Always Go

I didn't often make this sort of mistake. I was backed into a corner; the walls to my left and behind me funneled rocks, glass bottles and whatever other shrapnel protesters hurled right at me. They weren't aiming for me, rather for the Venezuelan soldiers lined up to my right. My camera lens was trained on the soldiers' weapons, ready for the next muzzle flash, though my eyes kept darting to the protesters lest they launch something more dangerous my way. Rocks and bottles smacked my helmet, as tear gas seeped into my mask.

I'd been in this type of environment countless times and was normally adept at positioning, getting a clear view, and taking down quotes, photos, and video, without putting myself in significant danger. I'd done this—as well as numerous hostile environment and self-defense courses—frequently enough to know that the best defense was thinking ahead: Make sure you have a way out and make sure you take it before things escalate. That is, don't get to where I was now.

Thankfully, I was well protected. Solid boots, shin pads, knee pads, a heavy-duty flak jacket, gas mask, and Kevlar helmet kept whatever landed from bothering me too much. The real dangers were flaming Molotov cocktails or live fire. Thankfully neither appeared in anyone's arsenal just yet.

Jhon, a young Reuters motorcyclist and regular partner on these outings, had made a run for it along the gap between protesters and soldiers. His hands beckoned me over. My calculation, however, was that following him was more dangerous than staying put. I'd rather crouch and wait it out with a few light smacks to my protective gear than be struck by something carrying far more momentum.

So I waited, depressing my camera's shutter while looking around to ensure the scene didn't devolve.

But what was I doing here? There was barely a story to tell. News is deviation from the mean, and Venezuela's mean had descended in recent years precisely to what I was witnessing. The country was undergoing a humanitarian crisis, with millions earning a dollar a month, suffering food shortages, insecurity, and rampant inflation. I don't know how many times I wrote that sentence. Our headline at Reuters that day—April 4, 2017—was evergreen: "Venezuela security forces battle anti-Maduro protesters."

Here, on the ground covering one of the world's worst crises, was precisely the position for which I'd spent the last decade narrowly aiming. I'd made it, and made it with the world's top news outlet in a well-paid staff position with unlimited expenses. But what was my purpose?

Everybody around me was suffering, earning nothing, not eating properly, mentally distraught, seeding trauma that would last generations. I was to tell their story but doing so didn't seem to make any difference. Was I actually just here for my own gratification—an adrenaline boost with which I could one day open a memoir?

I had wanted to impact the world, whatever that meant, but I could have done that in a more sophisticated way. And I'd chosen Venezuela on a whim. The foreign correspondent's destination, I'd later realize, is often a playground for the ego.

My mind wandered. I held no anger or resentment to either protesters or authorities, even when their ire turned on me. Nor did I hold anger or resentment towards the Venezuelan soldiers who had detained me a year earlier at the Colombian border, nor to Egyptian military intelligence who had detained me four years earlier at the Suez Canal and held me at a torture site. I was good at being an impartial observer, not taking sides or becoming emotionally invested; that made me a better reporter.

What angered me was the industry for which I was doing this—to which I was certainly not an impartial observer. I was tired of gross mismanagement, exaggeration, and fabrication by its most respected news outlets, and wild egos which trumped truth. I'd just returned from a disastrous trip to Iraq, what had meant to be my next move, where I'd found leadership to be non-existent. I'd felt betrayed too often. And here I was, being smacked around on a street corner while the editors from whom I sought support ignored my emails—too busy, I imagined, sipping cocktails at New York award ceremonies—and my family back home wondered what I was doing with my life.

After some twenty minutes, I reunited with Jhon behind the soldiers as they pushed forward, and we rode his bike through side streets to join the protesters. I got my photos, quotes, and recorded a TV piece before spending a relaxed evening with my girlfriend in our offensively cheap four-story penthouse. We watched macaws fly over Caracas as the warm sun set behind the Ávila mountain.

It was beautiful and thrilling. But something wasn't right.

Effective storytelling often relies on the melding of real-life characters and events. Such meshing is meant to convey the truth without confusing the reader, but isn’t always a precise representation of reality. I have no problem with this in principle, but, in this book, I have prioritized accuracy over storytelling. This is both due to the themes discussed, which include journalistic ethics, as well as, far more importantly, a realization that, in life, characters and events don’t always follow a narrative that makes sense.

I had to conceal identifying information about certain investigative sources. I chose to be deliberately vague rather than make up key characteristics—i.e., I will describe a source simply as “a person in a major US city” rather than “Tom, with whom I met in a Manhattan café.” The latter is more readable and relatable—but not true. Again, I’ve broadly gone for accuracy, and so vagueness, over making things up.

I have, however, made up some names and indicated having done so with an asterisk on first mention. I also switched some sources’ genders. I sent relevant excerpts to the most delicate sources pre-publication to ensure I’d not missed anything that could identify them, knowing how easy that can be to do inadvertently.

Every quote in this book from me or another person was either captured by me as audio, written by its author (in an email, text message, or similar), or, at worst, noted down by me within a few hours or days of being spoken. No quotes are drawn from long-term memory—or made up. However, interpretations of quotes and events are entirely mine.

I did not seek permission from journalism industry colleagues for anything I say about them or quote them as saying. I consider it to be in the public interest that society understands how the journalism industry works from the inside.

However, to every organization and person that I mention in any way that could be construed as negative, I gave at least four years to contest facts and offer a response. Responses, or lack thereof, are given as footnotes.

If this all sounds pedantic, that’s the point.

