Akhilesh Shukla
Some stories stay with you not just for the lives they recount, but for the truths they uncover about your own. Tarini Mohan’s debut memoir, Lifequake: A Story of Hope and Humanity, is one such book — raw, wise, and quietly powerful. It is not just a tale of survival after trauma, but of rediscovery, resilience, and the unshakable will to live on new terms.
At 24, Tarini was living the kind of life that seemed stitched from promise. A graduate of Wellesley College with degrees in Economics and Philosophy, she had turned down a lucrative Wall Street career to work with BRAC, one of the world’s largest nonprofits, in Kampala, Uganda. But her path was irrevocably altered when a motorcycle taxi accident left her with a traumatic brain injury and in a coma.
She was airlifted to Delhi. For three months, there was silence.
Then — against all odds — she opened her eyes.
What follows is not a miracle story wrapped in sentiment. Lifequake is something more powerful: an unflinching, funny, and fiercely intelligent chronicle of what it means to come back to life when the body resists, the mind stutters, and the world you knew no longer fits.
“This wasn’t who I’d been, wasn’t who I was inside, or who I wanted to be,” she writes. “I didn’t want to live curled up on my parents’, or anyone else’s lap.”
With grace and grit, Tarini takes us through her painstaking recovery — from physical rehabilitation to cognitive therapies, from relearning how to speak to reengaging with love, ambition, and identity. Her long-term memory remains intact, but her physical and mental landscapes are entirely new. So is her relationship with her body, her independence, and with her partner, Nikhil.
In a literary space often starved of nuanced narratives about disability, Lifequake offers something rare: honesty without self-pity, humor without denial, and insight without overstatement. Tarini never asks to be seen as a victim or a hero — she asks only to be seen as whole, in all her complexity.
“For the gregarious,” she writes, reflecting on her difficulty with speech, “a brief moment of repetition is a small price to pay for being heard.”
This is a memoir about learning to live in a new body — and in a new world. It’s also a story of relationships under strain and transformation, particularly the evolving dynamics with Nikhil, and the unwavering love of her parents. Her mother’s deep, day-by-day caregiving and her father’s quiet optimism are vividly rendered and deeply moving. As Liaquat Ahamed notes, the portrayal of familial support is “selfless and all-enveloping.”
But perhaps most impressive is the clarity with which Tarini explores the hidden contours of disability in modern India — the infrastructural, social, and emotional gaps that make recovery not just a medical process, but a political one.
The acclaim has been swift and wide-ranging. Filmmaker Mira Nair calls the book “unputdownable, an emotional rollercoaster.” Historian Ramachandra Guha praises it as “deeply moving and richly readable.” And Richard Levin captures its essence best: “The reader leaves the journey with profound admiration for Tarini’s courage, persistence, and spiritual triumph.”
Now working at Jetri — a higher education firm focused on institution-building and inclusion — Tarini continues her commitment to public service, particularly in the area of disability advocacy and education reform.
Lifequake is a quiet triumph. It doesn’t shout, but it reverberates. In a world where lives can change in an instant, Tarini Mohan’s voice offers a powerful reminder: even after disaster, meaning and joy are still within reach — if we’re brave enough to begin again.
BOOK INFO
Title: Lifequake: A Story of Hope and Humanity
Author: Tarini Mohan
Genre: Memoir / Narrative Non-fiction
Publisher: Juggernaut Books
Release Date: Out Now
Bookshotsapp 
Leave a comment