The quarrel had started over a brick.

One afternoon in Sevagram, as the sun beat down on the half-built walls of the college, two students were locked in a heated argument. Gopal Kesariya spoke only Gujarati. Rajendra Wagh spoke only Marathi. Neither had a word of the other’s language, but both had opinions and were not shy about them. The subject — the quality of the bricks being used in the construction — was, in itself, not particularly important. The argument, however, had grown magnificent.

Finally, exasperated, Kesariya bent down, picked up a red brick, and shouted: “Aa che!” At exactly the same moment, Wagh picked up another and replied: “Ho aahe!” They glared at each other. A beat. Then the crowd of students watching burst into laughter. The two bricks, raised like trophies of conviction in languages that had no overlap, had somehow said the same thing. The argument dissolved.

That was Sevagram in 1969 — classrooms under construction, hostels still makeshift, and yet the spirit of the place already forming in the gaps between disagreements.

A Nagpur Boyhood

Subhash Srivastava was born on 7 January 1949 in Nagpur. His father, Maheshwar Prasad, was a civil engineer of unusual integrity who had built the Nagpur airport and several government museums, and who had trained at Roorkee. He shunned private contracts, stuck to government work despite the financial cost, and eventually started his own business. He had been a fine hockey goalkeeper in his youth, and he passed his love of sport on to his son, if not his engineering sensibility.

Subhash did his schooling at Bishop Cotton School through the eighth grade, then at St. Francis de Sales College for ninth to eleventh, and went on to SFS for his B.Sc. He missed GMC Nagpur by two marks. He tried Banaras Hindu University. He missed there by one. Fate, he would say later, seemed to enjoy the precision of its cruelty.

Then came the news about Sevagram — a new medical college, on Gandhi’s own soil. He applied, appeared for an interview that has since entirely faded from memory, and found himself among the founding sixty of the 1969 batch.

Pioneers in Dust and Cement

His first hostel was a small hut opposite Mahadev Bhavan, shared with Anil Kaushik. Later he moved into a three-bedroom house with mud floors and wobbly ceiling fans, sharing it with Subhash Patil and Rajendra Wagh — the same Wagh of the brick incident. The lamps they studied by smoked the ceilings black. The fans, when they worked, pushed the heat around without diminishing it.

But there was a quality to those years that no comfort could have replaced. The first batch was literally building the college alongside their education. The anatomy lab needed cleaning — they cleaned it. The physiology lab needed arrangement — they arranged it. The dissection hall needed design — they sketched it. By evening, shirts smelled of formalin and cement dust in equal measure.

The teachers were posted from GMC Nagpur and had come despite the mockery of colleagues who thought a village college was beneath them. They taught with the energy of people proving something. Dr. B.S. Chaubey once held up a theory paper written by G. Pillai in a medicine lecture and took it to GMC Nagpur to show his own postgraduate students how an answer should be written. The pride in Sevagram that day was palpable.

The Cricket Captain

If medicine occupied the mornings, cricket claimed the evenings. Subhash was captain of the college cricket team in the very first year — an opening fast bowler who also batted at number three. His opening partner in pace was Shivaji Deshmukh, known to the whole batch as Bhau, who bowled fierce yorkers from the other end. With Vinod Ude, Vilas Kanikdale, and Raju Deodhar in the eleven, they fielded a team of genuine spirit, if not always of sufficient skill.

Some of the team members were chosen less for ability than for filling the numbers — Kaushik and Patel struggled with bat and pads alike — but no one said so, and their enthusiasm was real. The team was eliminated in early rounds more often than not, but their principal, I.D. Singh, who loved cricket as much as he loved Physiology, stood at the boundary at every match offering tactical advice. Bowl the outswinger. Trap him at first slip. More often than not, it worked.

His father, visiting the campus, was moved enough to donate a cricket kit to the college, along with ₹2,000 — a generous sum in those years. It was the kind of gesture that said something about what the place had already become: not just a college but a cause worth contributing to.

He also captained the badminton team, playing doubles with Vinod Ude and Vilas Kanikdale in the long Sevagram evenings. The clatter of shuttlecocks in the dust is among the sounds he reaches for first when Sevagram comes back to him.

