It was March 4, 2000. It was a day like any other, but for the mischievous 8-year-old Jana, it was going to bring brutally unforeseen circumstances. “I found a seven-foot-long iron rod in the terrace, where I was playing and started wielding it like a warrior. I was standing near the edge of the terrace and didn’t notice the high tension electric line nearby. The rod suddenly came in contact with the line,” recalls Jana. He collapsed due to the high intensity shock which sent the nearest transformer bursting into flames. Hearing the loud noise, his parents and neighbours rushed to the spot and took the badly burnt boy to the Government Stanley Hospital where a group of 13 doctors, headed by child specialist Dr. Seeniraj, treated Janarthanan, who had incurred third degree burns. 

The injuries were so deep that they had to amputate his right hand up to his shoulders, left hand up to the elbow, his left leg till the knee, and the toes of his right foot. After six months of treatment and gradual recovery, all that the young Jana wanted to know from  Dr Sreeniraj was, ‘How will I go to school after all this? How will I go normally?’ “I started to worry that I could never be normal again,” Jana recalls. But the doctor’s answer proved to be life-altering. It gave his parents immense hope and their son a second chance at life. “He told me that he knew many people who wrote with their mouths and that I could too. It was perhaps the best advice anyone could have given me — and I started trying that very evening,” he recalls.  

Janarthanan was then admitted to the Government Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in Chennai to get a prosthetic leg. “My parents had spent a lot of money on my treatment by then and this was the maximum they could afford. My father even sold off his printing press to treat me,” he says, as he brushes his doting father Kesavan’s arm, whose eyes well up with tears, listening to his son narrate his tale. Kesavan says, “My son is a fighter. He just wouldn’t give up and started walking, fighting immense pain with unbeatable determination during practice sessions.” All this while, Janarthanan also continued to practise writing with his mouth. One day it struck him that he could try drawing and painting as well.

It wasn’t until the people at the rehabilitation centre advised him to participate in competitions that he felt confident of his work. “I was shy of stepping out. But when I finally participated in a painting competition in 2003 for differently-abled children, I ended up winning the first prize. Everyone was talking about me and there were posters about my recovery at the hospital to give hope to other patients like me. It was so encouraging,” says Jana.