One of the most heart-breaking stories I’ve ever done appears in the October issue of Elle magazine (Indian edition). “The Widows of the ’84 Riots” is a look at the survivors of one of the darkest chapters of Indian history– the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi that took place 25 years ago, after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

From the article:

In the camps, the young children cried out for food and water, the women went numb with grief. “Small children, they killed,” says 52-year-old Gurdeep Kaur. “I dressed up my boy in a dress, opened his hair and made ponytails, but they patted him down to check if he really was a girl, and found that he wasn’t.”

The water supply was cut off, she says. Even the pump had been destroyed. “The children were screaming for water. We had to urinate and give them that to drink. We did it because there was nothing else we could do.”

The women, she says, didn’t cry. “The heartbreak has set inside of them. Watching helplessly while their loved ones were torched. The half-burned children crying, ‘Mummy, save us, save us!’ How could Mummy save them?”

The next time someone rolls their eyes when I tell them I write for Elle (which I’m very proud of, by the way), I’m going to force them to read this piece.

There aren’t many publications, especially women’s magazines, that would have carried this article without asking me to change it. When I proposed the idea, I expected my editor to reject it saying it’s too dark for Elle’s audience. Instead, she agreed that if no one else will say it, maybe we should. In fact, she suggested that we add more voices to it, and made it one of the main features for the month.

When I submitted my first draft, I expected substantial cuts and rewrites asking me to tone down on some of the details like the one above. Not only were they printed as submitted, but the number of pages were increased because I went over my assigned word count.

I’m so grateful for my editors who trust me enough to agree to a story even when it seems so awfully out of place for them. And of course, for letting me tell it the way I want to. Pick up a copy!

For Time.com, I wrote the piece, “India’s Floods Reveal Climate Change Specter.”

And finally, since a little controversy never hurt anyone, I wrote this piece on stem cell treatments in India that I’ve been researching for several months, for Global Post: Unfettered by regulation, India pulls ahead on stem cell treatments

Sure enough, it was linked to by the Huffington Post and their readers had a lot to say.