The plane took off just before 4 p.m. Within seconds, I was flying over my grandparents’ tiny row house, purchased four decades earlier after their arrival to England. Since, they had worked soulless factory jobs, and, as the plane rose, I didn’t stop to wonder whether I was about to throw their hard work away.

My grandparents couldn’t follow my plan. I’d just graduated—itself a first for our line of the family—with a master’s degree in physics from a top university. My grandfather had proudly told his friends at the Hindu temple and the Mars factory, where he’d packaged chocolates for more than a quarter of a century, that I studied science. Now he’d have to explain that I was going somewhere—Mexico?—to become a journalist. It didn’t make sense. My grandmother, who wanted to see me settled, lovingly suggested that this wasn’t a good idea. She’d give me money to start a business, she said, though neither of us had a clue what that meant—and she certainly wasn’t able to offer significant seed funding.

My mom also wasn’t convinced by my plan, perhaps because it wasn’t really a plan. When I’d bought the flight in my bedroom three months earlier, she’d stood in tears in the doorway. “Why are you doing this?” What had she gotten so wrong in bringing me up, she asked? She’d saved us from government housing, an abusive husband, and paved the way for my acceptance to Cambridge University—without ever pressuring me to even go to university. Had she given me too much freedom, making up for the lack of it she’d had at my age? What was I trying to escape?

I loved physics but knew, during those lectures and labs, that I wanted to channel my curiosity soon toward something less abstract. I wanted adventure. I wanted to travel the world and make a difference. More than that, I wanted adventures that involved war, jungles, and diamonds, rather than spending the next decade confirming the sixth decimal place of an obscure physical constant—or, worse, work as a financial analyst. But I wasn’t able to articulate that to my family, for whom the life I sought felt so distant.

Yes, Usha, my mom, had given me too much freedom, swinging away from her parents—liberal in an Indian village context but conservative, and traditional, in a London-suburb one—who hadn’t given her any. Born in Kenya to a northern Indian family, my mother’s childhood was tough. Her mother expected her to cook and clean from an early age, as per tradition, even before the family moved to England in 1968 when my mother was eight. She hadn’t been allowed to go to university, or get her own apartment, as allowing unmarried women to do these things was frowned upon, and, at twenty five, she was forced into an abusive arranged marriage.

My desire for adventure, travel, and justice were born of my mom being deprived of them.

I pulled the Economist, which I’d picked up at Heathrow, out of my backpack and began to flick through it, but was too excited to focus. I listened to some Spanish lessons, but nothing sank in.

At long last, I was striking out to become a reporter. I’d been silenced when a university friend had asked about my Plan B; I hadn’t had one, and had no plans to make one. I’d rack up significant credit card debt the next few months, but it didn’t matter. I’d find my way.

My infatuation with journalism began as a teenager, when, sitting on our living room sofa, I watched news reports of fighting in East Timor, including one indelible scene in which a man was dragged across the street by soldiers and shot, the film cut just before the bullet was fired. As I lay in bed that evening, I wondered how he, the perpetrators, and the camera operator must have felt as it happened. How would I have felt in those positions? I thought similarly—despite not knowing what it meant to have a child—when seeing images from Gaza of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah, terror etched on his face, and his father cowering to shield themselves from Israeli gunfire. A year later, with the 9/11 attacks on the United States and ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I devoured the nascent websites of TIME, CNN, and the BBC on our computer, which I monopolized in my bedroom. With access to the web, I learned the rules of grammar—the em-dash, the Oxford comma, and the semicolon; and I dreamt of buying an SLR camera.

The computer also allowed me to fulfill another passion. From around the age of eleven, I taught myself to code. I had no benchmark, curriculum, or people around me doing it, so I just kept going. In my bedroom, I created an ever-expanding personal website, and wrote programs including a beat counter for musicians. I also created a popular music website, unwittingly marrying interests in journalism, programming, and music. I relentlessly called record company press offices to request promotional copies of CDs before they hit the shops. My website—replete with news, reviews, forums, live listings, and, even in those dialup days, streaming audio and video—was listed by MTV as one of the then-nascent web’s top twenty music news sources, and it all came from my bedroom.

Sadly, I didn’t realize the value of programming or the website during the dotcom boom. Had I known, I’d have monetized the site, or at least sought programming jobs paying far more than the minimum wage I would earn at bars and a supermarket in the coming years. My mom and I had thought about what we could do, and we even visited lawyers to incorporate a company, but we were way out of our depth.

At fourteen, in 2001, I got bored and let the music site go.

I had few interests in early high school other than messing around with friends. After an inattentive first few years, including remedial math class, and hopes of quitting school to become a music producer, I settled down. Thanks to the passion of maverick science teachers Anthony Branfield and David Thomas, I became interested in math and physics. I loved their rebelliousness, rigor, and quest for truth. At the last minute, I decided to apply to study Natural Sciences, with a focus on physics, at Cambridge, one of the world’s most prestigious universities. Branfield helped me put together an application the weekend before the deadline. In his reference, he quoted Thomas: “This guy will make a valuable contribution to the world.” I was taken aback by their enthusiasm and that they were batting for me outside the school’s normal processes.

I also had an equally passionate English teacher in Candace Dovey, whose excitement for literature brought out my own love of reading and writing. I studied Alfred Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” inspired by William Howard Russell, one of the first war correspondents. I told Dovey that I wouldn’t forget her subject—though I wasn’t sure how it would all fit together.

On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 2004, as I worked behind the counter of a local bookshop, my mom excitedly called to tell me I’d received a letter, which she’d opened, announcing I’d been accepted to Cambridge, pending A grades in math, physics, and chemistry. The manager was so excited, he would put a notice on the store window. I celebrated the beginning of the New Year that night, at a bar at which I also occasionally worked, with great excitement for the year ahead.

