Book Review: One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body

I got to not know about Shanta Gokhale only after reading an excerpt from her book One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body. I bought my copy after getting bowled over by the author’s wizardry of words and profound observations. 

"However high the flights of the mind or of ambition, it is ultimately the body that allows or disallows them. Athletes have a proper sense of this. After his eighth Wimbledon win, Roger Federer said, 'Again and again I am grateful my body has cooperated.' He was thirty-six, which is supposedly ancient for tennis. It is vital then to accept the body in all its beauty, mystery and power; to know that the images we build of ourselves might one day be rudely shattered by its exigencies."

I found out later that she is the author of several English & Marathi books, translator, scriptwriter and mother of actress Renuka Shahane. 

After the author reveals at various points in the book, I also learned that she's a feminist, rationalist, atheist and cancer survivor. Her convictions and independence of spirit shine through her writing. I enjoyed reading her autobiography immensely. 

I loved how the author conveys her deep appreciation of the human body while weaving her life story on the theme of human body parts. She narrates in a lighthearted way the highs and lows of her life without flinching when it comes to her weaknesses. Peppered with gentle humor and keen observations about life, the book is engaging & insightful even when she talks about her illnesses and medical issues. 

In a medical diagnostic report... Chronic is a reassuring term. It means it's been there a long time. I've lived with it. Acute is the chap to fear. 

Her strong relationship with her parents and their efforts to let her blossom to her fullest potential by sending her to England for higher studies (in the 1950s) reminded me of Marjane Satrapi's story in Persepolis. 

Her first novel 'Rita Welinkar' was published in 1995 while the second novel 'Tya Varshi' she wrote while recuperating from cancer was released in 2008. Its translation was published in 2013 by Penguin as 'Crowfall'.

Her English translation of the Marathi classic Dhag came out in 2002. The entire print run got pulped by the publisher Macmillans. It had a miraculous rebirth as 'Kautik on Embers' in 2017. 

Excerpts and my favorite bits -

In one of the rounds of farewell dinners we had before leaving Bombay, I had bitten into a green potato which, quite unknown to our overwhelmingly hospitable hostess, had made its way into a spicy preparation. Green potatoes have an indescribable metallic taste that makes you want to spit 10 times, rinse your mouth 10 times and repeat the cycle 10 times. As a guest I was not free to do that. Unsure what else to do with that disgusting mouthful, I held it between tongue and palate for so long before resignedly swallowing it that I gave the revolting taste time to penetrate right through my taste buds and settle at the very root of the tongue. As I drank a whole glass full of water to chase it down I knew I was never going to look at a potato again. 

The problem with law abiding citizens, among whom I count myself, is that they submit to the system, even when the system is an absence of a system. 

I have inherited my materialism from my father, along with much else, including my love for literature and the arts. For me too, the human body when alive, houses all the intangibles that spell what is human-emotions, desires, passions, aspirations, ideas, creativity. But once it dies, they die with it. There is no such thing as a soul. This is not a depressing thought for me. It is how it is. But the other is not a thought one can simply toss off either. Many fine minds have argued in favor of the soul and its continued existence after death. I've tested my beliefs against this and found that, at some stage, the word faith creeps into the argument. It is a concept of faith that I have a quarrel with. Faith does not strike me as a given without which you cannot live. Faith is a choice. The one who needs it, lives by it and for it. The one who doesn't gets by pretty well without. There is no reason why you cannot live in and for the here and now in the best way you know and be prepared to be done with once life ends. 

Tukaram warning human beings against hubris and recommending the virtue of humility, says: 

Lord give me the gift of smallness 

The ant is small, happy to eat grains of sugar. 

Airavat the divine elephant is great  

But must bear the prick of the spur 

Floods uproot large trees 

But the bulrush bends and lives 

He who is big 

Suffers agonies 

Tuka says now then 

To be smaller than small is best 

If intellectual means thinking independently, struggling to find words to express thought and coming up with fresh formulations to stimulate further thinking, then the people I had heard in seminars weren't it.

...human will is powerless against the human body 

...the body is a mystery and a miracle 

The independence to be yourself, complete with yourself, is very heaven

My life's philosophy was not to lift my second foot until the first had found a firm toehold 

In India, even gods have to live with the knowledge that their color is wrong. According to Valmiki's Ramayana... Rama was of ‘dark brown complexion’. What happened then between Valmiki's description and the image of Lord Rama as it has come down to us? Why has he been painted blue? Why has Krishna, also called Shyam, both names meaning dark, been painted blue? One of the dozens of answers offered by scholars for this betrayal of truth is that blue rather than brown or black is more likely to arouse devotion in people's hearts. After all, the malevolent planets in our horoscopes- Shani, Rahu, Ketu- are painted black while the other planets are painted white, yellow or red. 

"But I have made a promise to our family goddess that I'll never dye my hair"...I had used this trick on a couple of occasions before to avoid arguments and it never failed....That's the advantage of living in a 'spiritual' nation which believes in thirty-three crore deities, each to be worshipped with her or his own esoteric rituals. 

