MANILA, Philippines—If you pierce Nelly SINdayen’s veins, printer’s ink will flow.

Simply stated, she was a pro right down to her sandal straps, one of those vanishing Filipino practitioners of honest-to-goodness shoe-leather reporting.

That’s how friends remember the Time magazine correspondent in Manila, who died in her sleep Saturday—three days before celebrating what could have been her 60th birthday—after battling a severe diabetic stroke in June 2007.

The woman in malong, who was responsible for putting Philippine movers and shakers on the Time cover for over three decades, was wrapped in a white shroud and buried Sunday at the Muslim cemetery in Taguig City in accordance with simple Islamic rites.

The ceremonies were somber, something that hardly characterized Nelly.

You never knew if she was serious. She was always laughing, even in the worst of times. She would even sing you a song in her deep voice, while keeping in step with marching protesters.

“Summer time, and the living is easy …,” she would croon.

That’s until you read what she’d reported in the weekly news magazine.

I first met Nelly as a reporter in the 1970s during some of the first demonstrations against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and later in the coverage of more dramatic events in the waning years of the strongman rule.

The Manotoc ‘kidnapping’

One story that stuck to mind was the “kidnapping” of sportsman Tommy Manotoc in January 1982.

It actually broke while she was holding one of her “power parties” in her apartment, when Manotoc’s brother Dini showed up and announced the amateur golfer and basketball coach had been abducted, sending reporter guests scampering to file their bulletins.
Long after the wires had put out their wrap-ups of the day’s story, Nelly was still in the Manotoc home. She had called me from there hours after I had filed my night lead to the United Press International headquarters in New York.

“It’s a bit embarrassing that I’m the only one left here,” she told me, laughing. “But you know,” she said, “I have to squeeze the story dry or it will not see the light of day because you guys have reported everything to the world.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Because she wrote for a weekly magazine, she had to do more, get stuff that had not been reported by the wires, that telling quote, that detail that put flesh and blood in the story. You can only get these if you dig hard enough.

And her story of the Manotoc affair that appeared in Time magazine told it all and it wasn’t the way Malacañang had portrayed the disappearance—that communists were responsible.

As Nelly told it, Tommy, then aged 31, had gotten a quickie divorce in the Dominican Republic from his wife, the former Miss International Aurora Pijuan, and secretly married Marcos’ oldest daughter Imee, then 21, in the United States.

That enraged the bride’s mother Imelda. Happily, the two were later reunited and the stink died down.

The last scoop

In May 2000, Time earned a public rebuke from President Joseph Estrada, after the magazine published lurid scandals wracking the Palace, his extra-marital affairs and his dealings with his business associates in the face of widening poverty and insurgency.

The Manila correspondent was part of the Time team that put together the unsavory portrait.

Nelly’s last major scoop came in February 2006 amid President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s declaration of a state of national emergency.

She had been invited to the swank residence of Jose Cojuangco, brother of former President Corazon Aquino, in Makati City, where in the early morning hours, a dozen politicians and businessmen outlined a plot by Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim for the withdrawal of military support from the President.

The plan was aborted after Lim attempted to enlist Gen. Generoso Senga, the chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, in the mutiny.

For getting a ringside seat in the plotting of the failed coup, Nelly was put on the administration watch list and harassed, but Nelly, with Time giving all-out support, stood by her story.

Fiercely competitive

Nelly was born in Siasi, Tawi-Tawi. Her Christian father was murdered while she was a child, leaving her Muslim mother to raise her and her sibling.

She studied philosophy and letters in the University of Santo Tomas and worked for local newspapers and magazines before joining Time magazine as a “stringer.” That meant she could only earn if the magazine published her stories.

That she spent decades with the magazine, working for such well-known foreign correspondents and senior editors as Ross Munro, Sandra Burton and Anthony Spaeth told a lot about Nelly.

“She was so fiercely competitive,” says Monica Feria, a former roommate who was then a correspondent of Agence France-Presse. “She kept anything that could be a potential news story to herself,” she says.

A single mother, Nelly left behind daughters—Junne, 18, who was with her when she died, and Tarhata Sari, 24, who was in Canada.

A statement put out by Jason Gutierrez, president of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines, on behalf of FOCAP, said it all: “Her death leaves a vacuum in Philippine journalism, and she will be sorely missed by her peers.” With reports from Nikko Dizon and Allison W. Lopez