It was already past eight in the evening when the clerk found the missing form.
He looked up from the files with the expression of a man who has located something he was not certain still existed, set it on the desk between them, and said — with the particular exhaustion of someone who has been searching for longer than he should have needed to — “Come tomorrow. We’ll fit you in.”
Saroj was seventeen years old, alone in the Sevagram guesthouse, and had already missed admission to Government Medical College, Nagpur by a single seat. The waiting list there had not moved. She lay awake that night listening to the crickets in the Sevagram dark and turning the day over in her mind — the missing form, the clerk’s tired face, the morning still ahead. She was not, by temperament, a person who spent long with uncertainty. She had come this far. She would come back tomorrow.
The interview, when it happened, was brief. Two questions.
“Why do you want to become a doctor?”
She did not hesitate. Since childhood, she said, this had been her only aim. There was no profession as noble or as genuinely satisfying.
“Done any social work?”
She described the village fairs in Chandrapur, the health activities she had helped organise, the small part she had played in them.
That was all. The panel thanked her. She walked out into the morning.
What she did not know — and would only piece together later — was that Mr. Narayan Taksande, Dr. Sushila Nayar’s trusted aide, had likely spoken her name in the right ear before she entered the room. Ishwar Taksande, also working at the college, may have done the same. In Sevagram, as in most institutions finding their feet, the formal and the informal worked in close collaboration. The interview was the official mechanism. The whispered word was the human one. Both were real.
Her name appeared on the admission list. She was in.
The Rhythm of the Railing
She was born on 9 February 1952 in Chandrapur — then still called Chanda — the youngest of three children. Her father ran a cloth and fruit business. Her brother, a born teacher, had drilled English into her before she was five years old, with the focused ambition of an elder sibling who has already decided what his younger sister will become. “You must become a doctor,” he told her, in the tone that brooks no reasonable argument. She grew up with that sentence in her ear, and at some point — early enough that she could no longer locate the moment — it became her own.
She tried for GMC Nagpur in 1969 and missed by a seat. The waiting list moved as waiting lists do — slowly, and not in her direction. Then Mr. Narayan Taksande appeared at her brother’s shop one afternoon with an application form for a new medical college in Sevagram, handed it over, and said: “Fill it. Give it back to me today.” Her brother did not argue. He attached her photograph and sent it off.
The rest was the missing form, the clerk at eight in the evening, the cricket-filled night, and two questions that changed everything.
The girls’ hostel at Sevagram was a modest building near the nursing hostel, a short walk from Dr. Sushila Nayar’s home. Fourteen girls in the batch, from different corners of the country, assembled in a building that would contain their friendships, arguments, late-night studies, and formative years with the impartial efficiency of four walls and a shared bathroom.
Saroj’s roommate was T.K. Pushpam — a quiet girl from Kerala with large, thoughtful eyes and an even temperament that complemented Saroj’s more animated one. That pairing, assigned by administrative lottery on the first day, lasted all six years. They shared rooms, clothes, secrets, and eventually each other’s family weddings. It was the kind of friendship that forms when two people are placed together by circumstance and discover, over time, that circumstance got it exactly right.
The days in Sevagram began before sunrise. Their warden, Mrs. Nalinitai Ranade, had a reliable method of ensuring no one slept through the morning: the iron railing at the end of the hostel corridor, struck at 4:30 a.m. with something metallic and without apology. Fifteen minutes later, the girls stood in the hostel veranda — bleary, khadi-clad, eyes not yet entirely open — reciting the Sarva Dharma Prarthana. The all-faith prayer moved from Sanskrit to Urdu to English without pause, which meant that fluency in any one language was not a prerequisite for participation. Then came cleaning duty: bathrooms, verandas, the courtyard’s fallen leaves.
