The monitor blinked fitfully. The ventilator — their only one, bought out of their stipend money — hummed with the mild uncertainty of a machine that had not been designed for the conditions it was operating in. The operation theatre had bare walls. The nursing staff, who had arrived from Kerala with dedication but without training in neurosurgical protocols, were learning the procedures simultaneously with the procedures. Dr. Santosh Prabhu, scrubbed and focused across the drape, looked up briefly. “Can we manage this one?”

Dr. Sujata Mehta-Prabhu, standing at the anaesthetic end of the table, checked her gauges. “If we don’t, who else will?” she said. The answer was practical. There was no one else. This was Kolhapur in the early 1990s, and they had come here to build something that did not yet exist.

What that something became — the Western India Institute of Neurosciences, WIINS, now a 220-bed multispecialty hospital with its own neurosurgical ICU, its own modular operating theatres, its own DNB training programme — is a measure of the distance between a bare room with one ventilator and a working institution. The distance was crossed a decade at a time, each decade adding infrastructure that the previous decade had lacked, each addition made possible by the one before it. The early years were the hardest because they were the most improvised: Sujata was simultaneously anaesthesiologist, technician, nurse, ward coordinator, and procurement officer, leaving every fortnight for Mumbai to buy supplies down to the level of gloves and IV lines.

She does not describe those years with complaint. She describes them with the matter-of-factness of someone who has understood that the gap between what exists and what is needed is always bridgeable if the people doing the bridging are willing to stay.

The Vile Parle Childhood and the Promise Made

She was born on 4 December 1961 in Mumbai, the daughter of Dr. Kishore Mehta, a general practitioner trained at GS Medical College and KEM, and Tara, a homemaker who, when her daughter was in the seventh standard, began running package tours across Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Kerala and continued doing so for twenty-five years. These two influences — a father who sat with patients, a mother who organised journeys — gave Sujata a particular combination: the patience of clinical medicine and the practical capability of a person who understands logistics.

She schooled at Sarla Sarjan, a Gujarati-medium school in Vile Parle West run by the Nanavati trust, then studied at Mithibai College for her 11th and 12th. Her grandfather, despite his own limited formal education, had been treasurer of the Shri Vile Parle Kelavani Mandal, which built Mithibai and Narsee Monjee Institute. Education, in her family, was both aspiration and inheritance.

She fell short of a Bombay medical seat by three marks. When she sat for the PMT the following year, among the colleges she applied to was MGIMS Sevagram. She did not prepare the Gandhian Thought paper conventionally; at home, her grandfather and father wore khadi as a daily habit. The ideas were not new to her. She ranked second in the MGIMS entrance exam. Jayant Vagha ranked first. She has said, with the equanimity of someone who has long since stopped caring about entrance rankings, that this was a satisfactory outcome.

Her father, a practical man with a doctor’s instinct for honest appraisal, had offered a safety net: if she didn’t get in on merit, he would buy a seat at Manipal. She had told him, at seventeen, that a donation seat was not acceptable. She would try again on her own terms or not at all. He listened. She got in. She had promised him something, and she had kept it.

Sevagram: Adjustment and Stage

The orientation camp was not unfamiliar territory. Growing up in a house where khadi was worn as normal clothing rather than political statement, where the daily routine included habits of simplicity that were observed without drama, she found the ashram’s expectations neither burdensome nor alien. What surprised her was the quality of the community she entered: students from Kerala who could manage surgical knots in their sleep, students from Delhi who could speak three languages before breakfast, students from small Maharashtra towns who would turn out, examination by examination, to be formidably capable.

Ragging in the girls’ hostel was managed by a combination of senior kindness and collective resistance. Mohini Wable of the 1977 batch was particularly protective, intervening when things threatened to cross a useful line. Sujata found that the students who ragged her most severely in the early weeks became, by the end of first year, her most reliable allies. This she understands as one of the more durable paradoxes of institutional life.

