Between being and nothingness

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.

- Ananya Singh

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.