She left before the class of 1973 had fully found its shape. Pramila Khapre was in her second MBBS when she died, in April 1976, in the Girls’ Hostel. She was 19 or 20. The examinations were underway. The Pathology first paper had just been written. The second was days away.
What happened is not in doubt. What went through her mind — the weight of it, the particular quality of the fear or despair that made the examination seem insurmountable — is not known and will not be. Her batchmates, who were themselves young and frightened and busy preparing for the same papers, could only reconstruct what they had missed. “We rushed to attend a last-minute prep lecture and did not knock her door when we left from the hostel,” one of them recalled. “When we came back, we saw her, unconscious.” Another: “She had locked herself in her room. Her death was a tremendous shock to the whole batch.”
Who She Was
Pramila came from Nagpur. She had done her pre-medical education in the city and arrived at GMC in 1973 as Roll Number 168, Batch D. She was quiet by most accounts — studious, as her friends remember her, and “impeccably dressed,” which is an odd detail to carry for nearly fifty years, but perhaps not so odd: what we recall of the dead is often what marked them as particular, as themselves, as not anyone else.
She had beautiful handwriting. This too her batchmates remember. In the dissection halls and lecture theaters of GMC Nagpur, where the work was grinding and the hours long, she wrote with the care of someone for whom legibility was a form of respect — for the subject, for the examiner, perhaps for herself.
She was, by all accounts, very stressed in the lead-up to the second MBBS examinations. The exams were known to be difficult. The Pathology paper that came first was widely considered one of the hardest. But stress in that season was universal; nearly everyone in the hostel was stressed. What made Pramila’s stress different — heavier, less manageable, more isolating — was not visible to those around her. That invisibility is part of what makes these losses so hard to carry.
The Result That Came Too Late
A month after her death, the examination results were declared. Pramila had scored 58 marks in the Pathology paper she had written on the day she died. She had passed. The number 58 sits in the memory of her batchmates with a particular cruelty — not because it changes anything, but because it reveals the distance between what she feared and what was true. Fear, when it is severe enough, cannot be reasoned with from the outside. It could not be reasoned with from the inside either.
Chandrabhan Chattani, another student in the batch, had taken his own life the previous year, in 1975, also during examinations. Two such deaths in successive years, in the same hostel corridors, among the same group of young people: the accumulation is hard to name without acknowledging that something systemic was also at work — the pressure of the examinations, the inadequacy of support systems, the isolation that medical education in that era demanded as a kind of entry fee.
Pramila Khapre left no record of her aspirations, her interests beyond the examination hall, the things she hoped medicine would allow her to do. She left, from the accounts of her batchmates, the sense of a person who was warm, who cared about how she presented herself to the world, who wrote with care, and who was, in the weeks before her death, carrying something too heavy to put down alone.
She is included in this archive because she was part of the class of 1973, because she sat in the same lecture halls and hostels and dissection rooms, and because to leave her out would be a second erasure. The archive is a record of lives. Hers was one.