Triumph

If Shivani Gupta is anything like the protagonist of her autobiographical novel — a fiercely independent and a proud tetraplegic — she’d be offended if her book was judged not on merit but as a feat that defies disability. So it must be said that the book is good, just not well-written. But what No Looking Back lacks in technique and style, it makes up in spirit. The sheer enormity of the tragedies that unspool in the life of Chots — 22 years old when an accident first leaves her wheelchair-bound and dependent on a personal carer — is powerful enough to propel the narrative forward. One that is peopled at all times by friends and family, some of whom stay by her side right till the epilogue.

As with all autobiographies, however, disregarding the liminal space between truth and overemphasis can render a good story into a laboured one. And one wishes, when too many characters crowd a frame or too many sentences are spent on mapping a moment emotionally, that the publisher had chosen a better editor for the job.

Among the best-known accessibility consultants in the country today, Gupta has had a difficult life — marked not just by the challenges of a spinal injury in the early ’90s, when information and sensitivity towards issues of disability were scarce, but also by a greater personal loss. A second accident, days after her wedding, which she survives and her long-time partner doesn’t, mires her in grief yet again. Their relationship, having finally overcome dilemmas bred by personal ambitions and self-doubt, and surmounting resistance from the family of her able-bodied paramedic spouse, seven years her junior, is brought to a cruel, abrupt end.

Theirs was a marriage of equals, mirrored best, perhaps, by an incident in Paris. Stranded at a subway station near the Eiffel Tower without a lift or a ramp, Vikas had to lift his then girlfriend and her wheelchair up a steep flight of steps without any help (no one came forward). They are left fuming and embarrassed. But when they finally reach the top of the monument of love, “Being there together was all that mattered,” she says. A rude surprise in a ‘developed nation’, it also leads Chots and Vikas to their final vocation — improving accessibility in public spaces. One that she continues to go the distance for.

Read this book, if the true stories in your Reader’s Digest s are dog-eared.