“You were a pain in the arse to teach,” Branfield would tell me endearingly on results day, when we learned I’d got the grades.

I studied and lived within the walls of King’s College, founded in 1441 by King Henry VI, opposite its iconic Gothic Chapel. I’d loved learning science, especially through its history, and now I was walking the same cobbled streets as Stephen Hawking, Bertrand Russel, and Srinivasa Ramanujan. The basement computing room at King’s was named after Alan Turing. In the Cavendish physics lab, set up by James Clerk Maxwell, I saw J. J. Thomson’s cathode ray tube, in which he’d discovered the electron. In the Sedgewick geology building, I saw Charles Darwin’s notebooks. And in Trinity’s Wren library, I saw Isaac Newton’s annotated copy of the “Principia Mathematica.”

It was intellectual heaven, but I was eighteen and wanted different. I wanted a big city, nightclubs, a vibrancy and vitality that Cambridge couldn’t offer. I didn’t want to play croquet or wear a gown to formal dinners, even if I got to sit at a long wooden table in one of the most beautiful halls on the planet. Cambridge had made some progress in admitting people who didn’t come from elite backgrounds, but more than forty percent of its British-educated students had gone to private schools that year. I was pleased for the window into this new world—one of my closest friends there had attended high school in the precincts of Westminster Abbey—but it wasn’t the environment I wanted for my late teens.

After the first year, I decided to switch. “Maybe when I’m older, it will be the place for me, but right now, it is not,” I wrote to my supervisor. My destination was Manchester, a gritty but trendy northern English city, home to the music scene I so enjoyed and a world-class physics department. Because I was so much happier at Manchester, I went deeper into physics than I had at Cambridge, staying for the master’s.

Years later, I would connect the dots between physics and journalism. They are both built on curiosity and attempt to explain the world through observation and logic, without bias or bowing to authority.

My role at the Mancunion, Manchester’s student paper, was News Editor, and it was fun. A ruling Labour party official once called me and shouted, “If you print my name, I’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks.” (Of course, I printed his name—and his threat.) Manchester Evening News bought my investigation on inconsistencies in police crime reporting. It was the first outlet to pay for my work—fifty dollars.

“Take it or leave it,” the editor said.

Away from the student paper, I’d travel to other gritty northern cities to take arresting photos of anti-Islam demonstrations by the all-white, right-wing English Defence League. I didn’t too much consider my own race to be an issue, preferring to profess color-blindness to reflecting about my background and reasons for wanting to be here in the first place. That backfired only once when a rioter began to attack me—though I got away.

As well as student journalism, I spent the holidays on unpaid internships at various national news outlets. One of the many skills I’d learned from my mother growing up was tenacity. It’s how those who don’t start with silver spoons catch up. I had repeatedly cold emailed and cold called all the major British news outlets and asked about interning. The Guardian was first to bite, offering a three-week stint—and I couldn’t wait.

In August 2009, I rented a room in the up-and-coming East London suburb of Dalston, an hour’s walk to the Guardian’s sunlit offices near King’s Cross—my first proper newsroom. I sat in on the daily editor’s meeting with all the senior staff. And I found my strongest ally in health editor Denis Campbell, a wiry reporter from whom I learned to “shake a fact.”

Denis told me to apply for journalism courses, such as those offered by City University in London or Columbia in New York. I’d need to learn media law, shorthand, and how to write and report, he said. Plus, how else would I get myself that all-important network? My impatience, though, was enough to put me off, as well as the staggering costs—not to mention a youthful arrogance. Surely, after calculating quantum energy levels and the warping of spacetime, I could do journalism without formal study?

The next internship, a few months later in January, was with Reuters, just off Fleet Street in London. Reuters was far more global in scope and therefore more relevant. It was also more serious. Editors sent me to cover Parliament and London Zoo, and to gather quotes for a story on Tony Blair’s Iraq war interrogation. They tore through my copy, teaching me how to write and report, get things right, and get them across concisely. Not a single person at Reuters suggested I study journalism.

Other news outlets weren’t so generous. During a week-long unpaid internship at the Independent the following April, I worked with no guidance, publishing more but learning less. I was acutely aware that I was effectively paying for this privilege. My first head-on collision with the industry was seeded when an editor there refused to reimburse an eight-dollar London Underground ride for an event I’d covered.

After I billed the newspaper for my time there at minimum wage, the deputy editor called to tell me I was an idiot who’d never make it in journalism, before hanging up. I published details of his call and follow-up emails on my website. That’s what journalism was about, right—holding power to account? A media reporter asked if I thought my actions would harm my future. “Surely a troublemaker is what every journalist should be,” I responded with youthful defiance. Private Eye, a satirical news magazine, pounced on unpaid internship culture and told my story under the headline, “Internshits,” and I appeared—interviewed outside the Independent’s offices and in the hostel at which I’d stayed—on a BBC documentary about elite career inequity.

On July 1, I met with Jodie Ginsberg, Reuters’ London bureau chief, who would go on to lead the Committee to Protect Journalists. The former foreign correspondent led me to a conference room in the company’s Aldgate office. I had planned to move to London and, well, I didn’t know. She was risk-averse, she said. I frowned; I wasn’t. But then she surprised me.

“You need to go somewhere,” she advised.

“You mean just jump on a plane?”

“Yes.”

She saw it as a much smaller gamble than moving to London and hoping for a job. She told me she’d been envious of freelancers in South Africa, where she’d worked as a staff correspondent a decade earlier.

