After 30 years, opinion columnist Rekha Basu says goodbye to the Des Moines Register

The woman was just a girl — a high schooler at Dowling Catholic from a poor family on the southeast side — when she accused the scion of a local celebrity of rape.

The West Des Moines Police backed her story, even locating a semen sample where she said the assault had happened.

But at school, she was the one being punished. Removed from class, she was forced to study alone in the guidance counselor’s office, the trauma done to her body playing over and over in her mind like a horror movie. “I feel like I’m locked in this cage,” she told Rekha Basu, who put the girl’s story in her column and called for action, which unfortunately never came.

Nearly 15 years later, the woman got back in touch. She’d been through counseling and was now an advocate for rape victims. Through all the struggles that came with reclaiming her life, she’d kept a copy of Rekha’s story in her wallet, its newsprint crumpled and smudged and dog-eared from being read and read and read once more.

Because when I felt like killing myself — and there were many times that I came close — I would pull out your column and read it, the woman said. Just the fact that at least one person believed in me was what kept me going.

Spanning 30 years and nearly 5,000 opinion columns, Rekha Basu has been telling the stories of the unheard, of those being abused and objectified, of victims who had been without a voice before this self-proclaimed “international misfit” showed up with a notebook and a sharp sense of justice.

Some of her subjects wanted perpetrators punished or laws changed or damages assessed, but most were like this young woman. Most just wanted someone to say: I believe you.

After three decades of believing, agitating and uplifting in the pages of the Des Moines Register, Rekha, 67, is stepping back from her column. While her last day at the newspaper will be Dec. 1, she promises she won’t be idle and will continue to highlight causes she believes in, but what shape her next step will take is still coming into focus, she says.

“I honestly could not have found a better fit for me in this business than being a Register columnist,” she says. “It's been a dream come true.”

When Rekha felt frustrated or angry, grateful or exhilarated over the years, she took it to her column. When angst rose up inside her like water filled to the exact brim, she poured it onto newsprint. When Iowans’ stories caught her throat, their power enough to choke, she wrote and she wrote and she wrote.

And deep in the ink, Rekha found the roots that would come to define a life — in and out of print.

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Born into a United Nations family, Rekha spent her childhood traveling the world as her parents took postings in New York, India, Thailand, Libya and Egypt. Unmoored from any specific port, but at home in so many, Rekha’s life was lived in contrast: in countries that weren’t hers, countries where she looked different, sounded different, had different-colored skin.

But every night, the family gathered for dinner and discussion at their round table, debating and dissecting what was going on in the news or what they’d learned that day. They never shied away from difficult topics like domestic violence, religious discrimination, gender justice or civil rights.

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“My sister and I both grew up keenly aware of disparities in the treatment of men and women,” she says. “And in income inequality because traveling around the developing world, we would see incredible polarities of wealth and poverty.”

“We grew up with all of these things in our minds, constantly churning around what could we do to make a difference, to improve things.”

An extrovert and a seeker by nature, Rekha found context through the stories of those she met and the books she gathered along the way. All her learnings would mix and meld in the poems and essays and speeches she wrote in her diary.

Writing was her way of navigating the world and pushing — pushing and pushing and pushing — was the only way she knew how to make change.

After a master’s degree in political economy and popular writing, Rekha started to freelance for alternative publications like the leftist Dollars & Sense magazine, while pitching mainstream editors on injustices she felt weren't getting the spotlight. Stories like the rise in “dowry deaths,” which saw family members murder their daughter-in-law, making it look like an accident, because of an unpaid dowry. Or how British Customs Agents decided Indian women coming into the country to live with their husbands — the women a few months delayed due to paperwork — would be subject to a regressive and invasive physical virginity test.

“Airport officials would drag her off to a separate room, and subject her to an internal examination to determine whether or not she was a virgin. The theory being that if she was not a virgin, she must already be married." she says. “There's so many things wrong with that; where do you even begin, right?”

