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By Mehul Srivastava

Special to the Rockbridge Report

MAGAPATTINAM, India -- Right before staff photographer Chris Steward and I left for India and Sri Lanka, the lady who takes care of computers at the Dayton Daily News gave us a little present - computer disk drives, about the size of our thumbs, that could be used to carry around large amounts of information.

“They are the lightest things in the world,” she said.

In Sri Lanka, in a hospital in the middle of rebel held territory, I watched as a doctor copied image after image of dead children onto that disk drive. The pictures were heartbreaking - 10-year-olds with sand in their mouths, their eyes barely closed. Smaller children, their bodies slightly bloated, with their faces towards the cameras. The doctor had taken the pictures so that someday, parents could identify their dead children.

I didn’t want to look, but he kept pointing to image after image. I realized then what it was that Chris and I were doing here. Nearly 60,000 people died in India and Sri Lanka - the least we could do is bear witness to their suffering.

That computer drive is on my desk as I write this, sitting in a hotel room in South India. I may decide not to bring it back to America. For me, it is the heaviest weight in the world.

It is tough for me, as an Indian, to see my people suffer so much. Perhaps it would be easier if the dead didn’t look like my cousins, the grieving parents like my father and mother.

Perhaps it was this that made me cry as I left that hospital in Sri Lanka. Perhaps it was just the fact that in the face of so much suffering, there were people willing to put up with my questions, with the intrusive nature of my job, and the ridiculous experience of being photographed in their misery. Perhaps it was guilt - why was I able to pack my bags and leave when they had to stay there and suffer. Whatever it was, sitting on the steps of that hospital, I cried like I had lost a cousin. When Chris and the doctors came out, they could tell what had been happening - it’s tough for a grown man to hide his tears - but they didn’t comment upon it. I suspect, that at one time or the other, they cried too.

I hear on the phone that there are floods in Dayton and that the rain water has rushed into people’s basements. Once our work here is done, Chris and I will return to Dayton, and perhaps I will help him pump the water from his basement. I will frame some pictures from this trip, and put them on a wall somewhere. But even though I will probably leave that disk drive behind, I have a feeling those dead children’s faces will always stay with me.

We haven’t totally done the math yet, but in the last two weeks, Chris and I have covered nearly three-fourths of the coastline of Sri Lanka, and the entire coastline of tsunami-hit South India. I can tell you, the beaches here are beautiful, the sand golden, the water inviting. But in our entire time here, not once has either of us touched the water.