When Babaji struck it and called a girl’s name across the courtyard, everything stopped — briefly, in the way that only a phone call from home could stop things in Sevagram in the early 1970s, where there were no mobile phones, no letters that arrived reliably, no other thread connecting the world inside the campus to the world outside it. The black telephone mounted on the wall near the prayer hall was the single point of contact between seventy students and everyone they had left behind. A call was rare. It meant something had happened, or someone was thinking of you, or both.
When Babaji called her name, Shalini ran.
She picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
A boy’s voice said: “May I speak with Shivaji Deshmukh?”
She said, flustered: “Wrong number. This is the girls’ hostel.” And hung up immediately, cheeks burning.
She did not know — could not have known — that the wrong number would turn out to be the right one. That the boy who had dialled incorrectly was a classmate she had not yet spoken to. That the call that was not meant for her would become, over the following years, the beginning of everything.
A Household of Khadi and Freedom Fighters
She was born on 28 October 1948 in Raipur, the daughter of Venkatesh Raghav Kod — a dedicated worker in the Khadi and Village Industries Commission who managed not only the local unit but also operations in Jabalpur and Rewa. Wooden handicrafts, handmade paper, mustard oil, handspun cloth: khadi was not, in her father’s household, a symbol or a political position. It was the substance of daily life, the material from which the family’s livelihood and identity were woven together.
Her father had gone to jail for two years during the 1942 Quit India Movement. This was not, in the Raipur of her childhood, an unusual distinction — the freedom struggle had passed through that household as it had passed through many households of that generation, leaving its mark in the form of a prison sentence served and a conviction confirmed. The men and women who came through the family’s door — Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe, L.R. Pandit — were not historical figures but family friends, people who sat at the dining table and were fed by her mother with the warmth of a woman who had decided that the people her husband believed in were people worth feeding.
Her mother was a graduate in English literature who had chosen to be a homemaker — a choice that, in the context of that household, was not a retreat from the world but a particular form of engagement with it: the maintenance of a home where ideas circulated freely and visitors were welcome and the values of the freedom movement were kept alive in the daily texture of hospitality.
Shalini studied at Salim Christian Girls’ School in Raipur from Class 1 through 11 — an all-girls institution, sheltered in the particular way of girls’ schools of that era, her world bounded and simple and entirely without the complication of boys. After 11th came the pre-professional year, the bridge to higher studies, and the first real decisions about direction.
The decision about Sevagram was not, strictly speaking, hers.
Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe — the family friend, the freedom fighter, the man who had helped her father through years of political work — came to their home one day and asked: why don’t we make this girl a doctor? Her father hesitated; he did not have the means. Annasaheb said: don’t worry, we will take care of it. And they did. He and L.R. Pandit were deeply connected with Dr. Sushila Nayar, and through those connections Shalini found herself walking into the doors of India’s first rural medical college — not through a competitive examination, but on the strong shoulders of Gandhian camaraderie and the quiet, reliable generosity of people who believed that a good girl from a good family should be given the chance to become a doctor.
Group A and Group B
She arrived in Sevagram in handspun cotton, as most of the girls did. The campus was small enough that everyone knew everyone within weeks, but the institutional architecture kept boys and girls in carefully managed proximity: separate hostels, a shared mess, the prayer hall at the centre, and the unspoken understanding that the Gandhian eye of the institution was always, in some sense, watching.
Shivaji Deshmukh was in Group A. Shalini was in Group B. They did not see each other during the first year in any meaningful sense — a face glimpsed across the mess, a name heard in passing, the ordinary anonymity of a large class divided into sections. It was at evening prayers, sometime in the second year, that their eyes met for the first time.
Not a word was exchanged.
Just glances. Curious, shy, hesitant — the vocabulary of attraction in a place that did not officially sanction it, between two people who had been raised in households where the expression of feeling was conducted with a certain deliberateness.
The first conversation came after the second-year vacations, two brief sentences, nothing more. There were no dates, no hand-holding walks, no trips to Wardha together in the cover of a group outing. Sevagram did not permit it. Her upbringing did not permit it. The courtship, if it could be called that, was conducted entirely in the register of the restrained — meetings so careful they barely announced themselves, affection so contained it was almost indistinguishable from friendship.