I left that meeting with a smile and an about-turn in mentality. I’d just needed to hear it from someone who’d lived it. All Jodie did was confirm my own preference, but that’s exactly what I’d been waiting for. I took the Underground to St Paul’s Cathedral and sat on the steps to take it all in. Down the road was Fleet Street, the ancient home of British journalism. I walked half an hour from there to Stanfords, the nineteenth-century travel store on Longacre, and lost myself in its maps and books.

When I told Dominic Kennedy, a friendly investigative reporter at the Times of London, whom I’d met on another internship, of my plan to fly somewhere, he kindly introduced me to Richard Beeston. I didn’t know it at the time, but Richard was one of Britain’s last great foreign editors. Unlike most of the fresh-faced, out-of-college types later running foreign desks in London, Beeston had actually worked abroad—Lebanon, Chechnya, Iraq. His legend was enhanced by a blurring with that of his father, an intrepid Cold War correspondent. Richard liked my idea of Mexico and had a hole there. He wanted stories that British readers would care for, primarily the drug war.

“Don’t ignore the British tabloids,” he said, telling me never to be a snob. “You’ll need money, so go to whoever pays most. I’ll never look down on a journalist who does that.”

I had devoured books by journalists and, in 2010 on graduating, got in touch with anyone with a foreign byline. One particularly kind response came from Aidan Hartley, who I’d seen presenting a documentary from Colombia on its drug war. “Go wherever there's conflict and few hacks, mate,” he wrote. “Get as many strings to your bow including radio, magazines, and TV if you can. Good luck, and send me a postcard. What a lovely life you have ahead of you!” His book, “Zanzibar Chest,” was the only one I would take on the plane. On reading it, two months before flying, I wrote, “Being a young foreign correspondent really is the best job in the world.”

A few months later I was on my way.

I’d chosen Mexico with little thought. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent and it was a foreign country. While the Middle East held great intrigue for me, I felt it, and Arabic, to be too daunting. I’d go there after cutting my teeth somewhere more accessible. My mom and grandparents, with their antiquated understanding of East Africa, another option, said it was too dangerous for someone who looked Indian. I didn’t believe them, or care if they were right, but I wasn’t choosing particularly carefully anyway.

My grandparents had settled in Kenya in the 1960s, after my great grandfather was enticed there from India by the British who ruled both countries. My grandfather Balbir talked nostalgically about Rumuruti, the town in which they lived, for decades afterwards. He didn’t mention so much Tapa, in the Indian state of Punjab, where he was born, though recalled feeling alone in third class on the boat between Mumbai and Mombassa.

Amid growing tensions with the Indian population, Kenyan authorities made it tough for South Asians to maintain jobs or businesses, so many fled to the United Kingdom. In turn, the UK tightened its immigration policies. My grandfather was “one of the last people to beat the ban,” according to the East African Standard, a Kenyan newspaper that interviewed him in 1968. “The immigration officers looked at my passport very carefully. I told them I was here to stay,” he had apparently said upon arriving at the home of his elder brother Ramesh, who had persuaded him to come.

They settled in Slough, fifteen minutes from Heathrow Airport. Slough is scoffed at by everyone who knows “The Office,” or the 1937 John Betjeman poem which opens, “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now.”

My grandfather found his first job at Suters, a department store, though eventually went to Mars, the confectioner, for eighteen pounds a week ($250 in 2021), he’d tell me decades later in the same Slough house. “I started at night, 2 a.m. to 10 a.m.” For a quarter of a century, he worked day and night packing chocolates. He remembered that during one his first shifts, a manager yelled when he stopped a conveyor belt that ran too fast. But, soon enough, he got the hang of it. “Another man looked at me and was surprised at how fast I was doing the job,” he’d tell me with a smile.

Mars had made chocolate in Slough since the 1930s, and the scent of it hung in the air. I’d go with my grandfather to a Mars retirement club every other Thursday and we’d collect huge bags of chocolate for seventy cents each. He remembered Forrest Mars once visiting the factory and was impressed that the man was a billionaire—“with a ‘b.’”

My grandmother, Lajjya, was just two years old when, in Sirsa, in the Indian state of Haryana, her mother died. In her late teens—or not-so-late; her official birth year appears to have been modified to show she was older than she really was, likely for marriage or immigration purposes—she was wedded to my grandfather and yanked from her family to join his in Rumuruti, where she worked hard for his parents before coming to England. Tellingly, unlike him, she would speak more fondly of India than Kenya. She found work at a biscuit factory, all while looking after their two girls, the eldest of whom was my mother.

My grandmother was more headstrong than my grandfather, which led to great mutual frustration.

“Be strong, not like your grandfather,” she’d tell me.

“She didn’t let me do anything,” he’d tell me.

But they were good and loving people who wanted the best for their children—though didn’t quite know how to provide it. As my mother was the first female child on my grandfather’s side of the family, they had no role model for how to bring her up and felt the need to maintain a strict Indian upbringing.

My mother, unsatisfied with the trappings of their culture, wanted something different. She longed to see the world. Somehow—and in that benign word is packed so much—she was able to see through the blinders forced upon her and later rip them off entirely. She wanted to go to university, work in flight crew, or become a nurse, but her parents denied her those opportunities. She found a Saturday job at a department store while studying, where she rose from counter assistant to supervisor. She then took a full-time job as a lab technician, testing wheat and flour for biscuits. But her parents didn’t allow her to get her own apartment due to the “shame” of a single female living alone. The proceeds from her job went toward an arranged marriage in 1985.

I was born just over a year later and grew up at a terraced house in Chalvey, the poor part of Slough that people from Slough look down upon. Money was tight so my mother, father, and I slept on the bedroom floor.

