Why Should I Talk to You?

　　I'd recently returned to Delhi from covering the Indian Ocean tsunami and its aftermath. When the quake hit, the day after Christmas, I'd abandoned my family vacation, deaf to my mother's pleas, and taken the first flight out to Sri Lanka, where the death toll was rapidly rising. Sri Lanka is a tiny teardrop-shaped island nation off the southern coast of India, and the tsunami had turned it inside out. Along the southern coast, train tracks were twisted up into tree branches like a roller coaster gone wrong. A woman's nightgown fluttered like a pink flag above a fisherman's leveled shack. The bloated, stinking carcasses of buffalo floated in ocean lagoons. In the relief camps, everyone was drunk on moonshine.

　　"Why should I talk to you? My whole family is dead. What can you give me?" the fishermen would ask.

　　I'd give them the stock journalist answer——that hearing their story could help influence the U.S. government to send more aid. There was truth to this reasoning, but it felt like a cheap lie. After weeks of reporting the disaster, I'd started to lose faith in the very mission of journalism. In a hotel bar in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, my journalist friends talked about where the "sexiest" part of the story was. What they meant was where the most bodies were. I felt as though we were all competing with one another to squeeze painful tales out of as many victims as we could find and get the grisliest stories first.

　　In one relief camp, my driver——who doubled as my translator, to save money——helped me interview a man who's lost everyone except for one lanky preteen daughter, who crept over to me as I talked to him and put her in my lap. I stayed stroking her hair long after I finished talking to her father, even though my driver had been agitating that we had to find somewhere to stay for the night before it got dark. When she sat up, my jeans were damp from her tears. I gave her money, even though I knew I shouldn't since I planned to use her father's interview on the radio. In spite of the intimacy of that moment, I can't even picture her face anymore. It has run together with all the other lyrical, brokenhearted Sri Lankan faces.

Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P186~187
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2