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“I like dancing to music. I want to take part in sports, especially the running race”

Ankita Mandal (17) has been asking her family to take her to the Port Blair stadium. Her multiple disabilities – in locomotion, vision and learning – do not diminish her enthusiasm for sports. (Loyal readers might recall the story of M. Bhavani, the medal-winning para athlete from the Andamans who has been training disabled children in sports at the stadium.) Ankita’s mother Nilam, trying to describe her daughter’s staggering gait, says it’s “like that of someone who is drunk”. But Ankita doesn’t care. “I like running the most”, she tells us. She doesn’t run to win medals but for the sheer pleasure of it, just as she enjoys dancing to the songs she listens to on TV.
 
This cheerful teenager is growing up in a joint family dominated by women (her father Abhiram died in 2015): besides her mother there’s her younger sister, Akshata (15), father’s sister Depali and grandmothers Rina and Malti. Abhiram’s younger brother’s family is also part of the household and Ankita is very close to her seven-year-old cousin Rajesh. “She is the happiest when she is with Rajesh,” says Nilam. “She is always by his side, feeding him, taking him around.”
 
Nilam, who works in “a private job” (she hesitated to tell us the nature of her work), has studied till Class 8. “Ankita was perfectly normal till Class 3,” she tells us. “She was 11 years old when she got an injection in school. When I asked, they said it was for polio. Ever since that day I’ve been running around, taking her to hospitals.” She claims that the injection not only weakened Ankita’s legs but also affected her eyes.
 
Speaking to us amid bouts of giggling, Ankita told us, “I like going to school and I have many friends. My best friends are Shrishti and Shreya. My favourite subjects are English, Hindi and Art. After coming back from school I help my mother with her chores.” She is in Class 12 and preparing for the board exams. She says she wants to focus on completing her senior secondary and hasn’t given much thought to her future studies. Nilam says, “Sometimes she tells me she wants to go elsewhere for higher studies but how can we send her away like that when she can’t even walk steadily? My dream was that she grows up to be independent but it doesn’t seem as if that will happen.”
 
Ankita doesn’t echo her mother’s misgivings. The small things in life make her happy: going to school, being with friends, watching movies and cartoons, playing with her phone, eating mutton gosht. She doesn’t fancy being indoors for too long and loves to go out – it doesn’t matter where, so long as she is out of the house.
 
Nilam says her daughter has grown more strong-willed. “She has become different now. You can’t predict her behaviour. She wants things to be in a particular way and we have to do what she wants us to.” It sounds like a complaint but perhaps it is a good thing that Ankita is making herself heard. It could be a sign of her determination to carve out a life of her own.