For twenty years, Lakshmi Rao has been running through the streets of Nagpur before dawn, searching for stray dogs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She finds them in the lanes near MB Estate, on the Katol Road, in the gardens and vacant plots where animals congregate when no one is watching. She vaccinates them. She sterilises them. She nurses them when they fall sick, feeds the ones that are starving, and fosters the ones that cannot survive alone. She says, simply, that God chose her for this work. Her mornings begin with yoga, pranayama, and exercise. Her evenings are for the motivational talks she has delivered, without payment, for the past fifteen years. Medicine, for her, became only part of a larger practice of care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She no longer sees patients. She has not practised for some years. But the impulse behind medicine \u2014 the turning toward something suffering, the willingness to help \u2014 has not left her. It has only widened its field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lakshmi was born in Kakinada, on the Andhra Pradesh coast, to Wing Commander PS Rao of the Indian Air Force. An air force childhood means movement, and Lakshmi moved: Kendriya Vidyalayas in Delhi, Jamnagar, Tambaram, Gurgaon, Mumbai, and finally Nagpur, where she completed her pre-medical education at the Institute of Science. In 1973, she entered Government Medical College, Nagpur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation, she interned at the primary health centre in Saoner and at GMC Nagpur itself. In 1982, she married Dr. Ramakrishnan, a graduate of Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, and then the movement began again \u2014 not the movement of a child following a parent, but of a wife following a husband across his postings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Utarlai in Barmer district, at the edge of the Rajasthan desert. Tambaram in Tamil Nadu. Bangalore. Coimbatore. Chabua in Assam, near the foothills of Arunachal. Nagpur again, finally, in 1999. Each posting gave her a few months to establish a practice before the transfer orders arrived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I would set up my practice in a month or two wherever my husband was posted,”<\/em> she said. “The trouble was, I had to leave not long before I had settled in the new place.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The sentence carries no bitterness. It is simply an accurate description of a particular kind of life \u2014 one in which competence and energy are not enough to build continuity, because continuity is not permitted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Lakshmi returned to Nagpur in 1999, she came to stay. Her mother was alive and needed care; Lakshmi sat at her bedside through the last phase of her life, and the mother died at 85. The experience of caring for a parent in decline \u2014 of being there, unhurried, present \u2014 gave Lakshmi, she said, enormous satisfaction. It is one of the things she is most grateful for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She joined a laughter club \u2014 Nagpur has 26 of them, ranging from 30 to 200 members each \u2014 and found the weekly meetings genuinely restorative. She planted trees. She practised yoga and meditation. She gave motivational talks to groups who invited her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And she began, or continued \u2014 it is unclear exactly when the work started \u2014 the early-morning searches for stray dogs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The work is unglamorous and relentless. Dogs must be caught, vaccinated, sterilised, treated when injured, and found care when they cannot fend for themselves. In a city of Nagpur’s scale, the need is large and the resources are thin. Lakshmi does not work alone \u2014 she moves with groups, attends to networks of volunteers, and draws on whatever goodwill the city extends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She describes the impulse plainly: her heart goes out for any suffering. This is a simple statement. It is also the foundation of her medical training, of the decades of practice in towns and cities across India, of the year spent at her mother’s bedside. The particular form that impulse takes \u2014 stray dogs at five in the morning \u2014 is unusual, even eccentric. But it is of a piece with everything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her husband, Dr. Ramakrishnan, continues to offer care to retired air force personnel through the ECHS system. They live at MB Estate on Katol Road, in the apartment where, each morning, Lakshmi begins with yoga before going out into the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dogs, presumably, are waiting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n\n\nComing Home<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n\n\nThe Canine Cause<\/h3>\n\n\n