Stories and their memories

Last week I was writing an article on Hemant Karkare and his family, which required multiple trips to his house in Dadar, where his wife still stays.
As important as the story are the pictures that you run with it, for which I found myself trekking to the house again, hoping to persuade Mrs. Karkare to lend me some photographs to use with the story.

I didn’t think it would be too hard- after all, most people want their pictures in the news, right? However, as we sat on her brown sofa, with old faded photographs littered on the coffee table in front of us, Mrs Karkare was terribly hesitant about letting the photographs out of her sight. While I tried to make her feel comfortable by letting her choose the pictures she wouldn’t mind us using on our website, she kept asking me, “When will you give them back?”

I told her I just needed to scan them, and would return them immediately, but she seemed reluctant to let them out of her sight. “All you press-waalas come and ask for photos, and then you don’t return them!” she said, throwing me an accusatory look. I was taken aback- at the caustic tone, as well as these journalists that the poor woman had encountered.

For what kind of person takes a widow’s only memories and then refuses to return them? What kind of journalism is that, where you forget that your stories are about real live people, and their tragedies? People who you might be hurting when you’re too lazy to return the one thing they have left - their memories?