I only have a handful of early memories of my father. I am perhaps three years old, sitting on the staircase looking through the wooden banister into the living room. My mom and dad are arguing and he hits her in the face. I would cower and cling onto her when voices were raised, she’d tell me. Another memory is going to Pizza Hut with my father after watching a film at Slough’s rundown cinema. Was it “The Three Musketeers?” Another is him not returning home one night, and my mom and I driving together to his place of work to find out what was going on. At some point he worked as a milkman, postman, and in double-glazing—cash in hand.

Somehow—again, that word—my mom built up the courage to get us away from him. There were several attempts thwarted by her own mother, who told her to put up with him, something that would still viscerally anger my mother decades later. One morning, after he’d left for work, my mom took us to stay with a friend. Sadly, my mom had forgotten an address book, which led my dad to find us. Still, the friend and her husband put up a good defense and didn’t let him in. My mother spent some months working through the British legal system and, at the hearing, the judge ordered him out of the house in Chalvey—exactly five years to the day after their marriage. We moved back in, and he wasn’t allowed near us.

Her parents didn’t talk about the divorce with her or their friends. “But I'd come to the conclusion that this was my life, and I wasn't living in the shadow of theirs anymore,” she’d tell me years later.

I could only have been a burden to her at this point, too young to get what was going on, let alone empathize. I remember getting my mom a glass of water as she cried on the phone once. She was fighting to change my surname to hers—Gupta—from my father’s. The mortgage lender took her to court for not paying the full mortgage, something she didn’t have to do given the circumstances. The lender’s lawyers realized they would lose, even though she was defending herself, and offered an out-of-court settlement—but she didn’t accept on principle. She went on to get a worse settlement when she burst into tears in the courtroom, under the pressure of standing up for what was right.

My mom even took her own lawyer to court, arguing he had overcharged her for simply putting his letterhead on her writing. The lawyer backed down.

“Everything was a fight,” she would tell me. She fought when it was necessary, but also sometimes when it wasn’t in her best interests. It was the principle.

After some dwindling weekend visits, and the surname change, my father stopped showing up altogether. He’d told my mom he’d be back for me when I was sixteen, parting words which led to a decade and a half of distress for her. (He’d never return.)

Chalvey was rough. My mom’s car was repeatedly vandalized and, separately, stolen, found burned out not too far away by police. She long suspected our neighbors were responsible, given their dislike of people “like us.” They made spurious complaints about her to authorities, such as accusing her of slashing their car tires. When police responded, they felt for us, and the local beat officer would occasionally check in. At her request, he once showed me around the station.

In the late 1980s, working as a microbiologist thanks to evening and weekend classes at a local college, my mom had isolated a new species of the bacterium Legionella while testing water samples from a cooling system in Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. But while London’s key public health scientists and those at the US Centers for Disease Control carried out tests to confirm whether this was indeed a new species, her company announced they were moving their research arm three hundred miles north to Manchester.

In an attempt to woo her there, the company flew her from Heathrow, and the head of research met her at the airport and showed her their new state-of-the-art labs. But she was still battling my father and a move like this didn’t seem possible, so she turned it down. They then offered her another role traveling around the country educating companies about Legionella—but that too meant not being home.

So my mom accepted a small redundancy package and, a couple of months later, left my father. Once settled back in Chalvey in September 1990—alone with a small child, no job, and no community—my mom took odd jobs: Sunday cashier shifts at Britain’s Walmart, collating research papers, packing greetings cards into cellophane wrappers, caring for a one-year-old boy for a few hours a week. She even squeezed in volunteer work at the local hospital. And she tried a couple of weeks’ work experience at a local newspaper and did so well there that they offered to pay for her to study journalism, though she turned this down because she felt it would disrupt my upbringing.

My mom also attempted her own business, a bio-consultancy with a stylized swan as its logo. Once scientists at the CDC and Britain’s equivalent had confirmed her discovery of the new Legionella species, she wrote up a paper, naming the bacterium shakesperei. My mom was a published scientist without having gone to university. Running a business and bringing up a child, though, wasn’t easy. The consultancy didn’t work out.

She eventually followed my grandfather to work at Mars, though thankfully not on the factory line, rather in microbiology. She moved from one lab to another, and then over to the pensions department. This allowed her financial freedom—and me the freedom to explore a real-life chocolate factory.

Rather than go to Europe every year like many Brits, we would take vacations in England—Cornwall, Chester, and day trips to London—or venture once every few years to far-off places such as Singapore, Thailand, Dubai, the Red Sea, and Florida. I remember a sandier Dubai, Koh Samui airport a hut barely bigger than a hotel suite, and being awestruck by the Old Testament burning bush in the Sinai. My mom never settled for second best—Is there a room with a sea view? At times, I was embarrassed by her persistence, despite it always coming with a huge smile, but she was right; why settle for anything less, especially after all she’d been through.

In the school playground, not far from Heathrow, I was always excited seeing planes flying overhead. I didn’t wonder so much where they could be going; I was simply excited that they were going somewhere. My mom had also wanted to go somewhere—away from an abusive relationship, away from the constraints of her parents’ culture. Geographic distance was a stand-in for the emotional space and freedom she craved.

By the time I was ten, we moved out of Chalvey and into a nicer neighborhood, closer to the school. “Shoot for the moon,” she’d tell me. “Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.”

