delhi, I know more dead people than living. And what a way I met each of them! The first of the lot were the victims of the BMW car accident. I got acquainted with the survivor Manoj first. When the accident happened and the newspapers splashed it, all I understood, or chose to understand, was that there was a BMW driven by two or three boys from rich homes and that several people, including some cops, had been killed. Accidents were not my beat. But by nine in the morning my boss was on the line. The survivors were admitted to AIIMS and I had better go. Several accidents and unnatural deaths later, I realised that hospitals being my beat, deaths were my beat too.
So I went to Manoj in ward D-5. He had fractured his legs. In a bed nearby was Ashok Kumar, a constable who had broken his spine after trying to catch a thief. He was paralysed waist downwards and I had reported his tale earlier, all the while feeling miserable about making a story out of his wretchedness, that he would never walk again.
The next day I went back to meet my new friends. This time a man was sitting near Ramprasad. So he had been identified. The man told me that Ramprasad had been squatting near the railway line when some vehicle hit him. But Manoj said he did not know anyone called Ramprasad. I realised my blunder when another paper reported that the unidentified man in the BMW case was called Nasir. As far as the BMW story was concerned, Ramprasad was out of the picture. And I never met him again.
I started looking for Nasir once again, and found him. Manoj then told me that Nasir was Gulab8217;s cousin. A few days later Nasir died. It was a Sunday and I was visiting the homes of the victims. I met the family of a dead cop and then we were searching for the houses of Gulab and Nasir. Finally we came upon Gulab8217;s house in one of the lanes of Paharganj. There was a crowd there and a corpse was being taken for burial. Gulab had died a week ago and I was therefore not expecting a corpse at his house. I was told that it was Nasir, that they had lived in the same house and that their mothers were sisters. The photographer and I sat on leather mats which the duo had made by sewing patches together.
My visits to Manoj, and therefore to Ashok, continued. The day before Manoj vacated the hospital, Ashok also left for his village. Hence, one day I found to my dismay that both beds were empty. A few days later I was told that Ashok had got readmitted with brain fever and that he had died.
No accidents came my way for some time. But soon enough I was sent to the spot where a five-year-old girl had been run over by a schoolbus. I returned with her identity card, which she had pinned on her frock at the time of her death. It had her picture which we needed for the paper.
Back home that night, I did not have the courage to look at my sleeping daughter and was tempted to feel her breath with the back of my hand. The following day I did not have to look for an excuse to go to the girl8217;s house to return her picture. Another child, slightly older, had been killed in a bus accident on the same spot. I came back with his school card which I never returned. It may be there among other office pictures. But I did not keep it. I still think of it and worry. But I already have the picture of a dead man in my dairy 8212; Ved Prakash who had died in a TB hospital. He sits smiling with his wife and adopted son. Someone was to come and collect it.
