A nyone who learns about the amazing facts of
Shalini Saraswathi
’s life will wonder where she draws all that courage from, the source of her inexhaustible inner strength. “My Malayali DNA,” answers Shalini, who was raised in Bengaluru by her parents who hail from Kollam. “My parents were not overly protective but made me realise the importance of being self-reliant and taking my own decisions.”
A decision, which the parents accepted without any fuss, was to marry Prashanth, a Kannadiga colleague. Shalini had joined the BPO sector soon after her BCom and established a firm foothold in what was then a nascent industry. After living with her in-laws for a while, they started life on their own, a life that was fun, full of friends and a lot of trips. One such trip was to Cambodia in February 2012 where they spent a couple of happy weeks, little realising that she had contracted a deadly bacteria called rickettsia, which even most doctors had not heard of. Days after her return, when she had fever, it was initially thought to be related to her pregnancy, then attributed to malaria or dengue. But when platelet count dropped drastically, she was admitted to the ICU, where she battled death.
She may have won that battle but the unborn baby didn’t. The doctors warned that her limbs which were blue-black, motionless and swollen — like ‘dried wood’ in the words of Shalini — would have to be amputated. She and her family, however, hoped for a miracle and sought refuge in a series of alternative therapies including oxygen treatment, electric therapy and of course ayurveda, which was recommended by the Malayali nurses in the hospital. None of them could regenerate the limbs though ayurveda controlled the gangrene to an extent, according to her.
Eager to bounce back to normal life, she started working from home with her laptop but with disastrous results. There was a fracture in the left hand and it had to be amputated. She stopped working to save the right hand, which literally fell off one day onto the hands of her brother-in-law. “Yeah, I may have cried a little that day,” she admits, though very casually. “But more than sadness, it was disbelief for me as well as family and friends, because no one had heard about such a condition till then.”
Very soon, she got round to the fact that the legs will also have to go and that there was little point in resisting. The doctors suggested that they would remove one after the other but she asked them to do it in one go. She describes it as the ‘best decision’ and the only way forward. “It was not a rushed decision and I looked forward to it,” she says. One of her blog posts has it that she applied the brightest purple nail polish before the surgery in September 2013.
It took a few months to heal after which she got prosthetic limbs fixed and learned to walk all over again. The days that followed were painful to say the least. “I was trying to be brave and take it slow. One day I walked 300 metres, stopped midway and cried, telling myself that I can’t do this,” she says.
Somewhere along the way, in 2014, she met Ayyappa, an athletic coach, who had never worked with a disabled person before. “In the first year, I only walked. We then came to know that blades were coming to India on a trial basis. In May 2015, I ran five kilometres in the stadium and then moved on to 10 km. Last year, I took part in a marathon and ran 10 km in 2 hours and 2 seconds. This year, I improved my time in another marathon to an hour and 35 minutes.”
On the work front too, she kept improving her timings. Initially working from home, she started to go to the office occasionally before becoming a regular again. Today, she is a deputy GM at her company.
She was a dancer familiar with different forms but was never much into sports. Explains Shalini: “We are designed that way; for fight or flight. Till something goes wrong, we take things for granted. But when walking itself is a challenge and you are able to run, it gives a certain confidence. You then prove a point to yourself and others. You gain a sense of being in control of your life. When adversity strikes, it is an eye-opener in many ways and you crave to live life the fullest.”
In a recent TV programme, Mammootty presented her with an award and gave credit to her husband for the way he stood by her. “Of course, Prashanth was a strong presence. But I had a whole support system around me including him, the in-laws and a large group of friends that functioned very well. I never felt alone,” she says.
All the same, the transformation in abilities was as much physical as it was mental. There was a time when she “hated everyone, and I just shut the entire world to my life. I asked for no visitors, no friends, no family”. But slowly, she came to terms with the new reality. A brilliant writer, she describes this phase thus in her blog: “I lived each day at a time, made small achievable goals for myself, read every book I could lay my hands on and like my life depended on it, learnt classical music, looked forward to friends visiting — more than anything else hoped and believed that tomorrow will be better…” Her advice as someone who has seen it all and survived, even had what seemed like an out-of-body experience, “Live today and live in the moment, you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow.”
It’s no wonder that the brilliant communicator these days gets invites to give motivational talks to corporates. This year, she has travelled to Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Goa and Delhi.
What’s next? “I will try and qualify for the para games in 100m and 200m sprint. I want to represent the country,” she says.
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