My mom would give me all the opportunities she never had. She took me to see “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” in London in 1991, as well as the Christmas lights on Oxford and Regent Streets. She helped me get a day’s work experience at a Slough record shop as I was getting into music. She took me to the quarter-final of the 1996 European soccer championships, concerts at Wembley Stadium and Hyde Park. She bought me a small keyboard as I showed promise in music. A bike. A microscope. Swimming lessons. Snooker lessons, even. My mom and my grandfather decorated my room with dinosaur wallpaper and Ikea furniture. We lit fireworks in the back garden for Diwali, had a huge Christmas tree, a Punch and Judy puppet show for my sixth birthday, built snowmen, and paddled in a small pool.

My mom got me into a good school a couple of miles away. My grandfather would take and collect me, and bring me to his home where my grandmother would cook whatever Indian vegetarian meal I chose—daal-chawal, lentils and rice; mutter aloo, peas and potatoes; tori aloo, zucchini and potato—bringing endless fresh roti, bread, into the always warm living room as I watched cartoons. (My mother cooked my favorite, chole bhature, chickpeas and fried bread, on special occasions such as birthdays and Christmas.) I was too young to understand that great privilege.

The Indian TV channels—Zee News at 8 pm for my grandfather, and Khana Khazana, an Indian cookery show, for my grandmother—in my grandparents’ house, and our frequent trips to the nearby Hindu temple, taught me there was a world beyond Slough. More importantly, the trips with my mom taught me I could access it.

But like many immigrants’ children, I didn’t want to be different. I’d refused to speak Hindi, my first language, as soon as I started school, and would forever more respond to my grandparents in English. I didn’t want to be the odd one out and so shuddered at any hint that I wasn’t part of the dominant culture. I eventually started requesting from my grandmother a plate of fries, generous with salt, then scoffed at the food entirely and asked my grandfather to stop at McDonald’s on the way home from school every day for a veggie burger. At university, I began eating chicken, and eventually steak.

My backlash against my family’s culture, fuelled by my mom’s own backlash against it, was so strong that I never even considered India as a destination for my foreign correspondence.

I’d realize decades later that my mother had gifted me fight and ambition; my grandmother brought warmth and nourishment, in all its senses; and my grandfather was the stoic male, a father figure so strong I didn’t knowingly miss my own. All gave me pyaar, love, in their own way.

My father, however, or at least my mother’s reaction to him and the world, bequeathed a rage and resentment that, while heavily obscured by my kind, polite, and often people-pleasing nature, would manifest at the slightest injustice for decades to come.

I lugged my backpack to the top floor of the Mexico City hostel and into the dormitory’s lockers. The Zócalo, where I was staying, had been a ceremonial center since Aztec times and now housed the presidential palace, high-end hotels, and countless restaurants. I wandered the maze of streets, failing to find fajitas, which weren’t actually eaten in Mexico, and failing to read the local newspapers, which weren’t in a language I could read. I’d spend the evenings with English-speaking backpackers.

But I was here to become a foreign correspondent, not a glorified backpacker. And there was no question that this had to work out. I contacted every foreign desk from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Sydney Morning Herald to let them know I was available.

While I awaited responses, I needed to find somewhere to live. Everyone pointed to Condesa, a hip area populated by wealthy Mexicans and foreigners, whose residents were disparagingly called fresas, strawberries, meaning snobs. Scouring Craigslist, I found a cheap room, and quickly got a response from a woman who, incredibly, was a Wall Street Journal reporter.

I went over immediately and found Jean Guerrero in a large penthouse with a supermarket next door. My bedroom would be a tiny side room with no windows, bed, or door—but cost just $250 a month.

Two days later, I moved in. My room fit little more than a small bed, which I’d have to buy. I planned to put up a curtain for privacy but never got around to it. Not only had I found somewhere to stay, I was meeting the right people.

I’d plowed the cash from part time summer work at a dull trade magazine before I’d left England into flights, an SLR camera, and a MacBook Pro, with the hope that freelance work would cover it. I had some experience of audio production, having recorded a handful of guitar and piano covers in my teens; I’d long enjoyed photography; and video, well, I’d work it out. And I’d need to, as my bank balance was hovering around zero. An overdraft and credit cards would keep me afloat.

I also banked on revenue from selling the results of Freedom of Information requests to British tabloids to keep me going. Responses were still coming in to a myriad of requests during my first weeks in Mexico. In response to one, I scored documents detailing nearly two millions dollars’ of equipment stolen from Britain’s military in the past year. Another provided letters between Britain’s Prime Minister and his Chinese counterpart discussing panda leasing for Edinburgh Zoo. And I obtained data showing that foreign governments—including the United States and Russia—had used diplomatic immunity to avoid London’s congestion charge to the tune of $60 million.

I initially tried the Times for the military theft story, but editors on the home desk were unfriendly—“Why do you need to know my name?” scoffed one, Robin, when I called—so I sought the highest bidder. I called the Sun, a tabloid, with my stories. It was the reddest of red-tops, regularly spewing falsehoods, absurdity, and gossip. But it had money and Brandon Malinsky, who'd picked up the phone when I’d first called, was responsive and willing to pay.

“I'll sort you out,” he’d always say, leaving me wondering. But, unlike many editors, he always did. He’d pay around $500 for the forwarding of the results of a Freedom of Information request. A broadsheet like the Times of London or the Guardian, on the other hand, would pay a third of that at best. I thought back to Richard at the Times of London telling me to take what money I could.

From my small desk in Jean’s apartment, I sent near daily emails to Richard and his foreign desk, featuring not only story ideas but often the full story. I had nothing to lose. I’d call if I’d not heard anything within an hour or two. I was too young to consider that my often not overly exciting stories from Mexico weren’t the center of their world—or that receiving a phone call so soon after an email might get annoying.

