Everyone else, it seemed, had arrived with someone.
The Gujarati students had found each other on the train from Ahmedabad — seven young men in new khadi, converging from Kalavad and Junagadh and Anand and Somnath, forming a cohort before they had even reached Wardha. Others had come with brothers, with fathers, with local guardians waiting at the station. The campus in those first weeks had the texture of people finding each other, assembling into the groups that would carry them through five years of shared examinations and shared meals and shared bewilderment.
Dilip Chotai had come alone.
He had boarded the train to Wardha with his suitcase and the particular self-possession of someone who has not waited for company before beginning a journey, and who does not expect arrival to feel like reunion. He was nineteen, from Veraval on the Gujarat coast, and he knew no one at Sevagram. What he carried was not the anxiety of the solitary but something quieter — the confidence of a boy raised in a household where medicine was not a dream to be reached for but simply what the family did, generation after generation, for as long as anyone could count.
His first friend at MGIMS was Gopal Gadhesaria — another Gujarati, arriving from a village in Jamnagar district with a newspaper clipping and a pair of new khadi trousers. The friendship formed quickly, in the way of people who recognise in each other a kindred seriousness. From Gadhesaria, Dilip discovered that there were seven Gujarati students in the batch. The seven became, for most of those years, a small republic of mutual support — sharing dictionaries, pooling strategies, translating textbooks line by line into a language they were learning as they went.
Dilip did not need the translation work. Unlike most of his Gujarati batchmates, he had never struggled with English. The language of instruction that arrived as a locked door for the others was, for him, already open. He slipped into the academic rhythm of MGIMS without the particular anguish of the language barrier, and quietly got on with his studies.
A Lineage of Twenty-Seven
He was born on 17 December 1950 in Veraval — known also as Somnath, the coastal city that anchors the southwestern tip of Gujarat, where the Arabian Sea arrives against a shoreline of considerable historical weight. Until 1947, the town had been part of the princely state of Junagadh, and even after its merger with India the traces of the old Nawabi heritage persisted in the streets and buildings — a palimpsest of administrations visible to anyone who knew how to look.
His family ran a business in Agmark ghee — a trade that required hard work and produced, in a large joint household of brothers who could nearly field a cricket eleven, the particular vitality of a home always in motion. Medicine ran through the family like a professional vocation transmitted across generations: twenty-seven doctors, by his count, across three generations. For Dilip, the question of what he would become had been answered before it was asked. The only question was which door would open first.
He did his schooling in Veraval and moved to Jamnagar for college — a six-hour journey that constituted, in those years, a significant displacement. It was there that his friend Jitendra Adhia, who had been tracking the possibility of a new medical college in Sevagram, said: “Let’s try our luck there.” Something in the suggestion carried conviction. Dilip applied, obtained a letter of recommendation from a member of the Gandhi family — the name has since blurred with time — and arrived at Wardha station alone, as he had departed from Veraval.
The interview is a blur too. He remembers being asked about the code of conduct — the khadi, the prayers, the commitment to rural service, the Gandhian compact that every incoming student was expected to acknowledge. He nodded with the sincerity of a boy who had seen enough of hardship at close range to know that simplicity was not a deprivation but a discipline. His name appeared on the list.
The Methodical Student
The first year was spent in the nursing hostel while the boys’ hostel was completed. Students carried their own steel thalis, katoris, and spoons. They swept their rooms and cleaned the neighbourhood. Morning and evening prayers bracketed the days. Three other Gujarati students shared Dilip’s room, and in the close quarters of that small space — the smells of khadi and kerosene, the sounds of pages turning late at night, the particular fellowship of people adapting together to conditions none of them had anticipated — friendships formed that would outlast the college years by half a century.
He was not, by his own candid admission, the sporty or cultural type. The table tennis tournaments, the badminton courts, the dramatic productions that absorbed so much of the social energy of his batchmates — these were not his territory. He was content with his books. In a campus that celebrated the well-rounded student, the full participant, the person who could dissect a cadaver in the morning and deliver a performance on stage in the evening, this was a minor eccentricity. His batchmates remember him as the quiet Gujarati who showed up reliably for everything that mattered and had no interest in being noticed for it.
