The backstory: When I became the only lifeline for parents seeking closure for their son’s death

“Hello sir, I am calling from Kanpur.”

It was early July, and Baburam Pal from Kanpur’s Khamela village had phoned me for the fourth time that week. He knew, of course, that I am a woman – but like many other rural men I have interviewed, he called me “sir” anyway, and I did not have the heart to correct him.

He was, after all, a grieving father desperate for a glimpse of his son’s body, for some proof that his boy had in fact died in the horrific “ONGC tragedy” in May that had already faded from news headlines.

Somehow, in the months after the incident, I had become Pal’s only reliable source of information, support and hope. Somehow, he was depending on a journalist in faraway Mumbai to help him fulfil his only wish: to give his only child a proper funeral.

A preventable tragedy

Pal’s son, 27-year-old Vijay Kumar, was one of the 86 men killed during Cyclone Tauktae on May 17, when two vessels deployed in the oil fields of the Oil and Natural Gas Company capsized and sank off the coast of Mumbai. One of the vessels was Papaa-305, a barge carrying 261 people, of whom 75 lost their lives. The other was MV Varapradha, a…

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