However, a marriage and two kids later, the tumour resurfaced. Even the doctors were surprised when in 1995, just after her second delivery, 35-year-old Mallick suffered a paralytic stroke. The late P K Sethi of the Jaipur foot fame found a massive tumour within her spinal cord.

Her husband Vikram Mallick was then in the Army and posted in Kargil. Mallick would battle alone for five years, even as she lost her speech, faced memory lapses and was in and out of operation theatres when emergencies occurred, like the leaking of cerebral fluid. She would not walk again.

However, with her family’s full support and after fitness and rehabilitation programmes, she decided that a wheelchair wouldn’t hold her back. Mallick set up a restaurant at Ahmednagar, where children who had dropped out of school could work part time while carrying on their studies. It was this spirit — she insists that she not be treated any different — that led her to participate in a beauty pageant, and win it.

Later, she would take to swimming as part of hydrotherapy, and excel there as well. In the 2006 Asia-Pacific Games at Malaysia, she came in second in the swimming competition in the disabled category.

After seven years on the wheelchair, she last week acquired a new set of wheels. Hearing that she loved bikes, tycoon Vijay Mallya presented her a specially designed motorcycle (with four wheels). The Rs 3 lakh bike has been designed to ensure that she gets no vertical spinal jerks while riding it, has a special chest belt as she has no muscle on her waist and abdomen, and it accommodates her wheelchair.

... contd.