Almost.
The Secret
When Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe learned that Shalini had developed feelings for a boy in her batch, he was furious.
“I brought you here to study, not to fall in love,” he thundered.
Dr. Trivedi, the stern Associate Professor of Surgery — also from Raipur, also connected to the network of people who had brought her to Sevagram — was equally displeased. The weight of their disapproval was real and not easily dismissed: these were not distant authorities but people who had invested in her, who had arranged her admission, who felt that their trust had been complicated by a development they had not anticipated.
She did not end it. She was not, at her core, someone who abandoned a conviction because it had become inconvenient. She was an introvert, yes — quiet, self-contained, more comfortable with books than with crowds, more at ease in her own company than in the social performance that college life sometimes demanded. But the quality of her inwardness was not passivity. It was the stillness of someone who had decided something and was waiting, without drama, for the world to catch up.
The affection remained. It remained hidden. It remained for the full duration of the MBBS years — five years of shared lectures and separate hostels and carefully managed proximity — and emerged into the open only when the degree was in hand and the institutional eye had, for the first time, looked elsewhere.
Shivaji and Shalini were the second couple from their batch to marry. Mala and Subhash Srivastava were the first.
The Introvert’s Sevagram
She has described herself, without apology or qualification, as someone who stayed to herself, spoke little, and preferred her own company. Her closest friend was Shubha Deshmukh from Gwalior — a friendship built on a shared fluency in Hindi and a shared set of values, the particular ease of two people who do not need to perform for each other. She did not like crowds. She did not go to parties. She preferred simple food and home-cooked meals and quiet corners.
This was not a limitation. It was a temperament, and Sevagram, for all its emphasis on community and collective life, had room for it. The library was always open. The study hours were genuinely for studying. The morning prayers, which might have been experienced as an imposition by someone more resistant, were for Shalini simply the natural beginning of a day — a rhythm continuous with the rhythms of her childhood home, where L.R. Pandit had been a family friend and the prayer hall had never felt foreign.
The campus was spartan in ways that the students of later generations would find difficult to imagine: no fans, no coolers, no television, no vehicles. For the first months, they cleaned their own toilets, swept their hostel floors, learned to stitch and spin cotton under the guidance of women from the Ashram. The daily discipline of shramdan, the prarthanas at four in the morning, the warden Rannertai’s watchful consistency — these were the framework within which the MBBS years took place. The 1969 girls, Shalini among them, followed every rule.
She has said, fifty years later, that the routines and the austerity were not burdens. They were foundations. They grounded her, humbled her, made her resilient in the particular way that genuine simplicity makes a person resilient — not by hardening them but by showing them, early and reliably, how little was actually necessary.
What the Wrong Number Gave Her
She practised medicine after her MBBS, carrying with her the clinical training and the Gandhian ethics that Sevagram had instilled with the particular thoroughness of an institution that understood formation rather than merely instruction. The details of those years — the specialty, the postings, the institutional affiliations — are hers to carry, and the archive holds them lightly.
What the archive holds more firmly is this: that she arrived at MGIMS on the strength of other people’s belief in her, and left having justified that belief in full. That she loved carefully and waited without complaint for the world to catch up. That she built a life with Shivaji Deshmukh — Bhau, as everyone called him — in which the values absorbed in Sevagram ran as a continuous thread through everything they did and were.
More than fifty years have passed since the iron bell rang beside the telephone near the prayer hall, and Babaji called her name across the courtyard, and she ran forward and picked up the receiver and heard a boy’s voice asking for someone else.
She has thought about that moment often. The wrong number that became a marriage. The call that was not meant for her and led her to everything that was.
It may have been the most useful mistake Sevagram ever produced.
Dr. Shalini Kohade Deshmukh completed her MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the inaugural batch of 1969. She married Dr. Shivaji Deshmukh — Roll No. 08, the benchmark profile of this archive — her classmate and lifelong companion. They are approaching their golden wedding anniversary. Her father, Venkatesh Raghav Kod, served in the Khadi and Village Industries Commission and participated in the 1942 Quit India Movement. She lives in Mumbai.