Run Like a Girl

Fusing personal essays with long-form reportage, The Day I Became a Runner is a poignant and insightful appraisal of Indian women athletes in a deeply gendered society

- Aditya Mani Jha

The journalist and .writer Sohini Chattopadhyay's multi-modal work of non-fiction The Day I Became a Runner begins with a forensic deconstruction of grief. In 2008, she loses her grandmother and, in mourning, starts to run, literalizing a metaphor from the Helen McDonald grief-memoir H is for Hawk ("When you're broken, you run"). To begin with, the mind is too scattered and an untrained body refuses to cooperate. But as she begins to fully inhabit the skin of a seasoned runner, she realizes the sheer amount of baggage that comes with being a female athlete in a deeply gendered society-what she's wearing, where and when she's running, the collective gaze of men unused to seeing a woman engaged in "a solitary activity conducted in the public sphere".