Throughout history, literature writers have frequently seen their bodies depart from their minds. Physical suffering has informed the writings of some of our most familiar names, from Tagore to Virginia Woolf. The writers’ burden – infuriating, draining and yet, extraordinary – helps bring to the surface what the thrum of ordinary health conceals. Authors have been telling us for centuries now that there is no need for this pretence – that from the threshold at which they have often teetered, a story-telling can emerge which is powerful and vulnerable, both. 

Tarini Mohan joins this list with her book Lifequake: A Story of Hope and Humanity. In October 2010 Mohan was travelling on a boda-boda in Kampala, night air sweeping through her and her friend Sujal’s hair, when an accident killed Sujal and caused a traumatic brain injury to Mohan. 

“When I woke three months later, I couldn’t move my right arm or hand, and damaged nerve pathways blocked motor signals to my right leg, too,” Mohan’s prologue begins. 

Twenty-three-years-old, full of plans and yet un-jaded by what life had to offer, Mohan starts life anew, with the knowledge that her body is not fully hers and her thoughts do not quite flow like they used to. 

In 300 pages, Mohan navigates the permanence of her situation by registering the full gamut of her emotions. For her reader, she extracts all the pain, discomfort, worry and listless haze that she has felt and perhaps continues to feel and displays them with candor. “I suffered a harrowing experience, and this is who I am as a result of it. In the middle, here is what happened,” her book appears to say. 

At places you find yourself angry on her behalf, irritated as she is waiting for an accessible taxi which just won’t come in time for her to reach an American football match. At other times, you are incensed at her as she berates her mother for giving her grief for returning home late as an almost 30-year-old. And at yet other times, you weep with her as she breaks up with her boyfriend after convincing herself that he did not sign up for the vast difference that his life with her would entail. When Mohan recounts feeling the warmth of her family, you are convinced of the solidness of her closest relatives too. 

It is honest story-telling in a memoir that records consistent suffering but is never bleak. 

But honesty is not the only place where the value of the book lies. Thanks to Mohan’s keen interest in the nitty-gritties of what exactly was going wrong with her body and when, and the allied questions of whether the possibility of a clinical trial can ease things, whether a particular wheelchair is better or a kind of cane, and what exactly is wrong with an airplane bathroom, her reader gets an acute view of exactly how excruciating the realities of the disabled are. 

In this account, nothing is painted with a comforting brush. Mohan is thankful for her acuity at one point, but at another, she recognises that she was able to continue in the immediate aftermath of her accident only because she was not fully present. She, who would lead and win any argument, finds herself jotting talking points down before speaking to her boyfriend over the phone. Friends, whose attention anyone her age would take for granted, are seen as kind because they have offered her friendship.

This shift in the prism through which Mohan needs to look at things is seismic enough, but the wealth of details recorded in the book make it doubly sobering. 

Mohan’s account sporadically stops to acknowledge her privilege and so, as a reader, you are made aware of it even when she does not acknowledge it. As the daughter of one of India’s foremost economists and a classical dance exponent, Mohan had had an education spanning India and the US. In the course of her treatment, the healthcare opportunities of both countries are presented to her. Mohan makes no bones of noting that the US is more perceptive of the needs of disabled people than India and does not spare the details. She notes how a nurse does not stop to drape a cloth over her as she inserts a catheter and for a second. There is value in Mohan noting this in a country where such indignities are almost routine in a healthcare system that sees neither the patient nor the caregiver as deserving of full respect. 

There is another story, in which Mohan feels irritation at one of her first speech therapists in India for mispronouncing 'water' as 'vater', only to realise that qualified therapists mostly leave India to make a better living outside. It is a wretched sort of story, difficult for her, for the therapist and for the reader to swallow. And yet it does say a little bit about the ritual frustrations this climb that Mohan set for herself must have entailed.

The fundamental question that Mohan grapples with is whether she can even continue to be Tarini Mohan if all the markers that she had erected as checkpoints to her identity are robbed off her. She finds that she can try to erect more checkpoints and gets a degree from Yale. She lavishes praise on her family and friends and sees herself through their eyes. Sometimes, she applies a fresh coat of lip balm. And then, she writes a very readable memoir. 

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.