About

Sumitra Mehrol was a mere child when she was struck with polio. Her parents, struggling to make ends meet, coping with a growing family, were not able to give her the attention she needed to be fully cured. Nor was medical care readily available or a reliable diagnosis easy to access. As a result, the illness remained largely unattended and Sumitra grew up with a disability, facing scorn, often insults, from many around her. When combined with the fact of her belonging to a Dalit family, something she began to understand as she grew into adulthood, Sumitra was left even more vulnerable. ‘All my life,’ she says, ‘I have intimately known the pain, the fear and the suffering of a life lived on the margins. I am a woman, a disabled person, a Dalit.’  In this honest, unsparing and deeply moving account, Sumitra describes her life and her struggle to cope. She speaks of what it means to have the aspiration to merely live an ordinary life, the desire to do ordinary things —study, have friends, fall in love, take up a job, marry, have children—and seeks answers from society for the rules it makes, the expectations it sets and the deep prejudices it hides.