Kim Wall | Mansi Choksi | Longreads | May 2018 | 22 minutes (5,980 words)
Kim Wall and Mansi Choksi met at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in 2012. Mansi returned to India after graduation and Kim soon followed; it was the start of a writing partnership that took the pair on reporting trips to Africa and Sri Lanka.
"We went on our first reporting trip together to write about an emerging Chinatown in Kampala in 2015," says Mansi. "And then the next year, I moved to New York, where she was living, so we would spend our afternoons working together."
Mansi and Kim traveled to Sri Lanka in 2016. Mansi recalls Kim's dedication to telling the story of the women who fought with the Tamil Tigers during Sri Lanka's brutal, 25-year civil war.
"Kim genuinely fell in love with the women we were writing about," says Mansi. "You can hear it in her voice, in the tapes of our interviews."
Not long after Mansi and Kim filed this story, Kim Wall was murdered while on another reporting assignment. The story of the Tamil Tiger women became the last piece she wrote. We have been humbled to work with Mansi over the past several months to give this story a home at Longreads.
To honor Kim's memory, the Kim Wall Memorial Fund was created to "fund a female reporter to cover subculture, broadly defined, and what Kim liked to call 'the undercurrents of rebellion.'"
--Krista Stevens, Editor
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Velu Chandra Kala was 17 when she charged into her school principal's office with a bag of milk toffees. She was small and jumpy, with dimpled cheeks and a woolly fringe. The principal took a toffee, briefly looking up from his desk, and assumed it was her birthday. Next, she was in science class, surrounded by howling classmates. They were hugging her, weeping into her palms, begging her not to leave. The cookery teacher took a toffee, and teared up. Next, the vice principal. Afterward she left the toffees in her mother's kitchen, by the stove. She was on her way to join an armed conflict.
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