She was not a natural extrovert, but she sang. At a Ganesh festival, senior Mukunda Oke — from the 1972 batch, a man who took culture seriously and considered the annual function a test of character as much as talent — ordered her, in the manner of ragging, to sing something. She chose Geeta Dutt’s Babuji Dheere Chalna, from Aar-Paar, in a voice that started hesitant and steadied. When she finished, the crowd applauded. She had not expected this and did not quite know what to do with it. She accepted it. That, she says now, was the lesson: sometimes courage is simply not refusing to try.

Rajni Gaind of her batch became her closest friend in the hostel years. Together, they navigated the examinations, the mess food that would have benefited from editorial intervention, and the particular pleasure of Bombay home cooking on the weekends when Sujata’s mother fed six girls without difficulty and packed breakfast for the Monday morning train.

Tata, Kolhapur, and What Was Built

After MBBS, she trained in anaesthesia at Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai — a department whose rigour, whose equipment, and whose sense of institutional purpose set a standard she has measured against ever since. Under Dr. Sawant and Dr. Anila Prabhu, she learned what anaesthesia looked like when it was practiced well, with attention and consistency, in a setting that expected no less.

She was completing her MD when she became pregnant, and complications required her to withdraw from the final examination. She moved to Kolhapur, consoling herself with the intention to sit the examination later. Kolhapur had other plans.

Santosh had trained under Dr. Sunil Pandya at KEM — three and a half years of neurosurgical formation under a teacher who was simultaneously a clinician, an ethicist, and a writer, and who treated his students with the particular seriousness of someone who believes that what you make of yourself matters to more than just yourself. When Santosh chose Kolhapur over Hinduja Hospital — his father-in-law had built a surgical practice there, and the decision to build something independent rather than join something established was already made — Sujata came with him.

The early years at WIINS were the years of naked improvisation. No trained nurses: she trained them herself, hour by hour, procedure by procedure. One ventilator: she monitored it personally. No non-invasive monitors, no pulse oximeters for years: she relied on clinical signs the way her teachers in Sevagram had taught her to, because clinical signs were all she had. The Malayali nurses who arrived from Kerala — dedicated, technically capable, willing to work through nights without complaint — became, in her account, the institution’s hidden foundation. She has never stopped acknowledging this.

She bought supplies in Mumbai every fortnight. She arranged equipment. She kept the operating lists running. She was the other half of a surgical partnership in which Santosh operated and she kept the patient’s physiology steady — a collaboration that the best theatre partnerships require, built across two decades of cases into something that functions below the level of explicit communication.

WIINS grew: a proper ICU in 1998, modular operating theatres in 2002, DNB accreditation in 2007. More than seventeen neurosurgeons have trained there. The institution introduced procedures — VIM thalamotomy for Parkinson’s, psychosurgery for treatment-resistant psychiatric conditions — that required both technical courage and the willingness to develop a practice no one had handed them ready-made.

Dr. Sunil Pandya came to the inauguration and came again when invited. He watched what his student and his student’s wife had built from an empty room and a single ventilator, and he was, by all accounts, pleased. He died some years later, and his death left a space in Sujata’s inner landscape that she describes plainly: she mourned him as a mentor, as a witness, and as the kind of person whose approval carries weight because it was never easily given.

Architecture, Briefly Considered

She has said, occasionally, that she might have become an architect if the path had been different. She can see it in the buildings she has noticed all her life — the way a space is organised, the way it holds or fails to hold the people inside it. What she built in Kolhapur was a building in the most literal sense, and also an institution, and also a practice of medicine. These three things, she has found, are not as separate as they appear when you are standing outside any of them.

She is still in Kolhapur. She is still at the anaesthetic end of the table.

Dr. Sujata Mehta-Prabhu completed her MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, and trained in anaesthesiology at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai. She co-founded the Western India Institute of Neurosciences in Kolhapur with her husband Dr. Santosh Prabhu, building it from a single operating room into a 220-bed multispecialty hospital with a DNB training programme. She lives and practises in Kolhapur.