The 15-Year-Old Who Taught Me About Suicide
India’s suicide problem goes up close and personal
Jan 29
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This is well outside the realm of stories that Asia Sentinel normally publishes. However, we were surprised and impressed by its quality and sensitivity, especially from a recent journalism student. It was made available to us through an agreement with the Journalism and Media Studies Center of the University of Hong Kong. We hope you will find it as valuable as we did –the editors.
By: Ruhi Soni
On a late evening last September, I stood in a dark hallway on the ninth floor of my building, watching people beg a 15-year-old girl not to jump off the edge of the window on which she was standing. She had been spotted barely half an hour earlier. As she wrestled with and shrieked at the building guard who had been the first to arrive on the spot and was holding on to her tightly (so tightly that she had a red mark on her arm even hours later), she drew a crowd of masked onlookers – trickling in at first, then rapidly. The dark hallway on the ninth floor was bursting at the seams, until people began waiting on lower floors, hoping for the best outcome.