Sonal Mansingh
Author- Sujata Prasad
Publisher- Penguin Random House, Rs 599
In her book, Sonal Mansingh: A life like No Other, SUJATA PRASAD writes about how a major accident had caused renowned Indian classical dancer Sonal Mansingh severe physical pain and damages and how the danseuse overcame the crisis
On August 24, 1974, Sonal had a close brush with death. She was being driven back from Nuremberg to Bayreuth by Georg after spending a ‘delightful day’ with their artist friend, Herbert Traue. It was a wet, lacquer-dark night on a deserted autobahn near the town of Pegnitz where there was no speed limit and one could drive as fast as one liked. In love, and heady like a teenager, Sonal was humming a peppy song, when the car’s headlight unexpectedly picked on a deer standing in the middle of the road. Georg slammed the brakes hard, but their Volkswagen Beetle skidded on the rain-drenched road, did three somersaults, turned upside down and settled on its roof. Sonal lost consciousness as she was tossed four metres away from the car on the hard surface of the motorway.
Sonal threads together the events of that terrible night: “My flight through air and the impact of the fall rendered me unconscious. Georg escaped with only a whiplash injury on the neck. luckily, a passing car called the police from a roadside phone. A sprinkle of water and I came to, murmuring, ‘I am cold.’ My blue Pashmina shawl covered me as I was gently lifted by a male nurse into an ambulance from the nearby town of Pegnitz.”
After preliminary investigations at the Pegnitz General Hospital, she was referred to the University Clinic of Erlangen, near Nuremberg, a city known for its specialised clinics and hospitals. X-rays revealed that four of her ribs were badly damaged, her 12th vertebra was smashed to smithereens and both her collarbones were broken. Was it the final act, a denouement that even her worst nightmares had not prepared her forIJ Trapped within a carapace of pain, her limp body lay under the hot lights of the OT where the treating orthopaedic surgeons gave her two options — to allow them to insert a steel rod in her back to hold up the spine, or to shroud the body with a heavy plaster cast to allow nature to heal her body. Impetuously, she chose the latter option. During the two weeks at this clinic, support came from unexpected quarters. An Indian woman, Vrinda Swatek, married to a Czech German, visited her every day with food with Indian flavours. Dressed in a lovely silk sari with a big round bindi and salt-and-pepper hair, her presence was so comforting. She would bring along a silver thali, katoris, spoon, napkin, glass and delicious food!
Georg was by her side from morning till night. It was not the pain, overwhelming as it was, that seared her. She overheard one of the doctors tell Georg that it would take several months of physiotherapy before she could walk. Returning to dance seemed improbable. For Sonal, this was like having her pause buttons permanently pushed.
letters, messages and telegrams poured in from known and unknown people and places. Indira Gandhi’s was one of the first, asking her to keep her chin up. ‘India prays for you,’ read the message in her telegram. Fourteen days after the accident, Sonal was moved to Montreal where Georg worked. Her Air Canada flight was also shot through with some amount of drama. She was to board the flight at the Frankfurt airport. She recalls, “As my ambulance came to a halt just in front of the nose of the plane, the pilots saw the vehicle. The doors opened and the captain stood there, arms firmly crossed at the chest as I slid down on the stretcher. I still remember every detail of that moment when he looked down at me strapped to the stretcher and told lechner, ‘We can’t take her. We are not prepared for this.’ I was looking up at him as a sacrificial goat might at its rescuer. Even that did not help. lechner whispered to the two male nurses to unstrap me and haul me up. I staggered up the 40-odd steps of the ladder helped by those two and greeted the captain with a dazzling smile and a ‘Good afternoon, Captain, thank you!’ I still don’t know how I did it. It was almost like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen.” With no readymade protocol or blueprint for dealing with her condition, Sonal put all her grit together to survive the 14-hour transatlantic flight ordeal, with just a small halt at the Shannon airport in Ireland.
Sonal remembers that flight most also for the intimate camaraderie between her and Georg and the captain’s thoughtfulness in ensuring that she was served bread, cheese and desserts from the first-class menu. Georg’s apartment in Montreal was on the ninth floor of a building called the Port-Royal on 1455, Sherbrooke, a road lined with bars, boutiques, antique-stores and art galleries. Sonal, confined to bed and dealing with dark interior monologues and haunted by reminiscences, was getting to a point where she wanted to dismantle her memories, the pointless reveries of the past. To think that all this was happening to her, a woman who exulted in her body, and more than that, in her dance. She says, “And there was poor Georg trying to nurse me, sublimating his restless intensity, assisted by a German-teaching couple from the Goethe-Institut, Bernhard and Hildegard Beutler, who took turns to look after me. lying on my back in the quiet isolation of my room, trying to block out sounds from the legendary Ritz Carlton that was just across the road and where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had once got married, I felt as brittle as a glass doll. I could move only my fingers and eyes. I went through all the hasta mudras a number of times, did eye exercises like a Kathakali dancer and recreated the accident and the ensuing events with just those gestures and eye movements. Nothing assuaged my feeling of impending doom. Whispers from the living room from where phone calls were made and received reconfirmed what the German doctors had said, ‘She will never dance again!’”
It was in Montreal that a well-known chiropractor, Dr Pierre Gravel, who had seen her give a lec-dem a couple of months ago at the Goethe-Institut, took up the challenge of bringing her back to her feet. He was vacationing in the beautiful laurentian Mountains, about three hours’ drive from Montreal, when he received news about the accident and drove straight back to see her. He confessed that he usually would not disturb his well-earned summer holiday for anything, but when he was told that it was the Indian dancer he had seen a few months ago and she had broken her back in a terrible accident, he dropped his yacht on the lake, his girlfriend, Myrto, and cats in the chalet, and drove down to see me. He told me how he was himself a music buff and how profoundly he was moved by Indian dance that evening when he had seen me perform. Pierre turned her room into an intensive care cubicle, beginning his diagnostics with a bunch of x-rays. A couple of days into his investigations and after holding consultations with leading orthopaedics and surgeons on the exact damage to the vertebrae, he stood at the foot of her bed looking rather grim. ‘I am afraid,’ he said with a dramatic pause, and as if fearing the worst, she looked into his warm, compassionate, deeply intimate, blue eyes, her own welling with tears, ‘I am afraid that you will be able to dance again.’ Even though she was crying, nothing could dilute the adrenaline that Pierre’s simple words generated. The days spent in despair paled to monochrome in an instant, ready to be filed in neatly in her catalogue of memories, and pushed away. She adds, “Sensing what I was going through, Pierre caressed my hair and held my hand, which he was to hold all through the arduous journey back to a life of dancing. ‘But it will be hard work, Sonal,’ he said. ‘You will have to promise to follow everything I say.’ I was ready to stand on my head if he delivered on his promise.”
More importantly, Sonal promised herself that no matter what it would take, she would reclaim her life. This was the beginning of the process of what she loves to call her ‘second birth’.
Excerpted from Sonal Mansingh written by Sujata Prasad and published by Penguin Random House, Rs 599