“Doctor, do something! She should not die on the road. If she must die, let her die here.”

The murmur outside the hospital in Hinganghat was low but insistent, the kind that precedes a crowd’s anger. Inside, a young girl lay before three interns — Arvind, Poonam, and Jasbinder — with a gash across her throat, her trachea gaping, blood clots blocking her breathing. No suction machine. No senior doctor in sight.

“Where are Dr. Dwande and Dr. Khobragade?” Jasbinder asked, her voice unsteady.

“Not here,” Arvind said. “It’s just us.”

He picked up a rubber catheter, inserted it into the trachea, and sucked the clot out with his own mouth, spitting it aside.

“Arvind!” Poonam gasped. “You’ll swallow blood.”

“I’d rather swallow blood than watch her die.”

The air passage cleared. Hours later, the girl opened her eyes. The crowd outside broke into applause. Some lifted the three interns onto their shoulders. Arvind’s Luna scooter, which perennially ran short of petrol, mysteriously had a full tank the next morning. Farmers brought vegetables to their quarters. Villagers asked them, almost pleading, not to leave when the internship ended.

That night, under a dim lantern, Arvind understood what Sevagram had made of him. Not just the capacity to act under pressure, but the willingness to stand by a patient when standing by them cost something.

A Grandfather’s Prophecy

He was born on 3 December 1962 in Jalgaon, in his grandmother’s house — though the official records give his birthday as 3 September. His father was a clerk at the Reserve Bank of India in Mumbai, and the family lived modestly, not far above the poverty line. Arvind was the third of three children. There were no doctors in the family, no white coats in anyone’s memory.

The prophecy came from his grandfather. Lying sick in a hospital bed, he held the boy’s hand and said, with the quiet certainty of the very old: “This boy — he will be a doctor.” Nobody thought much of it at the time. But the words stayed.

When Arvind completed his schooling and the time came to prepare for medical entrance exams, he had almost nothing to work with. No coaching classes, no surplus textbooks. He read only what was prescribed in the prospectus, supplemented by whatever the school librarian could spare. His father, a steady man of modest means, pressed him to study Gandhian thought seriously. Arvind read what he could. He appeared for the PMT. The result, when it came, was both Nair Medical College in Mumbai and MGIMS Sevagram. His father had recently been transferred to Nagpur. Sevagram was closer, and Gandhiji’s shadow still fell across its compound. The decision made itself.

There was, however, a problem. The admission fee was eight thousand rupees. Arvind had six.

At the counter, certain he would be sent home, he confessed the shortfall. The clerk, Mr. Gawli, looked at him and smiled. “Don’t worry, Arvind. Pay later. Sevagram won’t send you away.” It was, he would say for years afterward, his first lesson at the college: humanity came before paperwork.

The Boy Without Books

He arrived by passenger train from Nagpur — ticket price, four rupees — carrying a small bag and very little else. The campus was modest, neem-lined, and unhurried in the way of places that have never had to prove themselves. A tall senior, passing by, lifted Arvind’s bag without asking and walked him to the ashram. He left without giving his name.

The fortnight of orientation at Gandhi’s ashram passed in prayers, sweeping, and the slow rhythms of khadi. On Independence Day, the batch shifted to Boys’ Hostel Block A. The cohort was fractured along the usual lines — Pune-Mumbai boys versus Vidarbha locals, English speakers versus Marathi medium, the comfortable versus the rest. Arvind belonged to the last category. He had no books at all.

One morning in Anatomy, Dr. Malathi — the department’s most feared presence — called out his roll number. She held his notebook open, squinting at it.

“What have you written here?”

The pages were full of bones and muscles rendered phonetically in Marathi: humorous for humerus, temparal guessed at from sound. She marched him directly to Dr. G.K. Hari Rao, the Head of Anatomy, and explained. Rao listened, reached into his shelf, and pulled out his own copy of Gray’s Anatomy.

“Take this, Arvind. Study from this book.”

It was the first English medical text he had ever owned. When a senior student, Deepak Telwane, graduated years later, Dr. Rao told him: “Give your books to Arvind.” Decades afterward, Arvind would still remind Telwane that he had quite literally lived on borrowed books.

By the end of first MBBS, to everyone’s disbelief including his own, he topped the university in Anatomy with honours.