Vishnubhat Godse’s Majha Pravas (My Travels) is considered a classic of chronicle writing in Marathi and arguably the only eyewitness account of what is now known as the First War of Independence. In Part Six of the book,  the erudite priest Godse describes the rituals that attended worship at the Ramjanmabhoomi in Ayodhya as prescribed by the shastras....Nowhere in Godse’s description of Ramjanmabhoomi does he mention a mosque 

Marathis are clerks and poets, playwrights and actors, singers and sermonizers and, in their very heart of hearts, warriors, descendants of the great Shivaji, ready to pull out imaginary swords to lay low anybody who dared breathe a word that suggested the warrior king was after all a human being, not a God. What they were not, if they could not help it, were persuasive sellers of goods. 

You never know for sure whether  the body is controlling the mind or the mind is controlling the body. 

Maloccluded or misaligned teeth give you a bad bite. The grinders don't grind efficiently because they don't come together as they should.

In her 40s, she had a mild attack of chicken pox which she passed on to the children. When people asked her how she managed to contract chickenpox at her age, she said ‘I had to work very hard for it’.  

Twenty years later I was to discover that once the chickenpox virus has entered your body, it takes up permanent residence there. Someday in the future, it might emerge as herpes. Herpes happened to me when I was in my late sixties. Three little blisters under the right arm. I rushed to the doctor and within a week they had disappeared but the virus is still there, lying dormant, waiting to strike.  

Glasses came to me at the textbook age of 45. In Marathi, the age and the accompanying spectacles are denoted by the same word, ‘chalishi’, the 40s. But chalishis are for reading. I could read even a six point type with my naked eyes. Strictly speaking then, my glasses could not be called chalishis. They were for seeing distinct things which had begun to acquire double edges of late. 

I occasionally experienced a searing pain around twilight that felt like my eyeballs were being pulled into the back of my head. 

The first eye doctor she went to misdiagnosed 

The condition is irreversible....the test takes just 2 minutes...The normal pressure of fluid in the eyes is 17 or under. Both my eyes had registered a pressure of 50

and after confirmation of Glaucoma he said -

You have no family history, no headache, no vomiting, no red eyes and yet you have glaucoma! 

...Glaucoma prevents you from seeing depth. I lost vision around the periphery of my right eye. Only tunnel vision remained. Fortunately, my left eye was fine. Under Dr Nisheeta Agarwala's care, I have managed to read, right and translate with one eye and half for the last 25 years. 

In 1999 after she turned 60 she fractured her wrist after a fall. She went to a nearby clinic and just after her hand was “fixed” she found out it was by bonesetter and not an orthopedic surgeon. The first “operation” led to a second operation by a proper orthopedic surgeon and a slight distortion in the wrist. 

Around 1992, the year of my marital crisis, I noticed that the fibroids in my left breast were multiplying. But my gynec’s assurance that they were harmless, was like a line etched in stone in my mind. 

She found out in 2000 that she had stage 3 cancer. She had carried a cancer for 10-12 years. She records that 8th & 10 days of chemotherapy are bad days; characterized by fever, low WBC ('the body's police force') count. After 2 rounds of chemo, there is baldness. After 4 rounds of chemo and the lump shrank to 30%,  she had a radical mastectomy in 2005. This was followed by six monthly injections (for 5 years) & tests (for 10 years).

She received almost 80% of her hospital costs from her mediclaim policy which she took 10 years before.

Dr Nisheeta Agarwala had told me (in 2004) before I was diagnosed with cancer that I had cataracts in both eyes and they called for early removal. In the old days doctors waited for cataracts to ripen before taking them out. But now the procedure was different. It involves using a high frequency ultrasound device to pulverize the cloudy lens causing dimmed vision and removing the small pieces by suction. Dr Agarwala used the analogy of raw and ripe mangoes to explain the procedure. the analogy was bang on. I saw instantly that a raw mango would lend itself perfectly to pulverizing while a ripe mango would turn into a mess. 

In 2008 I had developed a tremor in the voice which made me sound like a Nani...I found it unacceptable to live with the bodily impairment without trying to discover its cause. I had had enough of doctors. So I satisfied myself with my own explanation. My condition was a result of a malfunctioning epiglottis. The epiglottis is a traffic policeman which functions in two ways. It stands up to direct food into the windpipe and lies down to allow breath to flow into the windpipe. It was doing well for food; but when it came to breath it was stubbornly refusing to lie down properly with the result that the flow of air was allowed or blocked erratically. Happy with this explanation I have been croaking and glugging my way through speech for seven years.  

Cancer is a homegrown disease. You can hold neither germ nor virus responsible for it. You may be as disciplined and moderate and your habits as a Yogi, but eating spinach everyday doesn't stop your cells from deciding one day to start misbehaving. When I was diagnosed with cancer, a childhood friend...said it's a lifestyle disease. He ticked off all the wrong things he presumed I had been, but shouldn't have been doing if I hadn't wanted to have cancer. I listened to his list of dont's patiently because he was obviously concerned about me. Then I assured him I hadn't been doing any of them. I hadn't been a eater of red meat or junk food, my diet had been moderate, full of vegetables, salads, fruit and nuts and I had walked every morning for an hour. Stumped, he said then why did you get cancer? Believers in random theory don't ask 'Why?'. They ask 'Why not?'