A Father and Son, Bound by One Calling

Harshu is gone.

At 3:00 PM today, a WhatsApp message shattered the quiet. Dr. Harshvardhan Tikle had died in Mumbai, the victim of what was most likely a massive heart attack. He was only 50.

I called Rajnish Joshi, his senior at MGIMS, who shared the heartbreaking details. Harshu had been doing what he had done for years—looking after patients in the operating theatre as the chief anesthesiologist. Between two scheduled operations, he stepped into the restroom. When he did not return for nearly ninety minutes, his colleagues forced the door open. They found him dead.

The news was hard to believe because only a few weeks ago we had met, quite by chance, in Sevagram.

I had just settled into my car to drive home for lunch when someone waved frantically from a passing auto-rickshaw. I stepped out. It was Harshu.

His mother had undergone joint replacement surgery at Kasturba Hospital. As there was no one else to care for her, he had taken leave from Mumbai and come to Sevagram.

We sat beside her bed for a long time, talking about old days and old friends. Later, we walked slowly down the familiar hospital road, talking for another hour. When it was time to leave, he climbed back into the auto-rickshaw, smiled, waved, and said, “Sir, we’ll meet again soon.”

We never did.

Harshu belonged to the MGIMS batch of 1993, but his roots in Sevagram ran much deeper. He had grown up on the campus. His father, Dr. Arun Tikle, headed the Department of Anesthesiology and served as the boys’ hostel warden. Their home was the modest warden’s quarters—a place generations of students knew well.

His journey into medicine began in the shadow of family tragedy.

On 1 February 1993, while Harshu was preparing for the medical entrance examination, his father suffered a major heart attack. He had to be rushed to Bombay Hospital for emergency coronary artery bypass surgery. Dr. Arun Tikle was only 48.

As his father recovered, Harshu sat for three demanding entrance papers. I still remember how reluctantly he filled out the MGIMS application form. His heart was not in it; he had watched medicine consume his father—a man who seemed to belong more to the hospital than to his own home.

Yet, he chose the same road.

Dr. Arun Tikle never allowed illness to stand between him and his patients. He missed family holidays without complaint, answered emergency calls even on his days off, and quietly took over duties when colleagues were overwhelmed.

Then, in the early hours of 20 August 1999, he collapsed with a massive brain hemorrhage in the old medicine ward of Kasturba Hospital—the very hospital he had served for twenty-six years. The family understood that death was near. They chose not to pursue futile treatment and allowed him to die peacefully, with the quiet dignity that had marked his life. He was 55.

Harshu completed his MD in Anesthesiology at MGIMS, in the department his father had once led. He worked in the same operating theatres where his father had spent countless hours. Later, he moved to Mumbai, rose through the academic ranks, and became Professor of Anesthesiology at Nair Hospital.

Life also brought him another gift during those Sevagram years. Megha had been working as anaesthesiologist at Kasturba Hospital; it was here that they met, fell in love, and married. Together they built a home in Mumbai, where Harshu balanced the demands of an academic life with the responsibilities of a husband and father.

Some things, however, never changed.

When I met him a few weeks ago in Sevagram, he was officially on leave to care for his mother, yet his thoughts kept returning to his students. Sitting beside her hospital bed, he opened the draft of a student’s thesis on his phone. He read every line carefully, corrected mistakes, and emailed the revised draft back to Mumbai. He was anxious to ensure his student wouldn’t miss the submission deadline.

That quiet scene says more about Harshu than any tribute I could write.

His father died at 55. Harshu died five years earlier, only months after celebrating his fiftieth birthday on 11 February. He had been looking forward to seeing his children build their own futures. Now, he leaves behind Megha, his companion from the Sevagram years, and their children, who must navigate a loss that came entirely without warning.

Life does not always unfold as we imagine. The boy who grew up in the warden’s quarters became the anesthesiologist his father had been. Both devoted themselves to the same department, the same profession, and the same quiet sense of duty. Both left far too early.

Long before he became a physician, Harshu was a quiet boy, almost shy. In the years I lived in Vivekanand Colony, a short walk from the Mahadev Bhavan Library, I often saw him there, slipping in quietly and leaving with another stack of Marathi classics tucked under his arm. He read them voraciously, learning early on to keep company with books.

Even now, when I think of Harshu, I do not first see the professor from Mumbai. I see the quiet boy who wandered into the Mahadev Bhavan Library, leaving with a stack of Marathi books tucked under his arm. Then another picture follows—the smiling man stepping out of an auto-rickshaw in Sevagram a few weeks ago, waving across the road, certain that we would meet again. Between those two memories lies an entire life. It ended far too soon.