BOOM SHANKAR sitting pretty.
Tell us about yourself.
I am the youngest of six kids. We didn’t have a lot of money in our family, so we were always scrimping pennies. We had four kids in one room with two sets of bunkbeds.
I became paralysed really young, from cancer in my spinal cord. I was about three. My parents didn’t really make any accommodations to the house, and we didn’t have a big shift as a family. We just kept on as we were.
I slept in the top bunk on the top floor of our house, and I just learnt to crawl up the stairs and crawl up the side of my bunkbed and kind of topple into the top bunk there. And I loved it—I mean, that was the coveted space, the top bunk. So I wasn’t about to let someone else take it.
The sibling who’s closest to me is my sister Sarah—she’s two-and-a-half years older than me. Sarah doesn’t really remember me being any other way. She doesn’t remember me not being paralysed.
My sister Laura, who’s twelve years older than me, was almost like a second mother to me. She was a teenager when I was paralysed. But for all of them, even my oldest sister, who would have remembered me before, it’s always felt like I have just been entirely their sister, exactly as I am. I’ve never felt singled out or seen as anything other than who I am in my whole entire person. I think there were really beautiful, lovely things about just being accepted as I was.
And I guess that’s striking to me, because as I’ve gotten older, that’s pretty rare. There’s always something—some slight barrier or something that feels a little bit different, like I need to get to know somebody first before we are even approximating that kind of comfort level.
