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Pune, March 30 : Faster, higher, stronger — in the collective mourning for the Indian hockey team’s failure to qualify for the Olympics, no one’s heard of one gutsy woman from Ahmednagar near Pune who perhaps best symbolises what the Games stand for. She’s Deepa Mallick, 39, mother of two, a spastic paraplegic, with no movement in her body the third shirt button down, who is set to become the first woman to represent India in the Paralympic Games to be held in Beijing.

She will be participating in the javelin event. But before that, she will become the first Indian woman to participate in the International Paralympic Swimming Championship in Germany in May.

And that’s only half the story. Mallick was just eight when she was first detected with a tumour in the spine. Since then, she has had three spinal surgeries, with spasticity, leading to 183 stitches, laminectomy on seven vertebrae (surgical removal of the rear part of a vertebra in order to gain access to the spinal cord or nerve roots) as well as gone through lack of bladder and bowel control.

Along the way, she has won laurels for her college team in baseball and cricket, represented India at the Asia Pacific Games, opened a restaurant, is an avid biker, won a beauty contest, and is right now getting ready to head for Gwalior to train for the Paralympics.

When a tumour was discovered in her spine for the first time 31 years ago, she lost movement in her lower limbs. An operation later, the little girl had to move around with a crude equipment attached to her like a chest brace with chin guard. She would recover, regain movement in her limbs, and go on to become a member of her college basketball and cricket teams.

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.

With her husband now retired from the Army, and her children grown up — one is in Class XII while the other is 13 years’ old — Mallick says she has a new mission. Once she is back from Beijing, she plans to ride her new bike 4,000 km round the country to raise awareness about the “specially abled”.