The bicycle was a bright red Hero. She rode it from her second year of MBBS until her MD years. It took her everywhere in Sevagram — from the girls’ hostel to the college, down the slope to the old Medicine ward, and across the campus. Often, her close friend, the late Sarita Varma, perched behind her, double-seat on the small bicycle as they moved from one corner of Sevagram to another.

The red bicycle could be spotted from far away. On more than one occasion, Vinaya Soman rode it up the ramp of Kasturba Hospital and along the first-floor corridor because the labour room and the gynaecology operation theatre were too far apart, and the walk between cases took time she did not always have. Nobody told her she could do it. Nobody told her she could not. She simply did it.

The bicycle became part of her identity. In a small campus where habits quickly become legend, the red Hero was one of the details her batchmates remembered longest. The cycle that once went up the ramp and along the first-floor corridor has been stationary for a long time. The work it carried between wards — the urgency, the precision, the willingness to be where the need was — has not.

She was twenty years old and had just been handed the keys to the first independent surgical decisions of her training. Dr. Pradeep Sambarey, her teacher in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, was a man who trusted students in the way that produces real surgeons rather than permanent assistants. He stood at her side for the first breech delivery, then moved back slightly. He stood at her side for the first Caesarean, then moved back again. The first hysterectomy, the first vaginal hysterectomy, the first vaginal tubectomy: each time he was present, each time he let her lead, each time the distance between teacher and student was exactly what it needed to be. She became, under his supervision, someone who could work. This is not a small thing. Many doctors trained in Sevagram’s era have noted that the willingness of teachers to hand over responsibility early — not recklessly, but deliberately — was what distinguished the institution from colleges where students watched and rarely touched. Vinaya touched, and the bicycle carried her between the places where the touching happened.

Indore Childhood, the Chinese Method, and a Decision Made Early

She was born on 21 February 1962 in Nagpur, but grew up in a household whose geography was defined by her father’s postings in the Indian Bureau of Mines and, more formatively, by her grandfather in Indore, who had ideas about education that diverged from the standard curriculum. He used a large blackboard in the living room. Whatever word she spoke, he wrote and built a story around it. This was how she learned Hindi and English — not from textbooks, but from story, and the learning stuck in her memory with a physical precision she has carried ever since. She did not enter a school until fourth standard, by which point she could already read, write, and recite Sanskrit shlokas with the clarity of a child who has been taught by someone who loves language enough to make it beautiful.

Government Girls’ High School in Indore took her through class eleven. Then Gujarat Science College, also in Indore, for her BSc. Her father, watching the admissions landscape in Gujarat and Maharashtra from his Bureau of Mines postings, advised her to apply to MGIMS. She appeared for the PMT at GS Commerce College in Nagpur. The Gandhi paper cost her no anxiety; her grandfather had spoken of Gandhi as a familiar figure rather than a historical one. Outside the examination hall, she met Aruna Vanikar — a meeting that became, without either of them knowing it at the time, the beginning of a lasting friendship.

The telegram confirming her admission reached the family on 4 August 1980. She was away at a wedding in Pune. The neighbour who brought the news, Shastri Uncle, rushed over as if the admission were his own family’s triumph.

The very next day, on 5 August, she arrived in Sevagram with her father and Kanitkar Kaka, the family friend who drove them there. By then, the orientation camp was almost over. Only one student joined after her — Tarlika Parmar, who later retired as Professor of Anaesthesiology at BJ Medical College, Ahmedabad.

The Hostel, the Ramp, and What Was Not Yet Known

The girls’ hostel received her with the established rituals of arrival: ragging, managed by seniors who found their own amusement in the process, and absorbed by juniors who understood, correctly, that the people causing the discomfort were the same people who would eventually become their most reliable allies. Mala Premchand of the 1978 batch, who resembled Vinaya closely enough that people asked whether they were sisters, took her under her wing and gave her textbooks including Samson Wright’s Physiology — an act of generosity that settled something practical in the first weeks when everything was uncertain.

She was a Nagpur student, which meant that the city was close enough to visit on most Fridays and return from on Monday mornings in time for Dr. Sutikshna Pandey’s physiology lecture at eight o’clock. He closed the door at exactly eight, and the students who had spent the weekend in Nagpur or Bombay or wherever home was ran from the bus stop or the station entrance, wet from the monsoon or rumpled from the overnight journey, and arrived with the particular breathlessness of people for whom punctuality was a matter of survival rather than preference. They were never late. Or rather: they were occasionally late, and the consequences were sufficient that lateness became rare.

