Her father never stayed long in any one city. Dr. Vishwanath Anant Vanikar, Gujarat’s first practicing pathologist, would return from his laboratory at the LG General Hospital in Ahmedabad and within days be preparing to leave again — for a village in Saurashtra, or a tribal settlement in the hills, or a cluster of homes whose inhabitants had never once thought about their own bones. He carried with him a set of bones from his teaching collection: a tibia, a fibula, a radius, an ulna. He showed them to boys and girls in fields and courtyards, explaining the scaffolding of the human body in the simplest possible language. He trained them to manage fevers and mosquito bites and scorpion stings. He arranged medicines. He followed up personally. His daughter Aruna watched all of this, the youngest of five children in a household where excellence and service were simply the atmosphere — not discussed, but breathed.

Her eldest sister became a gynaecologist. Her second sister graduated among the first women engineers from IIT Bombay. Her brother studied electrical engineering. Her third sister joined ISRO. Aruna, the youngest, found her calling in medicine — drawn there by her father’s example, though the path to a medical seat was neither simple nor straight.

She had completed her schooling at Gujarat Law Society in Ahmedabad and spent a year at LM College of Pharmacy, but the image of her father with those bones, in those villages, stayed with her. Medicine was not a profession to her; it was a calling, demanding something beyond competence. Her 12th-standard marks were insufficient for Gujarat’s medical colleges. AIIMS and BHU did not yield seats. A cousin in Nagpur suggested a third possibility: MGIMS Sevagram. Growing up surrounded by Gujarat Vidyapeeth and the Navjivan Press, she had read Gandhian literature as casually as others read film magazines. The PMT’s paper on Gandhian thought gave her no trouble at all.

When the results arrived, joy overtook her. Among the first people she met on campus was Neena Naik from Nagpur, and the bond formed in those first hours would last a lifetime.

The Ashram Fortnight

The orientation camp at Gandhi’s Ashram remains, more than four decades later, the sharpest memory of those years. Sixty-five students arrived in Sevagram in the first week of August 1980, most of them strangers to one another and to the land they had entered. The ashram received them with its particular austerity: early prayers before sunrise, shramdan through the morning, spinning sessions, simple vegetarian food served without ceremony. They wore khadi — coarse, in Sevagram; the finer sort, they would discover, was available only in Bombay.

Aruna was not distressed by the simplicity. She had come from a home where the same values prevailed — not as ideology, but as instinct. What surprised her was the depth of the people she found there: men who had sat at Gandhi’s feet, women who had walked the Bhoodan marches with Vinoba, inmates for whom the ashram’s discipline was not a programme but a life. The fortnight ended, but the tone it set — the expectation that medicine was inseparable from service — persisted through five years of MBBS and long afterward.

The batch was allotted Gopuri, a village eight kilometres from Sevagram. Aruna stayed with Thakurdasji Bang, a professor of commerce, a freedom fighter, and a participant in the Bhoodan Yatra who had also endured imprisonment during the Emergency. His wife Sumantai worked with Chetna Vikas, an NGO for village women and children. Their household was voluntary poverty made graceful: two educated, capable people who had chosen to live with less and do more. When Aruna naively asked whether she could bring their young grandson — suspected of tuberculosis — to Kasturba Hospital for investigation, Thakurdasji replied without drama: he would receive the same care as any other child of his age there. It was a lesson in Sarvodaya — not preached but embodied — that she has never forgotten.

The Hostel Years

Hostel life was lively, occasionally chaotic, and made bearable by friendship. Her closest companions were Neena Naik, Kumud Agrawal, Pratima Kothare, and Kalpana Bhargava — a circle that shared meals, complaints about the mess, and the quiet exhilaration of becoming doctors. She won a cycling race from the college to the Wardha Milk Dairy and carried herself well on the badminton court. She practiced Bharatnatyam in a room at the Ashram that Nirmalaben Gandhi, Gandhiji’s granddaughter, had generously made available. She kept up with festivals, with sports, with all of it — though the losses came too, and came early: Kalpana died young, a grief the surviving circle still carries.

