Manik Khune, who knew him from their internship days at Akola and Deolapar, wrote of him after his death with the precision of a man who had watched a difficult life from close enough to understand it. “A lanky upright bright fellow with thick sets of self-made rules about ethics and discipline,” he said. “He never compromised with them all his life.” The tribute was also, quietly, the verdict: Ramvallabh Rathi was a good doctor, an ethical man, and a man whom life treated badly. He died on 20 June 2011, on a road outside Hingoli, three kilometres from the town where his son was to be engaged that afternoon.
The Village and the Road
Ramvallabh was born in 1956 in Dhamani, a village 13 kilometres southwest of Washim. His father farmed the land. He walked the 26 kilometres to school in Mangulpir, and completed his pre-medical education in Akola. He arrived at Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973.
His internship brought him to the district hospital at Akola and the rural health centre at Deolapar, where he worked alongside Arun Mankar, Manik Khune, and Jayant Deshmukh from the 1972 batch. After graduation, he took a house job at Swami Ramanand Teerth Rural Medical College, Ambajogai — Manik Khune had been invited too but declined — and then registered for MD in Medicine at GMC Nagpur.
The MD did not happen. He reached the third year of postgraduation and stopped. Why, his close friend Manik Khune would say, “is still an enigma to me.” He got married, moved to Jalna with the help of a brother-in-law, and started a practice. It did not settle. He moved to Pulgaon.
Pulgaon, Karanja Lad, Amravati
In Pulgaon he worked as a private practitioner, a resident doctor at the Pulgaon Cotton Mill, and a physician at the military hospital. The three roles suggest a man filling in gaps, making it work. Manik visited him once during those years. The practice, he noted, was not flourishing, and Ramvallabh did not seem happy. “He seemed to be dragging on.”
After fourteen years in Pulgaon, he moved again — back toward his origins, to Karanja Lad, a small town closer to Washim. There he took a contractual job with the Army at Amravati, a commute of daily motorcycle rides between the two towns. The salary was modest. The ethics, by all accounts, were not.
He and Manik exchanged letters. They spoke by telephone from time to time. The friend who had kept a dictionary in his hostel room at GMC — throwing new words at his batchmates, asking for meanings — had not grown smaller. He had simply not found his ground.
June 2011
On 20 June 2011, Ramvallabh drove with his family toward Hingoli. His son Varun was to be engaged. Three kilometres from the town, a speeding truck hit the car. Ramvallabh died at the spot, along with three brothers and a sister. His wife survived. Varun escaped with leg fractures, was operated in Pune, and married in 2012.
The losses did not stop there. Varun, an Ayurveda physician, was admitted to a private hospital in Jalna in early 2021 with cirrhosis of the liver. He died on 17 February 2021. He left behind his mother, his wife, and a six-year-old daughter.
Manik Khune ended his remembrance with a verse from Omar Khayyam — the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on — and with a plain sentence: “Destiny was so unfair to him.” No word from the banned list is needed. The plain sentence says everything.