Beyond the Byline: The Making And Unmaking of a 'Good Reporter'

Silence spread through the village. Everywhere I looked, there were people, despair on their faces. To one side, there were four bodies kept together, a fifth awaited. People sitting by the bodies wailed, and their cries echoed in my ears. I was present, seeing and hearing everything, but the life had left my body. I had turned to stone, a statue. No words left my lips. I was no longer in Gaurhari. I was in Kabrai, in my home. I was fifteen years old and my elder sister had just died. My whole family was around, my parents were weeping. But I saw my sister clearly, standing, speaking, moving around. I wanted to touch her but I couldn’t. I wanted to speak to her, embrace her. My body was drawn to this memory of my sister. I sat there and told her how much I think of her, how this was tormenting me, how I cried. I thought, if only I could open my eyes and she would be here, in front of me, her body warm, scolding me, making me laugh. Then a scream, and I was back in the darkness of Gaurhari. I wanted to hold the mourners but I couldn’t step forward. How could I pacify them, tell them to stop crying when I was tormented that way? I felt unable to control the tears running inside me, but my eyes were dry and I was quiet. It was like my ability to speak had been taken away, as punishment.

In 2016, five workers fell to their death in a stone quarry, a terrible tragedy for a region with frequent reports (and more frequent silences) of workers dying due to unsafe conditions of work. The calamity happened in Gaurhari, known for its soft and radiant Gaura stone, which made its quarries too lucrative to regulate. Three of us who had gone to investigate the incident spent the night in the village, mourning the workers, with the knowledge that these deaths would be silenced by the quarry owners if we didn’t stay. This was just another tragedy that befell the poor; this too would pass – it was a matter of time, money and muscle. Compensations would be paid to workers’ families so no police cases were filed and the lucrative quarrying could continue. It was in part due to our physical presence that all deaths were put on record.

The Good Reporter: A Memoir of Journalism in the 21st Century, Disha Mullick and Team Khabar Lahariya, S&S India, 2026.

We witnessed not just the post-accident horrors, but the casual conversations between police, officials and other reporters, the drinking and joking adjacent to the bodies. Our bravery, the drama of the scene, and the fact that only we registered the pain of the mourning families, were the familiar climax of the story. It was how we have always remembered and recorded it. The version above, of a reporter encountering death in the past and present at the same time, disrupted that success story, turning the camera inwards, towards the truth of the journalists reporting on this tragedy.

Through our careers, whenever we have written about ourselves, or others have written about us – even if the intention was to get to know the people behind the story of Khabar Lahariya – we have allowed only selected parts of our personal lives to enter the story of our professional journeys.

In this instance, the writer had worked, as a child, in dangerous conditions in a stone quarry, and this biographical detail was included in many of her reports on quarrying. This cohered with her effort to be seen as a good rural journalist, comparable to male narratives of success after hardship.

But in the text that emerged in the writing room, perhaps made possible by the other memories of vulnerability and under-exposed emotion, she allowed something else to enter the frame of the narrative, a buried grief that had not been revealed so far. Her bodily absence, in a moment when she was required to be journalistically present, was something that she had never before had a desire or provocation to remember or reveal.

The admission that in this situation, she had escaped, in some sense, into her own body and grief brought into our writing room emotions that were not easily reconciled. Our colleague – now a young mother herself, and often caught in the strong, contradictory imperatives this triggered: love and rage, suffocation and a sense of wholeness – said that the experience of writing this had been too painful.

What we are doing, how we are going deeper and deeper and deeper within, is piercing me. Why open a hidden pain, expose it to probing, not once but again and again? Why bare what has been put away and that enables you to move on? To be seen as a strong, unshakeable and righteous reporter in search for justice – just leave it at that? Some of us agreed with her, but others in the group said this, too, is the work. The struggle and the multiple realities we hold – this pain, too, should be recorded.

Disha Mullick is the co-founder of Khabar Lahariya and CEO, Chambal Media.

This is an excerpt from the book The Good Reporter: A Memoir of Journalism in the 21st Century written by Disha Mullick along with Geeta Devi, Harshita Verma, Kavita Bundelkhandi, Lakshmi Sharma, Lalita, Meera Devi, Nazni Rizvi, Shyamkali and Suneeta Prajapati.

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