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I’ve attended Hollywood awards ceremonies and watched couture-clad A-listers stroll the pink carpet, however I’ve by no means seen anybody look as glamorous as Arti Kumari on the day of her wedding in Bihar, India.

For the ultimate ceremony of the multiday celebrations, Arti wore a full velvet skirt lined in golden embroidery, matched to the gossamer pink veil over her head. Heavy gold jewellery encircled her neck and wrists and dangled from her nostril and earlobes, so that each motion created a tinkling rustle of metallic in opposition to metallic.

On that sizzling day in May in Arti’s village, I used to be 11 months right into a reporting mission with Emily Schmall and Shalini Venugopal Bhagat, my colleagues from The New York Times’s South Asia bureau. Until that time, we had assumed that we have been going to be writing a reasonably conventional article about one of the urgent questions dealing with India: What was preserving Indian girls out of the office? It was a sample that not solely trapped many ladies in poverty and abusive relationships, but in addition restricted the nation’s financial development.

We had been following Arti and another young woman, Nasreen Parveen, hoping to make use of their lives to carry statistics and skilled evaluation to life. We needed to point out our readers what the macro developments for feminine employment seemed like in actual girls’s lives. But as I stood within the crowd of wedding ceremony friends, watching Arti and her new husband, Rohit, on a flower-bedecked platform, a doubt was already beginning to gnaw at me.

The materials we had gathered was fascinating and profoundly illuminating. But it merely wasn’t suited to the construction of a typical information story or a column for The Interpreter, the Times publication that I write each week.

As I organized my rising file of notes, the story started to remind me of a podcast or tv miniseries: The drama lay not in a single occasion, however in how the ladies confronted a collection of obstacles. And that mirrored the fact of what was preserving Indian girls out of the work drive — not one single barrier however a collection of them, reinforcing each other.

That sort of episodic drama wasn’t match for a single article, which might have to be brief and centered. And we didn’t have sufficient audio materials to make the story work as a podcast. But I spotted that there might be one other solution to do podcast-style episodic storytelling by benefiting from a platform that The Times has embraced in recent times: e mail newsletters.

The Interpreter publication has a big and constant viewers. And it reaches subscribers immediately. What if, I requested Emily and Shalini, we turned this mission into an e mail collection?

It could be an experiment: Although podcasts like “Serial” had proven that there was urge for food for this sort of story in audio kind, The Times hadn’t completed something prefer it by way of publication earlier than. But I used to be fairly positive that the Interpreter viewers would recognize the brand new kind. And it will give us an opportunity to let the story breathe.

Emily and Shalini agreed, and our editors signed off on a six-chapter “written podcast.”

Over the next months, we continued our reporting. Arti started her marriage, skilled triumph and disappointment in her seek for a job, and have become pregnant. Nasreen made plans to open a vogue boutique, persuaded her mother and father to conform to let her marry the person she selected and coped with tragedy when a fireplace tore by means of her household’s dwelling.

Emily and Shalini, each based mostly in India, made a number of reporting journeys to go to each girls and their households. From my dwelling in London, I hunted down explanatory context for the younger girls’s struggles the identical approach that I do when reporting on occasions like wars and corruption scandals, calling students to ask for statistics and evaluation. Slowly, the collection took form.

We wrote. And rewrote. And rewrote once more. Even although the collection as an entire was lengthy, area felt tight. Every chapter of about 1,400 phrases wanted to maneuver the story ahead, provide context for readers who had by no means been to India and finish on sufficient of a cliffhanger that they might come again for the following installment.

Many drafts later, we had our collection: India’s Daughters.

But because the publication date for our first entry approached, I felt a heavy weight of accountability. Several colleagues had warned me that they didn’t assume readers would tune in for six chapters of any story, a lot much less one about two unknown younger girls.

What in the event that they have been proper? Sure, Arti and Nasreen have been compelling characters. And the query of girls’s employment in India is essential. But there was no information hook.

Happily, Times readers proved the skeptics flawed. Thousands of readers turned deeply invested within the two girls’s tales, and a whole bunch despatched me emails, sharing how a lot they favored the collection. Many begged for spoilers, saying that the suspense was killing them. Some wrote that the collection had taught them about part of the world they knew little about. Others had lived or frolicked in India, and informed us that they have been gratified to see their actuality mirrored within the collection. Our gamble had paid off.

Arti and Nasreen’s tales aren’t over, though our collection is. No one can say what is going to occur to them, or to India’s hundreds of thousands of different daughters, within the years to come back. But their struggle for the longer term they demand, and the parallel struggles of hundreds of thousands of different younger girls like them, will proceed to form the world’s most populous nation.