When Dr. Kush Kumar first walked into Sevagram in the blistering summer of 1976, conversations stopped mid-sentence. He was hard to miss—tall, broad-shouldered, eyes probing behind thick spectacles. His English was flawless—precise when he spoke, elegant when he wrote. On rounds, his questions made residents squirm. In the OR, he moved like a man in full command. He read X-rays like a poet reads verse—slowly, and between the lines.

He had come from the plains of Uttar Pradesh, trained at the prestigious King George Medical College in Lucknow, and earned his MS under the legendary Dr. Tuli in Banaras. A PhD in orthopaedics would come later. But in Sevagram, he was simply Doctor Sahib—the new face in a struggling department.

Orthopaedics then was skeletal—thirty beds, a wheezing X-ray machine, a forgotten corner in the OPD, where Paediatrics now stands. Together with Dr. S.C. Ahuja, he gently petitioned for a shift. They got a new space near surgery, borrowed benches, hung a board, and called it home.

Then he left.

Six years passed. In November 1982, he returned—not as a visitor, but as Head of the Department. Older. Calmer. Sharper. He stayed five years.

He could listen to a limp and hear its story. Ask the MGIMS batch of 1975—they remember. He nudged Dr. Madhu Kant toward the forgotten feet of leprosy patients and encouraged Dr. N.K. Kapahtia to study the twisted legs of children with polio. “Feet speak too,” he once said, half-smiling. “You just need to learn their dialect.”

But it was spinal tuberculosis that claimed him. Trained under Dr. Tuli, he understood its slow destruction, the silent resilience of patients, the thin line between healing and helplessness. He didn’t chase TB. He studied it with reverence.

He had a photographic memory. He quoted textbooks with ease, delivered talks laced with humour and wit. But in 1991, he surprised everyone. He sketched.

Three drawings, signed “KK.” Not diagrams—portraits. TB of the spine, seen not just in vertebrae, but in lives. A child’s stoop. A mother’s worry. The gulf between prescription and poverty. A satire on medical ethics. These weren’t illustrations. They were insights.

In 2017, those sketches resurfaced—featured in a review article on spinal tuberculosis he published from the USA. The lines had not aged; they still spoke with quiet urgency.

He left Sevagram in 1987, subsequently working at two medical schools in India: Karad and Dehradun. He also held positions in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Trinidad and Tobago, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. And finally, the United States—where he passed away in 2020, struck by a cruel irony: a tumour in the organ he cherished most—his brain.

His wife, Vibha, left her own legacy—feeding protein-rich laddus to children in Anji for her 1985 MD thesis, guided by Dr. M.P. Dwivedi.

And now, in quiet hours, the orthopaedic OPD sometimes seems to pause—as if waiting for the scratch of a pencil, sketching the silence between pain and healing.