Nalinitai Ranade also sang. Each morning, her voice rose in Vaishnava Janato before the railing had stopped ringing, filling the corridor with the hymn’s particular quality of unhurried certainty. After enough mornings, the sound became inseparable from the act of waking — you heard it and your eyes opened, the way a habit, once formed, runs ahead of intention.
A Campus of Ownership
The campus had a rhythm of VIP visits that the students came to treat as a form of irregular festival. When a political leader was expected, they swept the Adhyayan Mandir floor until it reflected, plucked flowers for garlands, decorated the pathways with rangoli. Nobody ordered them to do this. They did it because the college was theirs, and the guests were therefore theirs too — a sense of institutional ownership that Sevagram, with its insistence on student participation in every aspect of campus life, had carefully cultivated.
Indira Gandhi came. They sat cross-legged on the floor of the Adhyayan Mandir, so close that the distance between a student and a prime minister was the length of an ordinary room.
Classes had begun in an old hospital building — wooden stools, no desks, a cloth blackboard, and Dr. Indurkar and Dr. Kane drawing chalk diagrams with the precision of men who believe that a well-drawn diagram is itself a form of argument. Later, the new Anatomy and Physiology lecture halls were ready, and the formal infrastructure of a medical college assembled itself around the students who had managed without it. Those early months in the repurposed spaces had their own accidental charm — the kind that institutions lose when they become comfortable, and that the people who were there remember with disproportionate fondness.
Friendships formed with the speed that shared difficulty produces. Jayashree Deshmukh, Shalini Kohade, Lata Chaudhary, Safia Hussain, Shobha Deshmukh, Sushila Nangia — names that would echo across fifty years of reunion letters and anniversary gatherings. Table tennis in the mess-side recreation room, played past study hours with Nalini’s daughter and Menon Sir. Sitar lessons from Gajanan Ambulkar — the Anatomy department’s artist who had somehow also become its musician, offering lessons to any student who turned up and was willing to sit with the instrument.
The Standard of Non-Negotiation
Her teachers settled into her memory at different depths.
Professor R.V. Agrawal in Pathology carried a medical library in his head and proved it daily. After the batch cleared Second MBBS, he invited the entire Maitri group — their close circle — to dinner at his home. Varan, bhat, bhaji, papad. The menu was simple. The gesture was not. A professor who invites his students to his table has decided, consciously or not, that the relationship between teacher and student has a dimension that the lecture hall cannot contain.
Dr. S.P. Nigam was a different kind of teacher — the kind whose standard is visible in his face when it hasn’t been met. He scolded her sharply after the Medicine prelims. She had underperformed and he told her so, without softening it. She went back, studied with the focused intensity of someone who has been told plainly that they can do better and has chosen to believe it, and scored high in the finals. The look of quiet approval on his face when the results came was worth more to her than the marks themselves.
She understood, from both men, something that Sevagram was trying to teach in every register available to it: that the relationship between a doctor and the standards of medicine is not negotiable, and the teacher’s job is to make that non-negotiation feel like a gift rather than a demand.
After her internship, she entered GMC Nagpur for her MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, training under the esteemed Dr. Rani Bang. Rani Bang departed soon after, securing a doctorate in public health from Johns Hopkins before settling in Gadchiroli in 1984. There, with her husband Dr. Abhay Bang, she earned the Padma Shri for transformative work among Maharashtra’s tribal communities near Gadchiroli. Bound by shared Chandrapur roots, Rani embraced her young protégé with the quiet generosity of a senior who discerns and safeguards rare promise. Those three years of residency tested her resolve deeply. Midway through, she married an IPS officer.
His transfers became the geography of her career. She served at Dufferin Hospital Amravati, JJ Group Mumbai, Civil Hospital Ratnagiri, Civil Hospital Jalna, Government Medical College Nagpur, Aurangabad, BJMC Pune. Each posting was a new institution, new colleagues, new patient populations, new administrative cultures to navigate. The IPS officer moved; she moved with him, and built a practice at every stop, and built it well. Eventually she became Medical Superintendent of a four-hundred-bed hospital in Mumbai — an administrative as much as a clinical role, requiring the particular combination of systemic thinking and human attention that Sevagram had always argued were inseparable.
