Facing Shattering News, My Family Found Strength in Ways Uniquely Their Own

Extract from the chapter 'Heart Stopping News' in Lifequake: A Story of Hope and Humanity by Tarini Mohan.

The last time my parents had spoken to me was two days earlier when I had chattered non-stop about my new lunch routine of walking with my colleagues to the shed in which nearly all fifty BRAC Uganda office staff ate together. At the time, more than half the employees were Bangladeshi and the rest local. The lunch menu was reliably rice and watery yellow dal – not exactly gourmet, but Amar, Meri, and I would devour it like a delicacy.

With a giggle, I recounted how earlier that day, Jackson, the warm and ever-cheerful kitchen boy, had entered the compact lunch shed, holding up a platter of … fish heads. Grinning from ear to ear, he’d placed it at the center of our table with a flourish.

Tarini Mohan
Lifequake: A Story of Hope and Humanity
Juggernaut, 2025

Catching Amar’s eye, he pointed toward the fish heads and then pressed his index finger to his lips, as if sharing some grand culinary secret. Once Jackson returned to the kitchen, Meri leaned in and whispered conspiratorially that Jackson probably wanted to fill us up with fish heads so that there’d be enough of the “actual” fish for others. We sat upright, adamant we would wait for the fish’s body to arrive, along with the customary dal and rice. No fish heads for us.

While our colleagues chomped on the fish heads – the only source of protein on the table – we waited, confident our superior tactics would give us the last laugh. But after twenty minutes, it finally dawned on us: there was no “rest of the fish”. Clearly, Jackson had bought only the heads, and the vendor was still waiting for wealthier customers to purchase the bodies. I’d narrated how we’d returned to our desks, stomachs growling, while Meri, ever the optimist, tried turning the experience into a life lesson: never make assumptions based on just a part of the picture.

My parents had chuckled, amused by the odd experiences I was having. When I’d announced quitting Morgan Stanley months earlier, they’d taken it in their stride, as true, old-fashioned liberals who valued meaning over money. Though strict in my childhood, especially Mama, they’d loosened their grip after seeing me thrive at boarding school, college, and in New York. I’d earned a reputation for being meticulously organized, a trait confirmed when they later found my Kampala room in perfect order, every file in its place.

Now, their world lay shattered. Yet in their responses – each distinct, each fitting – I see our family’s essence: how they found strength in ways uniquely their own. In their different but complementary responses, you can read the story of my family.

My father activated his most essential self – the methodical problem-solver. He worked his way through the tasks on his mental to-do list. One of his first actions was reaching out to an acquaintance, the Ugandan ambassador to India, to confirm that visas could indeed be obtained on arrival. To his relief, the ambassador promised to connect him with her friends in Uganda who would provide my parents with any help they needed.

Mama is a natural pragmatist, a trait that has served her well through decades of adapting to new countries and changed circumstances. She immediately rushed to pack their suitcases, trying to anticipate what they would need in Kampala. She had no sense of how long their stay would be. Would it be cold in October? What kind of shoes should she pack? Should she take something for me? There were no proper answers but each folded shirt, each travel document arranged in sequence, was a small act of control in a situation that could have spiraled into chaos. “Sitting there howling,” as she put it later, with her characteristic directness, “wasn’t going to help”.

Papa knew he needed to inform the university, but it didn’t feel like it was the right time. It had only been two months since he’d started teaching at Yale. Finally, after a couple of agonizing hours, he made the calls. Professor Levinsohn, the head of the School of Global Affairs, immediately reassured him that a substitute teacher would take care of his classes, and offered him the university’s full support.

Several miles away, in New York, Rasoo trudged to the train station at dawn, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep. As he boarded the train, the ride felt interminable, each passing mile stretching out like a lifetime. He emerged from the station determined not to consider the possibility that I might never wake up. He instead willed himself to believe that I would return to my boisterous self in no time, perhaps even before my parents arrived in Kampala.

This signaled an extraordinary capacity to hold on to hope. The pivotal fact was, I was alive, and as long as there is life, there is hope. My parents’ extraordinary composure, too, was driven not by blind optimism but by holding on to this most fundamental of life’s truths: as long as breath flows, possibilities exist. Their hope was also fueled by experience. They had witnessed other families recover from similar traumatic injuries. A friend and another family’s daughter in-law had both managed to pick up the threads of their lives after traumatic brain injuries. They held fast onto these experiences as they prepared for Kampala.

Less than a day after the catastrophe that was to change their lives, my parents were on an airplane, huddling close together. Amid the haze that his thoughts had become, after all the organizing had been done, Papa heard his cell phone ring in Amsterdam, where they had a layover. It was the Indian family, Bina and Shaishav Nanavati, to whom the Ugandan ambassador to India had connected my parents.

Coincidentally, just a few weeks ago, Meri, Davis, and I had met with the Nanavatis’ son, Akshay, for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. He’d introduced us to his parents at their home that same evening. Upon hearing my name, the Nanavatis immediately rushed to IHK. They found me comatose but stable, having just emerged from emergency brain surgery. The Nanavatis’ phone call to my parents helped quell the storm raging in their heads.

Looking back, what strikes me isn’t just how vulnerable we were as a family then, but also the many comforts we had that helped us cope. I was lying comatose in a country in which over half the people live in deep poverty, sometimes described as multidimensional poverty. It’s a type of hardship that includes struggles with education, healthcare, and all the things from food to drinking water to electricity, needed to lead a decent life. Nevertheless, I was fortunate enough to have access to not only half of Uganda’s neurosurgeons, receiving care in the relative comfort of a private hospital, but was also benefiting from my parents’ skillful leveraging of their social network to ensure I received the best possible attention under the circumstances.

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