During Raksha Bandhan of the first year, ragging reached a pitch that strained even Sevagram’s generally mild tradition. The entire batch of girls, in a rare collective act of resistance, departed together for their homes. The holiday lasted longer than anyone had planned. They returned, the year continued, and the incident became, in time, one of those stories that grows funnier with the distance that only decades can provide.

The academic years brought their own rhythms. Anatomy after lunch, with Swami Sir’s voice slowing as the afternoon heat settled — a war against drowsiness that was not always won. Pathology under Khan Sir, who was strict to the point of intimidation, who made them sit in the front rows despite the ambient hazard of paan-stained proximity. By the final year, the glamour of medical college had fully dissolved into the hard work of becoming useful.

Aruna also suffered, twice, from acute abdominal illness that required surgery, and once spent weeks of the final year confined to a bed — her classmates reading lessons aloud while she recovered, their solidarity a demonstration of everything Sevagram had been trying to teach them. On one occasion, Narang Sir walked into the examination hall to check on her. On another, he brought oranges.

Transplant Sciences

After completing MBBS and internship, she pursued her MD in Pathology and Bacteriology from NHL Municipal Medical College in Ahmedabad, then joined the Institute of Kidney Diseases and Research Centre — IKDRC — where a pathology department needed to be built from nothing.

The man who shaped the decades that followed was Dr. H.L. Trivedi. He had trained at McMaster University in Canada, held a settled, recognised position there, and resigned it — without drama, without visible regret — to return to Ahmedabad and found the institute in 1981. His decision had the same quality as Thakurdasji Bang’s voluntary poverty: a deliberate choice to be where the need was greatest rather than where the rewards were most comfortable. He believed that transplant science in India could achieve what Western models said it could not; that the poor deserved the same access as the wealthy; that innovation had no obligation to remain in well-funded laboratories abroad.

Aruna learned, and then led. She headed the Department of Pathology, Laboratory Medicine, Transfusion Services, and Immunohematology at IKDRC. She built a stem cell research programme, working with adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells that could behave, depending on induction, like neurons, cardiac muscle, liver tissue, or immune regulators. Two patents emerged from this work — both handed to the institute, because, as she reasoned, they belonged to the community the institute served. She was named the first teacher for the post-doctoral course in renal and transplant pathology by the Indian College of Pathologists. When IKDRC became Gujarat University of Transplantation Sciences — GUTS — she guided it as Vice Chancellor, the first such institution of its kind in India.

More than two hundred publications in indexed journals. Editorial boards across the country and abroad. The title of president of the Indian Society of Renal and Transplant Pathology. A phrase used about her — “pioneer lady scientist” — that she has always received with mild amusement and quiet pride.

She was also entrusted with compiling Dr. Trivedi’s autobiography in both English and Gujarati, published by Navjivan Press at Gujarat Vidyapeeth. In telling his story, she says, she understood the contours of her own.

What the Soil Remembered

Her father had travelled across Gujarat with four bones and a belief that knowledge could be carried anywhere. He died knowing that the youngest of his five children had taken that belief into a laboratory, into an operating room, into a university, and across the country to every postgraduate student who received the transplant pathology course she helped found.

When she thinks of Sevagram now, it is not the examination halls she sees first but the ashram paths at dawn, the figure of Sumantai cooking in her swayampakghar while the village waited outside, and the classmates who sat beside a sick friend and read anatomy aloud because that was simply what you did for one another. The institute was many things. It was also, in some sense, her father’s lesson continued: you carry the bones to where the people are, and you do not stop until the work is done.

Dr. Aruna Vanikar completed her MD in Pathology and Bacteriology from NHL Municipal Medical College, Ahmedabad. She joined IKDRC in 1982 and rose to head its combined departments of Pathology, Laboratory Medicine, Transfusion Services, and Immunohematology. She led stem cell and regenerative medicine research, contributing two patents to the institution. She served as Vice Chancellor of Gujarat University of Transplantation Sciences and as President of the Indian Society of Renal and Transplant Pathology. She lives in Ahmedabad.