01 — The story
A belated birthday gift, from the universe
Shortly after his thirty-eighth birthday, in January 2018, Ansar Babu was told he had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. IPF scars the lungs until they can no longer do their one job. It has no cure, it usually arrives in a person's sixties, and it typically leaves three to five years. Nobody knows what causes it — that is what idiopathic means.
The memoir covers the year that followed. The diagnosis, and the strange administrative calm of being told you are dying. The slow subtraction of ordinary things: stairs, sentences, sleep. The wait for a match. And on 10 September 2018, a double lung transplant at Apollo Hospital in Chennai — eight months after the diagnosis, and considerably sooner than anyone had planned for.
Running alongside it is his wife Shehna, who is less a supporting character than a co-author of the survival. Their two children are the reason the book has an argument rather than just an account.
It is not a misery memoir. The structure moves between chapters and poems, and the register moves between grief and a fairly unsparing dark humour — the kind that turns up when the alternative is unbearable. Readers arrive expecting to be sad and report laughing more than they expected.
Did he survive or did he succumb? Well, here he is, with a story to tell.