But Rekha always knew where to begin. She began with a pen.

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The Kingston Daily Freeman, a local New York paper, gave her a job as a staffer after another master's, this time in journalism from Columbia, and a portfolio of bylines in indie weeklies. There, she traded opinions for news reporting — years she credits with instilling in her the importance of shoe leather even in opinion columns.

In Kingston, she met her husband, the paper’s editor, Rob Borsellino. Together they had two sons, Romen and Raj.

Rekha ran into the Register’s opinion editor at a journalism conference the year the paper won a Pulitzer for a series on Nancy Ziegenmeyer’s rape and subsequent trial, the result of the Register's editor, Geneva Overholser, writing a column asking a woman to come forward and tell her story using her name, eschewing a journalism principle that rape victims be allowed anonymity.

This Iowa paper was taking big risks, and Rekha wanted to work at the Register as much as the editors wanted her. But her family’s entire life was in New York. She pitched Rob on that country life he’d always talked about. “Field of Dreams.” The wraparound porch. Rob wasn’t convinced.

There are two views on what happened next. Rekha attests she called Rob and asked if they could come to a compromise? Isn’t there a way to work it all out?

But in Rob's telling, he swore Rekha called him and said: “I took the job.”

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In Iowa, you can come home again

Rekha made more close friends in her first seven months in Iowa than she had in seven years in the Albany area. Iowans, she says, were kind, desperate to make her new state feel like a home.

“There was so much that was beautiful about the way Iowans participated in school board meetings or city council meetings,” she says. “They came and spoke their truths and wanted the betterment of the community.”

And the stories flowed in, too.

There were the women in Pleasantville who shared stories of being abused by a coach so popular that residents would spit on the accusers as they walked the town square. Or a personal look at her friend Louise Noun’s decision to take her own life at 94 and Noun’s dying wish that Iowans consider with compassion those who want to stop living rather than live in pain.

Or the Catholic priest who abused boys, causing at least one suicide, and was allowed to retire — until Rekha’s column pressured the church to defrock him.

“When you can tap into emotions, and inspire similar emotions in your audience, then human rights become real,” she says. “It's not just some caricature. It's real people's lives.”

“If you let down your defenses, you can discover amazing people, and it changes your life.”

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During her tenure, Rekha wrote about 9/11, the floods of 1993, and the historic day Iowa legalized same-sex marriage. She got over a fear of public speaking with the help of a local hypnotist. She interviewed luminaries like Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, Temple Grandin and Barack Obama. She attended inaugurations and chased leads in India, China and Ethiopia, where, touching the red earth of Africa, she finally let out the grief that she’d carried in her cells like DNA after Rob died from ALS in 2006.

He was gone, but their shared passion for truth and story was still hers. In a way, he could always be with her — in the pages of the Register.

(Yes, Rekha and Rob took jobs at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 2001, but they regretted their decision nearly instantly — Rekha’s father deemed the area “a city without a soul” — and they moved back within the calendar year.)

Rekha’s work has inspired fury and adoration in equal measure. She’s come to be known as a political firebrand, but the stories of average people have always inspired her most. Our shared humanity is within reach, she says, if one just takes enough time to seek it.

“If I have gone too hard and sounded like I was overly critical, it’s because I really love this state. And I want it to be its finest self,” she says. “And I think it can be, if people just let their hair down a little more.”

Over and over, Rekha came home — literally and figuratively. She came back to Iowa after that ill-fated year away. She came back to the paper when her husband died, when her parents died, through loss and grief thick like molasses. Back to her post as she mothered her sons, as life’s big transitions threatened to veer her off course.

In her work, in the ceaseless focus on truth and story and people that she first discovered at the dinner table and nurtured in the pages of the Register, Rekha found her roots.

Ink-stained or not, those roots are unshakable.

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Courtney Crowder is the Register's Iowa Columnist. Reach her at [email protected] or 515-284-8360.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Columnist Rekha Basu retires from Des Moines Register after 30 years