KOCHI: Imagine waking up one day and realising you have lost your voice. You may get scared, anxious, depressed. But when this disaster happened to 15-year old Navya Bhaskar settled in Sharjah, she chose to pen down her experience. Her debut book, The Day I Almost Lost My Voice, is around 15 pages long and narrates her experience of losing her voice.
“It is a children’s book which tells the story of a girl who loses her voice one day. She is very passionate about singing and even dreams about music in her sleep. So losing her voice came as a shock to her. The book is about her journey out of the situation and how she manages it. I suffered for eight months without my voice,” says Navya, a Class IX student at RKD NSS, Higher Secondary School in Sasthamangalam, Thiruvananthapuram.
Instead of adding an element of fantasy as she wins her voice back, the youngster decided to keep her struggle real. She had lost her voice due to a vocal cord infection. She had no voice for eight months and regained it through therapy that went on for about five months, adds her mother, Vandana Bhaskar, a dentist. “It was during the first outbreak of Covid in 2020.
We still don’t know how her vocal cords got infected. Rather than getting depressed and feeling low, she dealt with it bravely and was adamant about getting her voice back. She did not sit idle in those days. Instead, she engaged herself in writing and learning piano. She is a Classical singer trained in Hindustani. Music is like her air. But when she lost her voice I found her crying once and that is about it. When she released her book, many such patients who suffered similar problems came to us to talk,” adds Vandana.
Her teachers and parents asked the Kannur-native to pen down her thoughts. “I completed the book in one month. It is a book that narrates my struggle and how I overcame it. I wish to write more,” adds Navya, who was the 2019 grand champion of UAE-based reality show, The One.