As I reflect on the past year, I can hardly believe how far I've come. It's been a rollercoaster of emotions, and every day has been a battle. But through it all, I've discovered something truly remarkable. It all started on a Monday morning last year on 21st Feb. I was on my way back home from meeting someone over coffee when tragedy ...

When I returned home from the hospital, I was keen to engage in this enquiry: "Why did it happen to me?" Not so much from a scientific perspective, but more in an esoteric sense, in words and ways that cannot be fully explained. I looked at my karmic balance, the rights and wrongs, the people I had maybe hurt or invited scorn from. All...

In its absence is its presence. Breath. Beats. Meaning. They make so much of Near Death Experiences – tunnelled light, converged time, out of the body, into past lives… No, none of that for me. Just a void, devoid of thought, then a memory hitting the ground. I’m 10, at school, in Delhi, grey shorts, self-checked white shirt running al...

We usually want to make sense of things. To reason why something happened the way it did. Often there is no single explanation, but many possibilities. We chose one that we most believe in, that makes sense to us. The perspectives can be factual – this happened, so that happened They can be scientific – natural law states when these co...

The second day after the accident was spent in a haze at the hospital. I recall throwing up at night while being transferred from emergency to neurosurgery. The stretcher wheels, walls, lights, everything around me was spinning. I recall an old man opposite my bed, probably recovering from stroke – he was loudly, mouthing obscenities t...

Ten days before the accident, I had a conversation with death. It was a Saturday, we were at home and about to leave for a friends’ place. Suddenly I found breath eluding me. I’ve never had asthma and last time I struggled for breath was due to bronchitis, over 20 years ago. This one felt different. I was unprepared. Visits to pharmaci...

We were eagerly awaiting our first visit to the Neurologist after discharge from hospital. We would get answers to all our unaddressed questions. We will know exactly what the roadmap to recovery looks like. "There will be changes", the Neurologist said, referring to likely changes in my personality. Later on, one of my therapists said...

Internal Landscapes is one of my favourite songs. It's by the Liverpool-based band, Anathema. The song's opening lines are from an interview of Joe Geraci in 1981. Joe had a near death experience when a haemorrhage came close to ending his physical life. “And I felt myself going. I was in a great deal of pain, it was a very frightening...

When I reached the hospital I was comatose. They needed a name, I could not tell my name. So they gave me a name. Dixie Tango. The main thing I now recall of Day 1 at the hospital is feeling nauseous while being moved on a stretcher. I felt it was moving very fast. I have been able to construct a sequence of events from hospital and ot...

For some who face a sudden loss or trauma, time freezes. Arrests. Stops. For me it feels like time is being stretched. All the while dividing itself into smaller and smaller fragments. I am leaping inwards, making quantum jumps into each diminishing fragment. Becoming a smaller and smaller part of the whole. The whole being a complete,...

I knew from the start that there would be grieving. As soon as I was back home I immersed myself in it. In what the poet Alice Oswald says, "Not the feeling of grief, but the being of grief". I started with the book that had moved me the most in the past: "Time lived without its flow", by Denise Riley. Grief has a unique relationship w...

When I was airborne after being struck, I experienced an Inception moment. I journeyed across time, thoughts, thoughts embedded within thoughts. In the present. I was flying, and falling. There was a past embedded in that present. A memory, a thought: I am 12 years old, in Delhi, running along the sidelines of the school field. We are ...

21st February 2022 starts off normally. I wake up, get ready, get kids ready, serve them breakfast, drop them to school, come back home. 10-11 am I have a meeting at a coffee shop nearby. I cycle to the cafe, meet Steven, have an inspiring conversation, start my cycle ride back home. Three minutes into the journey, An opening car door ...