The first terminal examination was manageable because her BSc had already covered most of the cycles, the enzyme classifications, the metabolic pathways that others were encountering for the first time. Her anatomy drawings impressed Mr. Swami, the lecturer who had an eye for spatial precision, and her colour-coded plexus diagrams circulated among batchmates in the way that good notes always do in medical colleges — freely and with the implicit understanding that this is what good notes are for.

Her village posting was Nalwadi, eight kilometres from Wardha. Four families were assigned to her care alongside Dhirendra Chavan. Two of them — the sarpanch’s household and the family of an elderly couple the village called Aji and Ajoba — became, across the posting weeks, something closer to relationship than assignment. Ajoba pressed fruit into her hands at every visit: guavas, jujubes, a small homemade laddu. He was poor in the way that most of the village was poor, which meant that the offering was everything he could give and he gave it without hesitation. The sarpanch’s daughter-in-law went into labour during the posting and was brought to Sevagram; Vinaya stayed through the long hours, and when the child arrived, felt the particular gratitude of someone who has done the right thing and been present for it without being thanked beforehand.

German and a Thesis That Failed

Among the institutions MGIMS embedded in the MBBS years that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with formation, the German language class organised by Dr. S.P. Kalantri was one of the stranger and more enduring. A small group — Suchitra Pandit, Sudha Jain, Monica Ahuja, Ganesh Srinivasan, Parthak Pradhan, and Vinaya — met three times a week with Mrs. Sunanda Kawade, who taught the language with a seriousness proportional to the improbability of the enterprise. They passed the first examination. The language gave her nothing practical for decades, and then, when she began encountering German medical literature in her later career, it gave her exactly what languages always give: a door into a room that would otherwise have been locked.

She completed Visharad in Hindustani classical vocal music from Indira Kala Sangeet Vishwavidyalaya, one of India’s oldest institutions dedicated to music and fine arts, with a history spanning more than a century. The university offers training in drawing, painting, sculpture, literature, and all three forms of music — vocal, instrumental, and dance.

At MGIMS, Nirmalaben Gandhi — Gandhiji’s granddaughter — made a room available in the Ashram for practice. She used it. She continued to use it after MBBS, after her postgraduate years, across the various cities her husband’s career took her through, until she sat the Visharad examination in classical music and dance in her middle years and passed it. These are not credentials. They are evidence of a life maintained in parallel with medicine, fed by it and feeding into it and never confused with it.

The MD thesis was a different kind of parallel: a difficulty that ran alongside the clinical training and resisted resolution. She was studying toxaemia of pregnancy and intrauterine growth retardation — GFR tests difficult to obtain, platelet counts unreliable without modern counters, data messy and hard to stabilise. Her teachers were less helpful than she needed. She failed the first attempt. So did Darshana and Vinita Nangia. She persisted. She passed.

She has said since that the failure was the most useful thing that happened to her in those years, because it taught her that the thing not achieved on the first attempt is not the same as the thing not achieved.

Marriage, Transfers, and the Women’s Programmes

In December 1987, she married Dr. Praful Agnihotri, who was training in anaesthesiology. What followed was the particular geography of two medical careers negotiated across a marriage: Loni, Trivandrum, Bhilai, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and then Bhilai again in 2000. In 2008, they settled in Raipur, where she began independent practice. Each posting had its own learning. Each city required the kind of recalibration that medical training, with its emphasis on adaptation, had prepared her to manage better than most.

She is a member of “Shakti,” a women’s organisation with nearly 30 branches across India. When Chhattisgarh became a separate state in 2000, Shakti decided to create an independent branch rather than continue under the Bhopal unit in Madhya Pradesh. A group of professional women from Raipur were invited to establish the new chapter, and she became one of the founder members of Shakti Chhattisgarh.

With an initial group of ten members, two of them took the lead in registering the organisation in the state in 2008 as Shakti Chhattisgarh Vignan Bharti Samiti. The NGO renews its state registration every five years.

Today, Shakti has registered bodies working in five districts of Chhattisgarh — Raipur, Durg, Bhilai, Bilaspur, and Korba. The programmes address adolescent girls, married women, and post-menopausal women, offering health education in settings where such education is otherwise unavailable. The work is both medical and social, which is the distinction that Sevagram’s orientation camp had always been trying to erase: the idea that medicine is something practiced inside a hospital on patients who arrive already sick, rather than something practiced everywhere on people who would rather not need it.

Dr. Vinaya Soman Agnihotri completed her MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, and her MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at MGIMS. She established gynaecological practice in Raipur and founded Shakti Vigyan Bharati Samiti, a women’s health organisation with thirty branches across Chhattisgarh. She holds the Bharatnatyam Visharad examination and passed the first level of German language certification. She lives and practises in Raipur.