Published Paper Details:

The paper reads Radhika Sachdev's memoir Second Go: First-hand Account of a Liver Transplant Recipient's Journey in India (2018) through Stacy Alaimo's concept of trans-corporeality to examine how the narrating body is represented as porous and materially entangled with medical technology, anonymous donor tissue, family, and the economic and legal apparatus of Indian transplant medicine, rather than as a bounded, autonomous self. Using close reading of excerpted chapters, the paper traces two related phenomena: survivor's guilt, which surfaces not through direct confession but through irony, fantasy, and collective gratitude; and othering, enacted upon the anonymous cadaver donor, the narrator's own diseased organ, and the transplanted subject more broadly through institutional and clinical language. The paper argues that existing trans-corporeal and medical-humanities scholarship on transplantation, grounded largely in Euro-American memoirs, has not engaged an Indian cadaveric-donation narrative, and that Second Go offers a text through which this vocabulary can be tested and extended.