On the night of 26 November 2008, she was Medical Superintendent of Cama and Albless Hospital — a 367-bed institution in the heart of Mumbai.
She had retired to her quarters when the phone rang. Mass casualty at Victoria Terminus. She dispatched her medical officers. Within minutes — before the full shape of what was happening had become clear to anyone — the terrorists entered the hospital itself.
What followed was six hours that she has described with the precise, undramatic language of a doctor who knows that panic is not a clinical option. She told her staff to switch off the lights and stay low. Two servants and six policemen lost their lives within the building. Grenades rolled down corridors. The air smelled of smoke and something else, the particular compound of fear and gunpowder that has no name in a medical textbook.
She stayed at her post.
At 3:30 in the morning, the commandos declared the hospital safe.
She had been trained, in Sevagram, in the foundational proposition of medicine: that the patient before you is the claim on your attention, and that claim does not pause for your own fear. She had spent thirty-five years practising that proposition in hospital wards and OPDs and surgical theatres. On the night of 26 November, she practised it in the dark, with grenades in the corridor, and it held.
She received multiple awards for her conduct that night, including the Tilak Smarak Award. She accepted them with the composure of someone who knows that courage, when it arrives, feels less like a choice than a continuation of everything that came before it.
She retired in 2010, then served for eight more years as a rural health consultant under Maharashtra’s 104 toll-free health service — training ANMs, ASHAs, and medical officers, working on the slow, unglamorous work of reducing maternal mortality in districts where every improvement is earned over years.
When she thinks of Sevagram now, she reaches for the 4:30 a.m. railing and Nalinitai’s voice in the corridor. Pushpam’s quiet presence across a shared room for six years. The sitar under Ambulkar’s instruction. Dr. Nigam’s expression when the final results came in. A campus swept clean for guests who were also, in some sense, their own guests.
Sevagram had given her more than a medical education. It had given her a way of understanding what medicine was for — not the management of conditions in comfortable hospitals, but the presence of a doctor where presence is needed, at whatever hour, under whatever conditions, without waiting to be certain it is safe to begin.
The 4:30 railing had taught her something about that. So had everything that followed it.
Dr. Saroj Taksande completed her MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology from Government Medical College, Nagpur. She served as Medical Superintendent of Cama and Albless Hospital, Mumbai, and received multiple awards for her conduct during the 26 November 2008 terrorist attack on the hospital. She subsequently served for eight years as a rural health consultant under Maharashtra’s 104 toll-free health service. She lives in retirement in Maharashtra.
Roll No. 27 — Dr. Yadunath Telkikar.
Notes before writing. The raw material here has an unusual structural gift: the Nagpur airport scene — Dr. Ingle running across the tarmac to add a name to a list before a plane takes off — is one of the most cinematically vivid admission stories in the entire archive. It must open the profile. Everything else follows from it.
The thematic thread is late arrival and unlikely belonging. Telkikar nearly missed the batch entirely, nearly missed medicine altogether (he wanted to be an engineer, hated biology, enrolled in BAMS without conviction), and arrived at Sevagram through a chain of accidents so improbable that he spent the rest of his life knowing how thin the margin was. That knowledge shaped him — the euphoria he describes on getting in, the seriousness with which he eventually applied himself, the Babulal debt repaid in person after MBBS, the blood bank role taken up at sixty-five because restlessness was more uncomfortable than humility.
The drama section is the emotional centre of the Sevagram years and deserves full treatment — particularly Babulal handing over the canteen keys with “Jo chahiye, le lo” and never keeping a ledger. That is the profile’s closing image.
The mosquito net passage in the raw draft is unusually sensory and specific — it earns its place in the hostel section and should be preserved almost intact in texture if not in exact wording.