“I am not going back to Sevagram, Amma. Please, get me another college.”

He was sitting at his mother’s feet in their Bombay flat, barely a week after stepping onto the campus for the first time. He had come home on the Howrah–Bombay Mail, arrived at Dadar, rushed to Bandra, and declared the experiment over. Wardha was not Bombay. There was no Marine Drive, no double-decker bus, no Irani café. In place of streetlights, kerosene lamps. In place of the sea, dust.

His mother listened. When he had finished, she folded her hands on her lap.

“Anil,” she said quietly, “you have fought so hard for this seat. Do you know how rare it is? Stay for a year. If you still feel the same, we will see.”

Her words carried the firmness of a general — appropriate, perhaps, since his father had been an officer in the Indian Army. Reluctantly, Anil Ballani packed his bag and boarded the train back to Sevagram. What followed was not the year he had agreed to endure but a decade that shaped the remainder of his life.

Born in Darbhanga, Raised in Bombay

He was born on 19 January 1960 in Darbhanga, Bihar, but his life unfolded in Bombay. In 1967, his father, Dr. Govardhan Ballani — an anaesthesiologist in the Indian Army who had served in the India-Pakistan war two years earlier — decided that Bihar’s schools would not suffice. His mother and Anil moved to Bombay, where his aunts also lived. That same year, his father was killed in a road accident. Anil was seven.

He joined Little Angel High School in Sion, directly across from Lokmanya Tilak Medical College — close enough that he could walk to its gate in five minutes, and young enough that the idea of one day walking through it became a fixed aspiration. He studied at Jai Hind College for his three years of HSC preparation, watching the medical entrance landscape with a single-mindedness that might have seemed excessive in a teenager but that his circumstances had made entirely sensible.

Then Maharashtra shifted to the 10+2 system. Overnight, the number of students competing for medical seats doubled while the seats did not. The year became the dreaded “double year.” His mother, with the resourcefulness of someone who has survived harder things than administrative obstacles, applied for Central Government admission under the Army quota — twenty seats scattered across the country, available to wards of service personnel. Through a distant relative with a connection to veteran politician N.K.P. Salve, the process was navigated. Anil was allotted MGIMS Sevagram — a college he had never heard of, in a village he could not have located on a map.

He arrived angry, homesick, and determined to find a way out.

Ashok Kamble and the Chess Board

In the anatomy hall, some weeks after his reluctant return, he noticed a nervous boy fumbling through his viva. His name was Ashok Kamble. He wore a faded, unironed khadi shirt and worn-out sandals. His parents sold vegetables in Wardha’s market. His English was halting and his confidence in the dissection hall very low.

Anil took an immediate liking to him. He invited Kamble to play chess. Kamble did not know the names of the pieces. “This is the pawn, this is the king,” Anil explained. The boy listened with quiet concentration. Within two years, he was defeating Anil with ease. His hunger to learn humbled a Bombay boy who had always assumed that the advantage was his.

Their worlds were poles apart — Anil’s home in Bandra with polished floors and decent restaurants nearby, Kamble’s in Pulfail Wardha, a neighbourhood known for bootleggers. Yet sitting cross-legged in Kamble’s small home, eating bhakri and dal cooked by his mother, Anil felt a warmth no Bandra restaurant could match. He began to stand by Kamble deliberately — gifting him medical books, bringing food from Bombay, buying the occasional cinema ticket. Years later, when Kamble moved to start his radiology practice, Anil was able to offer financial support. What had begun in an anatomy hall with a chess board grew into a bond that survived every difference between them.

A Fight, a Principal, and Badi Behenji’s Veranda

Not all of Anil’s Sevagram story was so quiet. A foolish quarrel with a classmate over walking with a girl escalated into a fistfight. In Sevagram’s conservative social atmosphere, a boy and girl strolling together was itself enough to generate talk; a fistfight was something worse. Both boys were summoned before Principal Dr. M.L. Sharma, who thundered that they would both be terminated.

For a week, they reported every morning to Dr. Sushila Nayar’s house — Prerna Kutir — and sat on her veranda, silent, sipping the tea she sent out. On the seventh morning, she came out herself.

“You have come here to be doctors,” she said, her voice calm and final. “Not to fight. Apologise. Hug each other. And tomorrow, go to class.”

They did. He has thought since about what would have happened if she had chosen punishment instead of correction. His career, for the second time, had been rescued by a woman who chose to believe in him rather than dismiss him.

Carbon Paper and a Quiet Arrangement

In the lecture halls, Anil had found a particular arrangement with Bindu Bansal that suited him well without his fully acknowledging why. She slipped a sheet of carbon paper under every page of her notebook, producing two identical sets of notes — one for herself, one for him. He read them with ease and never made notes of his own. At examination time, he passed with very good marks. His classmates admired his copies. Nobody knew they were Bindu’s. He never mentioned it.

He did not think of this as taking advantage. Bindu, for her part, did not seem to mind. The carbon paper continued until they both cleared MBBS. Somewhere in the years between the first exchange of notes and the last examination, the arrangement had become something else entirely — and in December 1988, they married.

The Court and the Extra Seat

After MBBS, they returned to Bombay for internship at Nanavati Hospital, expecting that postgraduate seats at either Bombay’s municipal hospitals or at MGIMS would follow. Bombay classified them as external candidates. Sevagram told them they were outsiders, having completed internship elsewhere. In a bureaucratic double-bind, no institution would claim them.

They went to the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court with lawyer Shrihare Ane. The judge looked at their ranks — among the top four in the batch — and ruled with the brevity of someone who found the situation absurd. Extra seats were created the following morning. Anil joined MD Medicine. Bindu joined MD Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

The Year He Decided to Stay

He is still struck, when he thinks about it, by the turning point he cannot quite date. At some point in his first year — after the chess games with Kamble, after the week on Dr. Nayar’s veranda, after the friendships had begun to take hold — the argument for leaving Sevagram had simply lost its force. His mother had quietly completed all the paperwork for a KEM Hospital seat in Bombay. She called to tell him: the door was open.

He told her no.

“Sevagram is where I belong now,” he said.

She was silent for a moment. Then she said: “All right.”

He has described that moment as the most consequential decision of his life — not because of what it chose, but because of what it revealed: that Sevagram had already changed him, and he had not noticed until the moment he was offered the chance to undo it.

After Sevagram

He returned to Bombay after his MD and built a practice as an internist — first as a registrar at Bombay Hospital, then at Lilavati Hospital from 2001, and finally at Hinduja Hospital, where his entry came through an incident that had nothing to do with formal recruitment. He was visiting the Hinduja family home opposite the ashram of Guruji Swami Gangeshwar when their diabetic daughter collapsed with severe hypoglycaemia. Someone pointed to him. He injected glucose; she revived within minutes. Two days later, Hinduja Hospital called. No interview, no application — just the quietly noted competence of someone who knew what to do.

He and Bindu settled in Bandra. Their elder son Abhijit lives in New York as an engineer. Their younger son Chirag is training in Orthopaedics in Düsseldorf, working at GFO Kliniken in Bonn.

He continues to practise internal medicine in Bombay, at the same pace and with the same discipline that Sevagram instilled — fewer tests than the generation after him prefers, more listening, more time with the patient before reaching for the prescription pad.

⸻

Dr. Anil Ballani completed his MBBS from MGIMS Sevagram and his MD in Internal Medicine thereafter. He practises as a consultant physician in Mumbai, with attachments at Hinduja Hospital and Lilavati Hospital. He lives in Bandra.