He had breakfast in the hostel canteen with VK Patel that morning, as he had on many mornings before. The Pathology second paper was at 2 PM. Nobody who saw him at breakfast saw anything unusual.
That is perhaps the hardest thing to hold: that the morning was ordinary.
From Yavatmal to Nagpur
Chandrabhan Chattani — Chandar to his family — was born in Yavatmal, into a business family. His father, Shri Narayandas Chattani, ran a cloth shop on Tehsil Road. The family was large: eight brothers and sisters, the warm density of a household where someone is always present.
Chandar came to Government Medical College (GMC), Nagpur in 1973 via Amolakchand Mahavidyalaya, Yavatmal — the same college that sent Vijayalaxmi Kane, Farhad Khan, Vrajlal Patel, Omprakash Singhania, Tukaram Badodekar, Mohan Gupte, Panjabsingh Chavan, and Bhaskar Gadge to GMC that year. He moved into Hostel No. 4, where the corridors filled with noise and argument and the particular restlessness of young men far from home.
He played table tennis. Raymond Maugham remembered that. He was there at meals, in the common room, in the daily life of the hostel. Chandramohan Hajari recalled that Chandrabhan Chattani and Chandrashekhar Meshram followed one after another in the university examination seating — three Chandras in a row, a small joke of alphabetical order. “In the morning, Chattani did not meet us,” Hajari said. “And in the afternoon, just before we were to leave for the Forensic Medicine paper, we got to know that he was no more.”
What He Left Behind
He was 20 years old. He had cleared his examinations a day before. He left a note to his parents.
When the results came a month later, he had scored 58 marks in the paper he feared he had failed.
Farhad Khan remembered a book lying open in Chandar’s room — Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End, the 1944 novel set in ancient Egypt. It was, Khan recalled, an unusual Christie: historical fiction, a high number of deaths, the cover image of a Mexican wasteland with cacti. Whether the book had any bearing on what happened, no one can say. It was there; it is remembered; the connection, if any, belongs to a mind that is no longer available for questions.
What the batch remembers is the person before. The table tennis player. The boy at breakfast. The name in the examination hall roster, one of three Chandras in a row.
A Family’s Memory
Dr. Samit Chattani, a dentist who comes from Chandar’s family, found words that have stayed with those who read them: “Those we love don’t go away. They walk beside us every day. Unseen, unheard, but always near us. Loved and missed and very dear.”
The batch of 1973 carried him forward in exactly this way — present in the memory of a table tennis game, a breakfast, a name on a list. Chandar Chattani did not graduate. He did not become a doctor. He stayed, instead, in the particular way the young who leave early stay: unchanged, specific, exactly as they were.