Three Hundred Rupees

Every month, his father sent three hundred rupees. The mess bill was exactly that. To save money, Arvind skipped meals or split a plate with a friend. A batata vada from Babulal’s canteen cost fifty paise. The group would pool what coins they had, buy one, and divide it three ways. Once, during a religious fast, Babulal quietly instructed his waiter to make sabudana vada for the boy. The gesture was wordless and warm, and Arvind never forgot it.

The students with money went to the Indian Coffee House for dosas. Those without gathered at Babulal’s over a glass of cutting chai. Arvind was the latter. He had a black-painted second-hand bicycle, later upgraded to a Luna scooter — a vehicle that became his signature. Colleagues spotted him strapping an ECG machine onto the back of it with a length of rope. Patients came to know him as the Luna-wala Doctor. He tried, with limited success, to teach Dr. S. Chhabra to ride it during their residency years. She declined the offer repeatedly.

Songs, Plays, and the Madman

Sevagram was not only examinations. Arvind acted in the Marathi play Zopi Gelela Jaga Jhala, playing a madman for five luminous minutes. His friends said he played it far too convincingly. At an inter-medical competition in Nagpur, Jasbinder Kaur from their class had barely begun singing when rowdy students from GMC began jeering. Arvind stepped forward, sang a Marathi folk number — Chal Turu Turu — and the hall quietened. He was given a consolation prize. Only then did they allow Jasbinder to finish.

Biochemistry was his perennial enemy. In an examination one year, a visiting external asked the entire class to name the chemical constituents of a paan — supari, kattha, chuna. A dozen students, including Arvind, stood frozen, and a dozen failed. Anatomy, by contrast, had become something close to devotion. Dr. Malathi walked with him in the evenings under the campus stars, quizzing him as they went.

“Don’t answer immediately,” she advised him once. “Pause. Think. Examiners don’t like quick mouths. And a week before the exam, stop reading and start teaching your classmates. The day before, play table tennis.”

He followed her counsel to the letter. The night before his Anatomy practicals, he and Pandurang Rao played table tennis until the nerves dissolved. The next day, the external examiner, Professor Kate from IGMC Nagpur, asked Arvind to describe the coracoclavicular ligament. Arvind quoted Gray’s Anatomy. The examiner looked at him with faint amusement — the ligament bore his name in the standard text. He nodded. Arvind walked out.

He had topped Nagpur University in Anatomy, the only student to do so with honours that year. The boy who had once rendered humerus phonetically in Marathi had arrived somewhere.

A Twist of Fate

He had wanted Paediatrics. His friend Nisha Shah wanted Ophthalmology. That year, the Ophthalmology department lost its guide; the seat vanished. Nisha’s parents came from Ghatkopar to make a case. If Arvind took Medicine instead, Nisha could have Paediatrics. Arvind agreed. By that small act of generosity, he became a physician rather than a paediatrician.

Three years under Dr. O.P. Gupta, Dr. A.P. Jain, Dr. Ulhas Jajoo, Dr. S.P. Kalantri, and Dr. Vivek Poflee shaped him in ways he would spend the rest of his life drawing on. They were strict, measured, and inspiring. They taught him that medicine was less about prescribing than about listening.

After Sevagram

He went to Mumbai after his MD. With almost no money, he found work as a registrar in the municipal hospital in Malad, where his classmate Geeta Menon was also posted. A gynaecologist named Dr. Arun Apte took an interest in him.

“Save money for five years,” Apte said. “Then start your own practice. Small beginnings, steady growth.”

Arvind followed the advice. A modest seven-bed nursing home grew into a respected practice in Mumbai. The wealth he accumulated was not financial but something harder to count — the trust of patients who kept returning.

In 1990, he married Meena, a paediatrician from Belgaum. Their elder daughter became a paediatrician. Their younger daughter works with children with special needs. Meena was the architecture of their children’s upbringing, the stability behind the household. She developed metastatic breast cancer and passed away in 2022. Arvind is still, in his own words, finding his footing.

He still rides a scooter. No car, no clinic with marble floors. Patients smile when they see him arrive. That smile, he has decided, is wealth enough.

⸻

Dr. Arvind Ghongane completed his MD in Internal Medicine from MGIMS Sevagram. He practised for decades as a physician in Mumbai, building a reputation rooted in clinical precision and patient trust. He rides a scooter to work. His classmates still call him the Luna-wala Doctor.