The backstory: When I was asked to stop asking questions

“Is it okay if we don’t talk about it more?” Sushil asked, with a weak smile.

It was the first time I had encountered such a request in my four years as a reporter.

I was in Himachal Pradesh’s Lahaul valley in May to report about how melting glaciers were causing flash floods in the Himalayan region.

Sushil was among those who had lost his home in August 2021, when a landslide damaged two floors of his three-storied house on the banks of the Chandrabhaga river. We met in his small grocery store in a busy market where we could hear the low gush of the river that flowed in the valley.

About half an hour into the conversation, Sushil looked down at the floor, then looked up at me, speaking up in a low voice to make his request – politely but assertively.

I immediately agreed. Soon, guilt followed – had I retraumatised him by asking him to recount what must have been a harrowing experience? But if I didn’t ask questions, would I still have my story?

I learnt later that “retraumatising” is indeed a phenomenon that reporters risk causing. Different from “triggers” that can bring back painful memories, retraumatising is more “consuming,” the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma notes in its style guide. “It happens when a conscious or unconscious reminder causes a person to vividly and comprehensively re-experience the feelings, thoughts and occasionally memories of a past trauma as if it is occurring in the present,” it said.

Perhaps several of my questions required Sushil to re-experience such memories. I began by asking him about the losses his family incurred due to the landslide. “We had stored firewood for about ten years, all of that flowed away,” Suresh said, adding other losses on the list – his sheep that he saw floating away, the fodder his family had stored, and parts of his house and its belongings. “Our estimate of the entire loss was about Rs 18-20 lakh,” he said. “But we got a compensation of only Rs 13,500.”

With such extensive damage to his house, I was curious to know how Sushil and his family coped in the days that followed. Sushil told me they lived with relatives for about a week before returning to their house and cleaning the debris that had accumulated. But I was keen to get some more details. So I asked him: When did you realise that a landslide had occurred and you must leave the house immediately? Was it early in the morning? Were the rest of your family also at home?

Perhaps remembering that his family had been in such a vulnerable position was the final straw. “We were able to escape because it happened in the morning, what if it had happened in the night? The thought hurts me emotionally.” This is the last quote that I jotted down in my notebook before Sushil ended the conversation.

It was only after I wound up and left did I become aware of the emotional impact of my questions. As a reporter who often covers climate disasters, I believed that I had a sense of empathy towards those suffering from them. I felt I knew how to ask questions sensitively, even to sit through the silences. But Sushil’s response made me realise I had to do better.

I knew that I needed to carefully plan such interviews to minimise the emotional toll they could take. While I might not be in a position to reduce the trauma my interviewees had undergone, I could, however, tread into the conversation slowly, picking up on body language to assess their comfort, and cushion the talk with the empathy that I felt but was probably not showing enough. Like how the Dart Centre’s handbook suggests while interviewing trauma victims: “It’s about more than asking good questions. It’s about creating, however briefly, rapport and a relationship – one that allows both you and your interviewee to give your best.”

I slowly started experimenting with different methods. Very recently, I reported from Joshimath in Uttarakhand, which had hit the headlines in early 2023 when cracks had appeared in hundreds of homes as the land beneath the town started to subside. I went to the town months later, to follow up on how its residents were coping.

This time, I decided to say out loud what I was thinking. “This must be really hard for you. I can’t even imagine what I would do if someone asks me to leave my home,” I told a woman after she shared how the administration marked their house with a red mark and asked them to leave as soon as possible. She looked at me and nodded, “Right? You can’t, right? Can you imagine this happening to you for an entire year?” she said, and went on to describe her family’s ordeals.

I have also now learnt that the currency for these conversations is information. For all that I want to know about people and their experiences, they want to know mine in detail to feel comfortable in sharing their experiences – a fair ask. So now, I have started accounting longer time periods for each conversation when I plan my reporting day. I have started responding to questions about whether my story would help them in any way, how long I have been doing this work, how often I travel, and even uncomfortable ones like what my salary is and why I am not married! I find that these conversations help people see me beyond the role of a reporter, and perhaps seeing me vulnerable with some of these questions brings us on a similar page.

There is a lot for me to learn as a reporter interviewing people about perhaps the most traumatising events of their life. But the learning wouldn’t have begun without Sushil’s request in Lahaul that day.