Two Shortest Players at the Crease

The sun hung low over Bombay, turning the cricket field into a canvas of gold and shadow. He walked to the crease, bat in hand, the smell of wet grass mixing with the tang of sea breeze drifting in from Marine Drive. Across the pitch, Sunny adjusted his gloves — compact, calm, already studying the bowler with the quiet precision that would make him a legend.

They were the two shortest players in the XI. They didn’t talk much out there. Cricket was their shared language — a blend of rivalry and trust. Sunil Gavaskar would send the next delivery skimming past midwicket; Akil Taher would manufacture a run somewhere off the edge. They ran in sync, stealing singles, their classmates cheering from the boundary.

This was St. Xavier’s High School, Bombay, before either of them knew what their lives would become.

Akil could never have guessed that his next innings would unfold on the red soil of Sevagram — far from Bombay’s noise and sea breeze, in a place where khadi was compulsory, meat was forbidden, and discipline was woven into daily life.

The Choice That Wasn’t Quite a Choice

He had grown up in Bombay, studied at St. Xavier’s, then completed his B.Sc. Part I at St. Francis de Sales College in Nagpur. His father, Mohamed Taherbhai, and his mother, Salma Taherbhai, kept their home grounded in values and hard work. His sister was in the UK, helping her husband run a grocery store. His brother was in the US, pursuing engineering. Two cousins were doctors who had moved to Germany.

In those days, if you didn’t have rich parents, you became either an engineer or a doctor. He chose medicine. A small newspaper advertisement for MGIMS caught his eye. He took the train to Wardha, appeared for the entrance test and interview, and left feeling he had not performed as well as he’d hoped.

He was selected anyway.

When he joined MGIMS in 1970, it was not out of devotion to Gandhian ideals. The truth was simpler and, he has always insisted, less noble: most of them ended up there because they hadn’t secured admission elsewhere. He states this without embarrassment, with the equanimity of someone who has long since concluded that the origin of a journey matters less than where it leads.

He broke every rule he could. The khadi requirement, the vegetarian meals, the prohibition on alcohol — all were circumvented with the cheerful ingenuity of someone who considers rules a challenge rather than a framework. Whenever the opportunity arose, they smuggled in non-vegetarian food and alcohol like contraband. In the first year, the restrictions felt so suffocating that the batch staged a quiet protest: the boys scattered to their hometowns across India, while the girls showed up for the internal exam without pens or pencils, rendering themselves unable to write a single answer.

The Man Who Slept Eight Hours

His closest companion was Shankar Raman — the most brilliant student in the batch, by general consensus, and the one who appeared to study the least. While the rest of the batch burned the midnight oil before examinations, Shankar calmly took his eight hours of sleep, arrived fresh in the morning, and outperformed them all. He also owned a Royal Enfield motorcycle — a significant social asset in a campus where most students walked or cycled to Wardha — and together he and Akil spent countless hours roaring through the dusty roads of Sevagram and into the town.

Akil was engaged to Nafi during his MBBS years. She visited Sevagram often and would ride pillion on Shankar’s motorcycle. One day, lost in his own thoughts, he failed to notice she had fallen off somewhere along the road — until locals flagged him down and asked him to stop. This story, told at reunions for fifty years, has been improved neither in the telling nor by time.

He was the first in the batch to marry — during final MBBS, a fact his batchmates teased him about relentlessly. First MBBS, then shaadi, they said. He replied: first bride, then MBBS. The wedding was in Bombay, at the Oberoi Sheraton. His batchmates arrived wide-eyed in the city’s glitter and spent the reception marveling at a world that felt very far from their hostel rooms in Sevagram.

What the Campus Was

The campus was a genuine melting pot — half the students from Maharashtra, half from across India. Punjabis, Gujaratis, Bengalis, Keralites, Tamil speakers. They learned each other’s languages and food habits and traditions, forging bonds that Akil considers among the most durable of his life.

Holi was the one festival when all barriers dissolved — students and teachers together, bhang consumed, wet and dry colours flung indiscriminately, the whole campus becoming one noisy, chaotic family for a day. It was the rare moment when the hierarchy of the institution simply did not apply.

Among the memorable personalities was Nanabhai, who was at Sevagram for social work and was married to a Japanese woman. One evening, he invited a small group including Akil to dinner. Someone asked Nanabhai’s little daughter what she wanted to be when she grew up. Without hesitation, she said: a sweeper.

Nanabhai looked at her and said: then be the best sweeper in the world.

That sentence — delivered without pause, without irony, without any of the discomfort that most adults would have felt at such an answer — has stayed with Akil for fifty years. It contained a life philosophy more complete than anything taught in a lecture hall.

In 1970, while the campus was still under construction, a building collapsed. Several labourers were critically injured and some died. As grim as it was, the surgeon on site remarked that this would be the best hands-on training the students would ever receive. It was a stark and sobering introduction to the realities of medicine — and to the realities of the era, when patient rights, informed consent, and privacy had not yet acquired the weight they now carry.

The Return to Gavaskar

He carried the Sevagram formation — discipline, camaraderie, the habit of clinical attention learned in wards that were inadequately equipped and therefore required actual clinical skill — into a medical career in the United States, where he has lived and practised for decades.

Three years ago, destiny brought Akil and Sunil Gavaskar together again. Both were invited as keynote speakers at the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin. They had some heartfelt conversations. His wife asked Gavaskar what went through his mind when facing the towering West Indian fast bowler Wes Hall. Without a pause, Gavaskar said: Concentration. I only looked at the ball, never at how menacing he looked. Then he smiled and added that even in a noisy, crowded room, he could immerse himself in a book without distraction.

That focus and calm under pressure had defined Gavaskar as one of the greatest batsmen the world had ever seen. It had also, Akil thought, described what Sevagram at its best had tried to produce: the doctor who, when the clinical situation is frightening, looks only at the patient, not at how menacing the circumstances appear.

When he looks back at MGIMS, he does not see it through the reverential lens that some of his batchmates apply. He came without idealism and was formed anyway — by the discipline he resisted, by the friendships he did not plan, by the mischief that became brotherhood, and by a campus that, for all its rules he broke, gave him something that no amount of rebellion could undo.

What began as a reluctant choice turned into one of the most transformative experiences of his life. He is quite clear about this. He is also clear that he broke every rule he could.

Both things are entirely true.

Dr. Akil Taherbhai completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the second batch of 1970. He received his postgraduate medical training in the United States and has practised medicine there for several decades. He was born and raised in Bombay, where he played cricket alongside Sunil Gavaskar at St. Xavier’s High School. He lives in the United States.