Dr. Indurkar and the Stage

He had not thought of himself as an actor. Dr. Indurkar, the anatomy professor, thought otherwise. Indurkar had a gift for seeing things in students that they had not yet seen in themselves, and one afternoon he simply told Subhash that he would be appearing in a Hindi drama — Loki Kiki — at the annual function.

He appeared. The audience laughed at his dialogue. He was genuinely surprised — he had been certain his delivery was poor. But the laughter was warm, and the experience of standing on a stage and finding that a crowd of people was with you rather than against you was not something he forgot.

The drama circle in Sevagram was a world of its own, with its own loyalties and its own stars. Manohar Chaudhary, his batchmate with the Lambretta scooter, was its constant lead. But Subhash had his evenings of it too, and they gave him a confidence in the open that the dissection hall, however formative, never quite could.

Ratnamala

It was in his second year that he first saw Ratnamala Golhar, a soft-spoken girl from Deoli near Wardha. He would say, without any apparent embarrassment, that it was love at first sight. The Sevagram air — carrying the fragrance of neem and the weight of Gandhi’s memories — also carried, for him, something more personal: a quiet certainty that this was the person he would marry.

His proposal, made in that same air, was accepted. Three years later, in November 1974, they married at the Vidarbha Cricket Association ground in Sadar, Nagpur, with classmates from the 1969 and 1971 batches gathered in festive clothes. The reception had the easy warmth of a party thrown by people who had already lived through something important together.

Ratnamala’s family had initially resisted the match — she from a Marathi family, he from a Hindi-speaking one, different castes and different cultural worlds. It was one of the quiet inter-community marriages that Sevagram, perhaps without intending to, produced with some regularity, in a place where people were too busy becoming doctors to maintain the comfortable distances of ordinary life.

Anaesthesia and After

MGIMS did not offer postgraduate courses in those years, and like most of his batchmates Subhash went outward for further training. He pursued a Diploma in Anaesthesiology in Nagpur, then lectured for five years before returning to Sevagram for his MD under Dr. Shetty, a demanding and inspiring head of anaesthesiology. His thesis examined how hyperbaric bupivacaine in spinal analgesia affected post-spinal headache.

By 1983, he left Sevagram and set up as a freelance anaesthesiologist in Nagpur, serving several private nursing homes. Freelancing gave him independence — the ability to work across institutions, to set his own terms, to carry the Sevagram discipline of simplicity and sincerity into environments that did not always share those values.

His two children, Sangeet and Amit, were born in Sevagram and Nagpur. Both became engineers, both settled in the United States. They would say, with a directness he respected, that watching their parents rush to emergencies at midnight and work through weekends had persuaded them that medicine was a beautiful vocation and one they preferred to admire from a distance.

What the Village Built

More than fifty-five years have passed since the hut days. The batch has scattered — to Nagpur and Mumbai, to Delhi and beyond, to continents they had not heard of when they sat in the shade of Babulal’s canteen arguing about cricket and bricks and whether Sevagram would ever become a real medical college.

It became one. More than one — it became a template, a standard, a particular proof that medicine practised in a village and rooted in values could produce doctors of the highest calibre. The skeptics from GMC Nagpur were silenced, one by one, by the results.

Subhash Srivastava was not Sevagram’s most academic student. He was its captain, its badminton player, its reluctant actor, its fast bowler. He was the boy who donated his father’s cricket kit and fell in love in a village where love had nowhere to hide. He was part of a family — not a metaphorical one, but a real one, forged in the real conditions of shared austerity and shared aspiration — that time has not managed to dissolve.

The brick quarrel was never really about bricks. It was about the fact that sixty people from different corners of India, with no common language between some of them, had somehow ended up in the same dusty field trying to build something together. That they managed it at all was Sevagram’s particular achievement.

Dr. Subhash Srivastava completed his MD in Anaesthesiology from MGIMS Sevagram under the supervision of Dr. Shetty. He practised subsequently as a freelance anaesthesiologist in Nagpur, working across several private nursing homes. He lives in Nagpur.