Through those calls, I got to know Richard’s deputy, Ed Gorman. Ed had himself worked abroad, and like Richard, said he could see elements of himself in me. In the mid-eighties, while he’d worked at a dull trade magazine much like I had, he and a friend decided to go to Afghanistan as freelancers. “But I had no money. I had no contacts in Fleet Street. I’d never written a word in a newspaper,” Gorman wrote in his memoir. By his own admission, he was as ignorant of the subject matter on which he’d report as I was. But, he would write, “We knew this was going to be the greatest adventure of our lives.”

That’s what I was hoping for, and I was so consumed by the hustle and adventure that the bigger picture hadn’t really registered. I knew nothing, less than someone who’d done a school project on Mexico.

Richard and Ed appeared impressed by the frequency of my pitches and calls, even though they always politely declined. The Times, they said, was more “reactive” to news in Mexico rather than actively seeking out new stories.

A couple of weeks in, I read about Ponchis, a teenage assassin who had become a prominent face of Mexico’s drug war thanks to videos which showed him slitting a victim’s throat, beating another with a stick, and posing by corpses and weapons. Local reports, which I could barely understand, let alone verify, said he was paid $3,000 per killing and worked with a group of girls who would dispose of bodies.

The drug war was the bloodiest it had ever been. Various cartels’ battles for territory had led to some thirty thousand deaths since President Felipe Calderón’s 2006 inauguration. Newspaper front pages carried pictures of decapitated heads or bloodied corpses, often, in jarring juxtaposition, next to topless female models.

I sent 430 words to the Times, all based upon others’ reporting. I’d added nothing original, bringing together stories by local newspapers, and news agencies such as Associated Press and Reuters. My sources were heavily weighted to the latter as they wrote in English. We surely all knew that what I’d sent could have been written by a London intern.

I called Ed around 2:30 a.m. my time to see if he was keen. He was flustered, as he'd just gotten in and had a busy day ahead with the release of British hostages in Somalia, he said. He’d get back to me. “Get some sleep.”

I awoke to an email saying he’d take it. I’d already sent the story, so there was little for me to do except await publication. As I sat in a bar with new friends that night, I repeatedly hit refresh on my phone’s web browser and found the story published at midnight in London. I’d had publications before, but this was the first with a foreign dateline (the reporter’s location). With that, I became a foreign correspondent. I bought a round of tequila with the $180 I’d make.

It was a good start, and Ed and Richard were complimentary, despite my peskiness on the phone. They were more confident in me, and I was learning what they wanted, so I started getting other lightweight stories in the paper. On top of that, a financial news outlet offered $100 a week for eight hundred words rounding up Mexico’s economy. My knowledge of economics was limited, but consolidating Reuters, Bloomberg, and Wall Street Journal pieces wasn’t going to be hard.

I got to know Mexico. I traveled to Puebla, where I saw Molotov, Mexico’s answer to the Sex Pistols; Chiapas, home of the Zapatistas, a socialist militant group; Morelia state twice, once to meet a friend of a friend and again to watch the southward migration of two hundred million butterflies. I’d hoped to meet English-speaking women on that hostel-organized trip, and was disappointed to find that only two German men, both called Benjamin, had signed up.

The journalists in Mexico were welcoming and tightly knit. In contacting one, you’d end up knowing all—correspondents from the Guardian, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Washington Post, BBC, plus countless freelancers. One of the most friendly and helpful was Greg Brosnan, who invited me to join him and friends—some of whom were also journalists—on a trip over Christmas to a beach just north of the Mexico–Belize border.

I’d emailed Reuters’ bureau chief in Mexico and, in November, had been invited to interview for a “stringer” role in Guatemala. In the foreign journalism hierarchy, stringer is the lowliest position. The stringer collects “string” that is to be woven into an article by someone more senior. The pay would be $1,800 per month, with Reuters having the right to first refusal. Many foreign correspondents here, including Greg, had begun their careers as stringers in Guatemala. But he and others recommended I think twice. I already had bylines in a national newspaper. While I’d have a steady income from Reuters, the non-Reuters market for stories from Guatemala would be far smaller. I turned it down.

A couple of weeks after my Ponchis piece, Mexican authorities arrested the teen as he tried to board a plane to Tijuana, on the US border. Rather than do another shallow rewrite of others’ work, I suggested to Richard and Ed that I get a bus to Cuernavaca, Ponchis’ hometown a couple of hours south, and speak with those who knew him. They said yes, but I had a favor to ask: Could they advance $250 to cover my expenses?

“One thing I hadn't accounted for so much with freelancing was cash flow and the amount of time payments would take,” I wrote Richard. He said he’d send it right over.

Of course, I should have saved up more before leaving home. Of course, I should have had a better grasp of business. But I was young and naïve. It would be a couple of years before I’d truly grasp that most others in this game were of a different class, often with a parent, relative, or friend already in journalism, or at least an adjacent world, such as diplomacy or business. Their earnings didn’t go into checking accounts like mine, but rather brokerage accounts they’d been taught about by financially savvy parents. They weren’t the types to suffer overdraft fees.

I called every official phone number I could find in Cuernavaca ahead of going there. I asked those who picked up if they knew anything about the case. Most hung up, unable to understand my Spanish, but eventually I got through to an English speaker who, with unbelievably good fortune, happened to be closely related to the judge in the boy’s trial. She agreed to meet the following day.

There had been a surge in violence in Cuernavaca since drug gang leader Arturo Beltrán Leyva had been killed by authorities a year before. As another gang took over, two decapitated bodies had been found hanging from a bridge in the city just a few months before my visit. Their heads were accompanied by a note warning that anyone supporting Beltrán Leyva’s cartel would suffer a similar fate.

