Lifequake: Tarini Mohan's book about what came after, not miracles

Lifequake: A Story of Hope and Humanity

By Tarini Mohan

Published by Juggernaut

296 pages ₹799

 

At the age of 24, Tarini Mohan found herself in Uganda moved, like many young people, by the compulsion to search for meaning, adventure, and a desire to help the vulnerable. Just occasionally such quests can be interrupted by catastrophe and discovery of another kind. In Ms Mohan’s case, it came without prelude or warning: A motorcycle taxi accident. One moment, she was cruising down Yusuf Lule Road, her life still wide open in front of her. Next, the screech of tires, the sickening collision of metal and flesh, then, nothing. When she regained consciousness three months later in a hospital in Delhi, her old life had already become irretrievable, a story that could no longer be picked up where it left off. That she survived at all borders on the miraculous. And yet,  Lifequake  is not a book about miracles. It is about what came after. It is not just the body that requires mending after such a calamity; it is one’s sense of agency, the scaffolding of identity, and expectations of selfhood that fracture when life veers off script. Ms Mohan writes not of a return to an imagined “normalcy” but of the painstaking reconstitution of personhood in the wake of rupture. 

She writes with remarkable lucidity about the estrangement of living in a body that no longer responds the way it once did, of the disjuncture between intention and execution. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously argued that consciousness is not some disembodied essence floating free of materiality but rather is rooted in the flesh, in the sensuous, lived experience of the body in the world. To lose control over it is to suffer a disruption in the fundamental way one exists with the world and oneself. Ms Mohan captures this with astonishing clarity: The sense of alienation as her words no longer match her intentions, her body no longer obeying the commands of her mind. Her prose moves fluidly between past and present, often returning in nonlinear fragments to episodes of her pre-accident life even as she describes her post-accident reality. 

Particularly moving is Ms Mohan’s meditation on the formation of identity in the eyes of others. She wonders, with honesty, whether those who meet her only after the accident will know her as a whole, or merely as a fragment, while she draws a comparison to Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture of the inverted urinal. Ms Mohan also ponders the sheer contingency of her survival. Her father’s ability to mobilise networks and secure access to high-quality medical care made her recovery possible.  She asks what fate might have awaited her in the absence of these resources.  Her account of being asked to stand up from her wheelchair during a routine security check, forced to explain her condition reveals the deeply embedded ableism that characterises public life in India. She also reflects on the class hierarchies that make the presence of attentive aides and domestic care possible in her recovery, while also highlighting the precarity of the workers themselves. 

The dilemma Ms Mohan confronts, that peculiar state of being simultaneously hyper-visible as an object of pity and yet invisible as a subject with agency, is confronted with remarkable nuance. Her reflections on the changing dynamics of her closest relationships— with her friends, her parents, or her then-partner Nikhil— reveal the fragile ways in which intimacy, care, and dependence are renegotiated in the wake of disability. Ms Mohan never lapses into bitterness or self-pity. One of the memoir's most moving passages captures this tension beautifully. Ms Mohan writes about the subtle yet profound nuances that differentiate pity from empathy and sympathy from solidarity. She confesses her aching desire not merely to be cared for but to be seen, to have her friends and loved ones momentarily inhabit her experience, to forge a bond unmediated by condescension or discomfort. Again and again, she returns to the frustration of being unable to make decisions about her own life, the small but piercing humiliations of dependence, the desire to return to a former self that could act without mediation. 

And yet, Lifequake  is far from a bleak or despairing work. If anything, what sustains and elevates this memoir beyond its immediate subject matter is the quiet current of hope, love, and emotional restraint that runs through it. Ms Mohan’s narrative is suffused with an abiding tenderness for the relationships that hold her, her parents, her brothers and friends who orbit her world, offering care and humour. Ms Mohan has a gift for weaving humour into even the gravest of situations, and her achievement lies in the generosity of her vision. 

The reviewer is a writer. X/Instagram: anannnya_s