She belonged to the group they called SHARP — Shobha, Hema, Arun, Ravi, Prakash — five students from the later years of the GMC Nagpur 1973 batch who formed the kind of close friendship that survives careers, cities, and the decades that separate reunion from reunion. In the hostel, the five of them were inseparable; the name was a coincidence of initials that crystallised into an identity. When her classmates speak of Hema Deoras today, they often begin with SHARP, which says something about the warmth she brought to shared life rather than to individual achievement.
Nagpur
Hema was born in Nagpur, the daughter of a Professor of Chemistry at Agricultural College, Nagpur. Her school was Dharam Peth Primary School, followed by Hadas High School — where Sanjeev Chandorkar, Tara Bhat, Sanjay Gadre, Rajeev Laul, and Maya Wanjari were among her contemporaries — and she completed her premed education at Hislop College, Nagpur.
She joined Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973. In those GMC years, her Rangoli work in art competitions earned genuine appreciation from judges who knew what they were looking at. She mentions this without emphasis, in the same register she uses for clinical achievements — it was simply part of a life lived attentively.
After graduation, she did house jobs in Gynaecology and enrolled in the MD (Obstetrics and Gynaecology) programme at GMC Nagpur. Her guide was Dr. (Mrs.) Jawade; the thesis evaluated the effect of forceps delivery on the newborn, a subject that required both clinical precision and the willingness to look carefully at an intervention whose risks, in the early 1980s, were beginning to be reconsidered. She earned her MD in 1983.
Mumbai: The ESIS Years and a New Practice
On 31 January 1982, Hema married Dr. Arun Deshmukh, a GMC Nagpur alumnus who had completed his Diploma in Ophthalmology from the same batch. After her MD, the couple moved to Mumbai, where both served at the ESIS Hospital for two years. The ESIS years gave them experience across a broad patient population — workers and their families, the kind of clinical variety that urban government hospitals reliably provide.
In 1986, Hema and Arun took over the hospital and converted it into an inpatient facility for women with gynaecological and obstetric disorders. Sai Nursing Home, Vikhroli — a five-bed maternity and gynaecology unit — became the institution around which the rest of her working life was built.
She practiced obstetrics and gynaecology there for decades. The work of a gynaecologist in a Mumbai nursing home is unglamorous in the way most good clinical medicine is unglamorous: deliveries at midnight, D&Cs in the afternoon, the management of complications that arrive without warning, the gradual accumulation of a reputation that brings patients back and sends their daughters and daughters-in-law through the same door. Hema built that reputation, quietly and over time.
The Children
Three children, and each chose medicine.
Shweta completed her MBBS at DY Patil Medical College, Mumbai, then her DNB, then a fellowship in Retina at a centre in Taiwan, and is now married to Dr. Karan Julka, a gastroenterology surgeon practicing in Thane and Kalyan. They have two sons.
Shilpa completed her MBBS at Terna Medical College, Navi Mumbai, then her MD (Medicine) in New York, and is now an endocrinologist in Boston, married to Dr. Neville Jadeja, a neurophysician. They have a daughter.
Rajiv, the son, went into computers — BE in Computer Engineering from Mumbai University, then an MS from San Jose State, and now works as a senior software engineer at Walmart eCommerce in San Jose, married to Swati Shah, also in software. They have two children.
The distribution — two doctors, one engineer — mirrors the quiet negotiation that many GMC families have made with the generation that followed them: medicine remains, but it does not insist.
A Hospital in Renovation
In the most recent information available, Sai Nursing Home was undergoing major renovation, and Hema had accordingly stepped back from Obstetrics. The hospital she built over thirty-plus years of practice in Vikhroli was being rebuilt around her.
Her husband, Dr. Arun Deshmukh — not to be confused with the batch’s other Avinash Deshmukh — had his own long career in ophthalmology. Together they built one of the quieter practice partnerships of the GMC 1973 batch: two doctors, a nursing home, three children, and a life built in the same city where they chose to stay.
Hema Deoras does not appear in any list of the batch’s most decorated alumni. She did not become a professor, did not head a department, did not serve on national committees. What she did was practice good gynaecology in Mumbai for three decades, raise three children, and keep the warmth of the SHARP friendship alive long after the hostel days that created it had passed. These are not small things. The archive records them because they are the actual substance of most medical lives — not the titles but the daily accumulation of care, competence, and constancy.