When the telegram arrived from the principal’s office at Sevagram, Dev Krishna Gupta did something that would have puzzled most of his future classmates.

He spread out a map of India and looked for the place.

He was seventeen and a half, born in Sangat village in Bathinda district, Punjab, and raised in a world whose edges had not yet extended beyond the city of Bathinda itself. He had not been to Delhi. He had not been to Bombay. He ran his finger across the map until he found it — somewhere near Nagpur, deep in Maharashtra — a small dot carrying a name that meant nothing to him yet and would, within a few years, come to mean almost everything.

He packed a bag and set off. The journey from Bathinda to Wardha required a change in Delhi, and at Delhi station a boy barely a year younger than himself assessed the situation with the practical clarity of someone accustomed to navigating crowds. Train bhari hoti hai, he said. Jaise aaye, chadh jaayein. As soon as the train pulled in, he leapt aboard and reserved a seat.

Dev Krishna had arrived at Delhi station knowing no one. He left it with a reserved seat and a small, unasked-for demonstration of the kind of generosity that asks nothing back — which was, as it turned out, a reasonable preview of the institution he was travelling toward.

From Sangat to Sevagram

He was born on 4 January 1952, the middle child of seven in an Agrawal Bania household in Sangat. His father ran a large business in the town. The family was vegetarian, observant, and disciplined. Dev Krishna had studied at the local government school in Sangat, passed his matriculation, and moved to Rajendra College in Bathinda for his pre-medical studies. He was considered good at English, which at Rajendra College was a distinction worth having.

The newspaper clipping that changed everything had been found by his uncle — Dr. Brij Lal Gupta, a leading cardiac surgeon in Bombay. The uncle read the advertisement, cut it out, and sent it by post. Dev Krishna’s elder brother filled out the application on his behalf. After the interview — conducted by Dr. Jivraj Mehta and Dr. Manimala Chaudhary, in English and Hindi — Dev Krishna did not take the train home to Bathinda to wait. He went to Bombay and spent a few days with his uncle. The telegram confirming admission arrived there, and he received it in the company of the man who had made it possible.

His father travelled with him to Sevagram for the admission. He stayed a few hours — enough to pay the fees and settle his son in — and then took the long train back to Bathinda.

The Language, the Dust, the Prarthanas

He was allocated a room shared with Shaikh Wasif Ahmed and Yogendra Paul; a few weeks later, Manoj Verma from Amla joined them. He had khadi stitched locally. The vegetarian food, the morning prayers, the shramdan — none of these troubled him. He had been raised in a household where such things were not foreign.

What took time was everything else. The language, the dust, the prarthanas sung at dawn in the ashram, which became inseparable from the act of beginning the day. And then, gradually, Sevagram grew on him.

Prof. I.D. Singh’s Physiology lectures left a particular residue. There was a chart he drew during one lecture on iron metabolism — bold lines, careful proportions, the kind of diagram a teacher makes when he knows the material well enough to render it visual without preparation. Dev Krishna can see it still. He had arrived in Sevagram staring at a map of India, trying to find the place. He left it carrying, among other things, a map of the human body drawn by a principal who loved sport and Physiology in equal measure.

The First Postgraduate

He completed his MBBS and internship and went to Bombay for his MS — returning, as if by instinct, to the uncle who had started the chain of events. He believes he was the first postgraduate from his batch at Sevagram. Madhavan Pillai probably came second.

After his MS, he moved to the United Kingdom. He has been there for forty-seven years.

This is not the ending that Dr. Sushila Nayar had imagined when she selected students for the inaugural batch. But Sevagram’s training was not, it turned out, a preparation exclusively for rural Maharashtra. It was a preparation for medicine practised anywhere — with any patient population, under any conditions. What it installed in its students was not a regional specification but a way of being a doctor: attentive, humble, present, incapable of treating a patient as a number.

Dev Krishna Gupta carries this in England the way his batchmates carry it in Nagpur and Mumbai and Nanded and Kozhencherry — not as a conscious philosophy but as a habit so old it has become invisible. He never forgets a patient’s name. He explains the diagnosis slowly. The habit started on a train platform in Delhi, was consolidated in a village in Maharashtra, and has not stopped since.

Dr. Dev Krishna Gupta completed his MS from Bombay following his MBBS and internship at MGIMS, Sevagram, where he is believed to have been the first student from the 1969 batch to proceed to postgraduate training. He moved to the United Kingdom after his postgraduation and has practised medicine there for forty-seven years. He was born in Sangat village, Bathinda district, Punjab. His uncle, Dr. Brij Lal Gupta, was a cardiac surgeon in Bombay.