Guest Interview: A life more, and more able.

In the guest interview A life more, and more able, Renu Arora speaks with lawyer, activist and writer Melanie Sharma-Barrow about her journey as a thespian and the role of sound, cohesion and creativity in a changed life.

The title resists a familiar cultural assumption: that disability inevitably makes a life smaller. Renu’s life did change overnight after she was hit by a bus in 2017 - her mobility changed, she became a wheelchair user and the voice on which she had built her career was profoundly affected, and none of that should be softened. Yet neither should disability be mistaken for an absence of artistry, imagination or possibility.

The conversation reflects on the process of meeting the artist who remained, which Renu has described as repurposing her career and defining herself as a “sit-down artist”: not abandoning the skills developed across years of performance, but insisting that those skills still belonged in the room.

Sound became especially important, since when speech alone could not hold the experience of accident, trauma and near-death, music offered another architecture, allowing feeling, memory and meaning to coexist without being forced into a linear account. That exploration would become central to The Burgundy Book, Renu’s original work combining storytelling, music and song.

The interview also considers cohesion: the possibility that the apparently broken or separate parts of a life can be held in relation to one another. The performer before the accident and the disabled artist after it are not two unrelated people, but part of one continuing creative life.