My mom wasn’t keen. “This is exactly what you promised you wouldn’t do,” she said the night before my bus ride. I was still living in the blur between backpacker and foreign correspondent—doing enough to get into danger but not knowing enough to get out of it.

The next morning, I walked to Cuernavaca’s public square to meet with the woman. It was a sunny, pleasant town and did better than others at hiding its underworld. Men selling balloons and blowing bubbles in the square attracted children and my camera lens.

The lady told me I looked young—“too young.” The two of us spoke for a couple of hours outside the judge’s courtroom, and she said her brother was open to talk. She reminded me of my mom, divorced and looking after a young son, and wanting nothing to do with her former husband. It was a comfortable, though at times harrowing, chat. She was scared for her relative, the judge. Judges in Mexico who deal in high-profile trials were often killed by cartels.

Sadly, the judge messaged her to say he wouldn’t be able to meet that day. He’d answer questions by email, she relayed. That ruined my plan. I emailed him but knew I was unlikely to get a response.

I needed other ways into this story. I also needed to get some food. The $250 hadn’t yet landed, so I made do with a cheap slice of pizza and hoped for a better breakfast. My greatest fear was returning to Mexico City without a story.

The next morning, I wandered about the same area, thinking about a way in. On the sidelines of a shootout between police and jewelry thieves, of which I hurriedly took photos, I met a local journalist who took me to a government building where, he said, someone may help. Maybe, he said, the judge I wanted to speak with worked nearby. I imagined having to jump through hoops to get anywhere near the judge’s office and his annoyance that I’d turned up regardless of his request to email.

However, I needn’t have worried. “Are you Girish?” said a well-dressed man walking past. The judge invited me into his office. He spoke candidly about the case and his life in this dangerous world.

The judge explained how extraordinary the case was and how Ponchis was clearly scared, as was he, of retribution from the gangs. He got me in touch with others who may be willing to speak. I didn’t feel I had much for the story, but now money concerns were pressing.

The $250 from the Times still hadn’t arrived. This wasn’t a good place to be maxed out, and I wouldn’t eat that evening; I needed to spend my remaining cash on a taxi to do more reporting. I sent Richard and Ed details of where I was, the plate of the taxi I’d hired, and the driver’s name, as well as the addresses I was heading to. While I was young and naïve, I did have a head for security.

“Good precautions,” Ed wrote. “Good luck,” added Richard. They were communicative and cared.

In the end, I got some good background, “color” in journalistic parlance, but nothing groundbreaking, just some quotes about how scrawny Ponchis was. There was nothing revelatory, just details that superficially expanded on what was already known. But, no one who read the Times knew this stuff. I still felt I needed more, but it was time to get back. I didn’t understand this world well enough to hang around longer than necessary.

“You may well have your story without realizing it,” wrote Ed, somewhat cryptically, but he was right. I got a bus back home, relieved, grabbed some food, and wrote.

A couple of days later, my lightly edited piece filled the front page of the Times’ world section. This was my first serious publication as a foreign correspondent. I learned to always go, a mantra for those in my field.

The Times paid $360, plus $250 for my expenses—which finally arrived once I was back in Mexico City. Small overdraft and credit card charges loomed, but I’d made it. I thanked Ed and Richard for trusting me to come back with something and for placing the piece so prominently.

“Yes,” he said, “Not bad for a freelancer we barely know!”

In the coming weeks, my pitches to the Times matured into a couple of lines rather than full stories. I took a trip to Ciudad Juárez. Located across the border from the United States, Juárez had become synonymous with the violence that ravished Mexico. I reported for the New Statesman about the hundreds, possibly thousands, of women raped and killed there over the last decades, their bodies left in the desert. Both the New Statesman and Times threw $400 toward the trip—plus paid for my work. It didn’t cover my costs, but I was getting closer to breaking even.

My mom even came to visit. We toured the country and I was proud to show her that I was somewhat settling into this new life. While she was shocked at my “broom cupboard” of a bedroom, she could see I was gaining traction. My grandparents, although they didn’t know how to inquire about Mexican culture or my career progression, never forgot what they saw as fundamentals. “Aap kush hain? Kya kha rahe hain? Are you happy? What are you eating?” their fragile voices would ask on the end of the phone as I bumped along in buses.

I was hitting my stride when Ed called with some bad news. Long before I’d arrived, the Times correspondent in Venezuela, Hannah Strange had floated the idea of moving to Mexico. She’d just confirmed, and the paper wouldn’t need me there any longer. Ed didn’t see it as a problem: “Just go somewhere else,” he said. I’d picked Mexico randomly. Anywhere else, especially if backed to some degree by the Times, would be better than random.

Richard made an offer: Either I could stay in Mexico and the Times might continue to use my work, or I could move to Venezuela, which I’d have to myself. Hugo Chávez was in charge there, a thorn in the side of the United States, and the country, I read, was going through serious economic issues. I’d visited Venezuela as a backpacker a couple of years earlier—though remembered skipping the first night in Caracas and going straight to Angel Falls, the world’s tallest waterfall, as the capital city was so gritty and dangerous.

I asked if Richard would be able to pay for flights and a hotel for the first couple of weeks. Yes, he replied. There was nothing to ponder. I wanted adventure and someone was paying. I booked my flight for February 10, 2011.

Ed and I had a longer conversation just before I flew to Caracas in which he said he’d been surprised to see that Richard was paying for my flight and hotel. It wasn’t something they did. However, he felt I needed to spend some time in London to get to know them, to see how the foreign desk worked.

“You don’t work like the other foreign correspondents,” he said.