It was a warm, December night in 2016, when 32-year-old Aahana Kumra fell off a Bullet. She’d just finished dinner with a bunch of friends. They were headed to get ice cream and Kumra grabbed her friend’s Bullet and took off. She’d been handling bikes since she was 16 years old so no one thought anything of it until a few minutes later when Kumra skidded in a puddle and fell, with the body of the Bullet on top of her.
She tore her rotator cuff and spent the next two months with her arm in a sling. But the fearless actor is already getting stronger. With Lipstick Under My Burkha then in production and a lot of ongoing theatre (with Naseeruddin Shah’s Motley and Ansh theatre groups), the ever restless Kumra is eager to recover.
She has been hitting the gym regularly and a carefully scheduled workout is showing results. “At first I did excessive leg training but there is only so much you can do. Then I started swimming, went to the US for a month, did yoga and when I returned, started lifting weights,” she says. She admits to being nervous at first – she was told not to lift weight overhead. “My dad is in pharma and all my doctors are his friends.” She talks of how she refused medication, and decided to work carefully at her healing.
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Her workouts and diet are being closely monitored by Mumbai-based fitness trainer and nutritionist Samreedhi Goel, who founded the Size Wise studio. Goel says, “Aahana is completely fearless. She loves to do weights and is very strong. She isn’t overcautious as is usually the case with people who sustain injuries. She looks forward to exercising and you can see that in her demeanour. We have designed her schedule to exclude over-the-head exercises and bench presses.”
Kumra, who was on her school’s athletic team, kept at fitness, and that has helped the speed of her recovery, feels Goel. “People who have been into sport as children end up liking exercise. One injury doesn’t get you down. Indian women tend to think that weights make you bulky, but look at her – she is so toned and petite.”
Says Kumra, “I am now more careful about what I lift and I have become slower but it’s okay to become slower sometimes. And of course I am eventually going to get back on that bike; there’s no question about that.”
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