Every Monday morning, the outer gate of the boys’ hostel brought a procession — students returning from weekends at home, bags slung over shoulders, the week’s accumulation of laundry and homesickness traded for clean clothes and fresh resolve. Abhoy Kumar Sinha, a final-year MBBS student from Bihar, had positioned his chair at the first-floor window of B-block with a view of this gate. He was, by his own admission, waiting.

Then one morning he saw her. A slender girl, walking briskly toward the girls’ hostel, simply dressed, with the self-possessed bearing of someone who has learnt not to waste motion. Something in him registered, sharpened.

For months, he watched in silence. When he finally learned her name — Pratibha Mishrikotkar, 1978 batch, Nagpur — two juniors added a warning: she is no-nonsense. Be careful.

This did not discourage him. It was, if anything, clarifying.

Where She Came From

Pratibha Mishrikotkar was born on 29 March 1959 in Nagpur, the third of six siblings in a family that understood, with the particular clarity of the not-quite-comfortable, what it meant to want more for your children than circumstance had provided.

Her father, the late Dr. Premchand Gangalal Mishrikotkar, was born in Karanja Lad into a modest household. Against considerable odds, he had pursued a medical education supported by the Jain Temple Trust. He was among the earliest batches of GMC Nagpur, a classmate of Dr. R.M. Ballal, Dr. H.S. Bhargava, and others who would shape Maharashtra’s medical landscape. He served as a medical officer with the Nagpur Municipal Corporation until retirement, a career of quiet steady service. Despite the weight of his own siblings’ obligations and the demands of raising six children, he ensured that several of his daughters entered medicine.

Pratibha completed her twelfth standard from Saraswati Vidyalayam in Shankarnagar, applied to the Nagpur medical colleges, and did not get in. She enrolled in B.Sc. at the Faculty of Science, Nagpur — disappointed, but not defeated. Two years later, she cracked the entrance exam. MGIMS offered her a seat. So did IGMC. She chose Sevagram. Her father, looking back decades later, would offer his own explanation: she was destined to meet her husband there.

The No and the Yes

Abhoy Kumar Sinha had been watching from his window for months when he finally acted. He waited near the old MGIMS library, knowing she would pass after her pathology class, and stepped forward.

“She chose MGIMS because she was destined to meet her husband there. And he came from Bihar for the same reason. Destiny had written this long before any of us knew.”

‘I want to be your friend,’ he said.

She did not hesitate. ‘No chance. My father is very strict. He won’t tolerate this. This can only bring tension, tears, and sorrow.’

He persisted: if her family had no objection, he wanted this to lead to marriage. Her response was equally direct. ‘It’s a no. I won’t even have the courage to speak to my father about this.’

What followed was not a love story written in ease. Abhoy went to Dr. K.N. Ingle, the physiology professor who knew her father. He went to Nagpur and met Dr. Mishrikotkar himself. He was told: you both have exams. Focus on those first. We will talk after that.

Then he left for Mumbai, joined Nanavati Hospital as a senior resident, tried to move forward. Months passed. And then a letter arrived from Nagpur. Just one word: Yes.

They were married on 22 November 1983, in a quiet ceremony in Nagpur. She returned to Sevagram to complete her house jobs and stayed on to pursue her MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology under Dr. Chhabra, completing it in 1986.

The Doctor She Became

Dr. Chhabra was not a gentle teacher. She was tough, exacting, consistent in her demands — the kind of teacher who raises the student to meet the standard rather than lowering the standard to meet the student. Pratibha did not always appreciate this while it was happening. She appreciated it later, when she found that the exacting standard had become her own.

She built a practice in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, working with the quiet assurance of a doctor who has been well-trained and knows it. She was diagnosed with bronchial asthma during her final year MBBS — a shadow that followed her through the decades of her working life. She fought it with the same quiet courage that had carried her through the years of her father’s silence.

The Last Pilgrimage

On 22 February 2022, Pratibha Mishrikotkar Sinha lost her final battle with bronchial asthma.

Just two weeks before she died, she and Abhoy had visited Sevagram. It was her last pilgrimage to the place where everything had begun — the campus, the wards, the library corridor where he had once waited for her. She spoke warmly of Dr. K.K. Agrawal and of Dr. S.P. Kalantri, saying he had always understood her asthma better than most.

Abhoy wrote: she was not just my wife. She was my beginning. She had come to Sevagram because the numbers at Nagpur did not add up, and because something larger was perhaps already written. She had said no to the man who waited at the window, firmly, more than once. Then she had said yes. She spent the years that followed building a life in medicine and in marriage that was quietly, stubbornly, entirely her own.

Dr. Pratibha Mishrikotkar Sinha completed her MBBS from MGIMS with the class of 1978 and her MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology from MGIMS in 1986. She practised until 22 February 2022, when she passed away after a long battle with bronchial asthma. This profile was narrated by her husband, Dr. Abhoy Kumar Sinha, MGIMS batch of 1974.