What he was, beneath the quietness, was thorough. He studied with the methodical attention of someone who knows that the work is the point, and that the work, done consistently, is sufficient. The seven Gujarati students who arrived not knowing the word for oesophagus in English went on, collectively, to produce results that astonished the GMC Nagpur professors who had been quietly condescending about the village college. Dilip was among them.
From KEM to Mozambique
After MBBS, he went to Mumbai — the obvious next step for a surgical career, and the city that offered the best training available. He worked as a house officer at Cooper Hospital, then pursued his MS in General Surgery at KEM Hospital. KEM in those years was formidable: enormous wards, complex trauma cases, a pace that did not slow for the inexperienced and a culture that expected you to find your footing quickly or not at all. He found his footing.
After completing his MS, he worked for a year as a trauma registrar at KEM. The work was demanding and instructive and did what good surgical training does — it showed him the full range of what the human body could survive, and what it could not, and trained his hands in the gap between the two.
Then came Mozambique.
The posting was through the government — a medical officer assignment in a country that had gained independence from Portugal in 1975 and was in the early, difficult years of building its own health system from the residue of a colonial one. Dilip spent two years there, operating in conditions that were, by any measure, more constrained than KEM Hospital but also more clarifying. The surgery required in a post-independence African hospital is surgery stripped of the auxiliary infrastructure that allows a surgeon in Mumbai or Nagpur to defer difficult decisions. It asks you to make do with what is present, to improvise within the bounds of safety, to hold the patient’s welfare as the fixed point while everything else is variable. It was, in a register he had not anticipated, the Sevagram education continuing itself in a different latitude.
The Geography of Vocation
He returned to Gujarat, to the Junagadh district where his family had roots, and built a surgical practice. Unlike the Mozambique years, this was the long work — the accumulation of a clinical reputation in a community that would come to know him over decades rather than months. He became associated with the neurosurgery department at Rajkot Medical College, extending his practice into the collaborative institutional life that good regional medicine requires.
In 1980, he married. His wife became a gynaecologist in Rajkot. Their daughter followed the family vocation into the third generation — not in Gujarat, and not in the general surgery that had been her father’s discipline, but in dermatology, practising in Manchester. Twenty-seven doctors across three generations had become, in the space of one more life, twenty-eight, and the count’s geography had expanded to include England.
He has thought, in the years since Sevagram, about what it meant to arrive alone.
Not with distress — he was not a man given to revisiting decisions — but with the particular reflectiveness of someone who has watched, from a slight distance, the way the gregarious ones formed their friendships fast and loudly, and knows that his own friendships formed more slowly and have lasted just as long. The seven Gujarati students who pooled their dictionaries and refused the private tutors and sat up translating Guyton line by line — he was among them, contributing his English fluency to the collective enterprise as quietly as he contributed everything else.
He had come alone on the train from Veraval. He had arrived at an institution still assembling its fee register and found, in its incompleteness, something that felt like an invitation — to a place that was still becoming what it intended to be, that needed students willing to help build it, that asked for commitment in return for the chance to be part of something that had not yet found its shape.
Fifty-five years later, it has its shape. And somewhere in that shape is the quiet surgical precision of a boy from the Gujarat coast who arrived with his suitcase and his family’s long history of medicine and the self-sufficient steadiness of someone who had always known that you do not need company to begin a journey, only the willingness to board the train.
His daughter operates now in a hospital in Manchester, her hands trained in a discipline her father never practised, in a country he never lived in, carrying forward a vocation that began in a cowshed ghee business in Veraval and was given its professional form in a makeshift hostel in Sevagram where the fee register was still being drawn in hand-ruled columns when the first students arrived.
Dr. Dilip Chotai completed his MS in General Surgery from KEM Hospital, Mumbai, following house jobs at Cooper Hospital. He served as a trauma registrar at KEM and subsequently spent two years as a government medical officer in Mozambique. He returned to practice surgery in Junagadh district, Gujarat, and became associated with the neurosurgery department at Rajkot Medical College. His wife is a gynaecologist in Rajkot; his daughter practises dermatology in Manchester. He lives in Gujarat.