She had a laugh that Sandhya Mohgaonkar still remembers as dilkhulas — open-hearted, without reservation, the kind that fills a room and lingers after the person has left. Sujata Pandya was tall, wore her hair long, and treated laughter as a serious obligation to the people around her. She died in 1991, at 35. She had been a doctor for barely a decade.
The Girl from Mohan Nagar
Sujata came originally from Jabalpur, but Nagpur was where she grew up — raised by her grandparents in Mohan Nagar, a quiet residential neighbourhood on the city’s western edge. She arrived at Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973 through St Francis De Sales College, joining a cohort that included Aziz Khan, Siddhartha Kumar Biswas, Dilip Gohokar, Sharad Jaitly, Murtaza Akhtar, Archana Srivastava, Alison Girling-Saxena, and Ravindra Jharia.
Vimala Iyer, who shared her commute for years, remembers the practical geography of that friendship: Sujata lived in Mohan Nagar, Vimala in the Motibagh Railway Quarters. They cycled to GMC together in the early years, then graduated to a moped. “She was such a simple and joyous girl,” Vimala recalls. Her grandmother fed them sweet curd with the unselfconscious generosity of someone who has always had enough love to give.
The Work She Chose
Sujata graduated in 1977 and completed her internship at the Rural Health Centre, Saoner — the posting all the women of the batch shared. She married Mr Rajesh Mehta of Jabalpur, returned with him to his city, and went back to her training. She earned her DGO from Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1981 and built a gynaecology practice in Jabalpur over the years that followed. For nearly a decade she worked, saw patients, and made a life.
Then, in 1991, she died. The raw manuscript records no cause, no circumstances — only the fact and its year.
What Remains
“Her memory brings a smile to my lips and soul,” Sandhya Mohgaonkar wrote, choosing her words carefully. That is not the language of consolation; it is the language of someone describing something that is still there, still active, still capable of producing warmth.
Vimala Iyer heard the news in Bhusawal and felt the distance as a particular kind of grief. She had been in Bhusawal when she heard that Sujata was gone, and the miles between them at that moment never quite closed.
What the archive holds of Sujata Pandya is small: a laughter that classmates describe thirty years later, a grandmother’s sweet curd, a moped on the road to GMC, and a practice in Jabalpur that ran for almost a decade before it stopped. It is not much. It is also not nothing.