The DTC bus that morning was doing what Delhi buses have always done: lurching through traffic with magnificent indifference to the schedules printed on its side. Samir Mewar had climbed aboard at his hostel stop, found a handhold near the window, and opened the notes he had been revising for weeks. The examination centre in R.K. Puram was an hour away. The Gandhian Thought paper was first.

He had bought the four recommended books from a quiet bookshop near Rajghat, just opposite Gandhi Samadhi, where such things were sold to the occasional serious buyer and the more frequent ceremonial one. He had read them cover to cover, highlighted pages, scribbled in the margins, and revised them again that morning at lunch. On the bus, swaying in the Delhi heat, he went through them a last time. When the paper began, he wrote until the final bell.

Most candidates for the MGIMS entrance that year treated Gandhian Thought as a paper to be survived rather than engaged. Samir had decided otherwise. When the results appeared, he had topped the written list for non-Maharashtra candidates. There were thirty seats in that category; after reserved quotas, fewer than twenty remained open. He had earned his.

His friend Rakesh Sood moved to the top slot after the interview, which placed Samir second. He did not mind. He was in.

Dhanbad, and a Dream of Engines

He was born on 28 March 1958 in Dhanbad, a coal town in what is now Jharkhand, where the earth beneath the streets held its own kind of energy and the air in certain seasons carried the particular smell of industry and effort. His father, Harsukhrai R. Mewar, had studied to the tenth standard and worked as a clerk in a coal mine office. His mother, Pramila Mewar, had studied to the third class. She managed the household with quiet strength and the particular competence of a woman who had never needed a formal education to understand what a family requires.

They were six children: an elder sister, two older brothers, Samir, his twin, and a younger brother. His sister went to Mount Carmel School. Samir and his twin attended De Nobili School in Dhanbad, a missionary-run institution whose discipline was real and whose academic standards were not negotiable. It was the kind of schooling that left a residue of rigour that stays useful long after the specific lessons are forgotten.

By 1975, he was at Zakir Husain College in Delhi, enrolled in B.Sc. Physics, and privately dreaming of aeronautical engineering. The dream was clear enough to act on: he went to Calcutta to prepare for the engineering entrance examinations.

Calcutta, and a Reckoning

The city was not what he had imagined. The landlord was indifferent, the food was poor, and the loneliness of a teenage boy far from home in an unfamiliar city settled over him with the particular weight of a mistake you cannot yet admit to yourself. He had spent his father’s money. He had nothing to show for it. The thought of facing his father with this news was worse, for a time, than the situation itself.

It was his school friend Alok Shrivastava who offered the way out, though he would not have called it that at the time. Alok was in Delhi, preparing for medical entrance examinations, and he spoke to Samir about it with the easy confidence of someone who has found his direction. Something in the conversation landed. Medicine, Samir calculated, was a plan his father could be told about without the preceding conversation about engineering having to be admitted in full. Delhi was also familiar ground: his elder brother studied there, an aunt lived in the city.

He moved to Delhi. Alok Shrivastava, who would go on to become a professor of pathology at CMC Vellore, had nudged him toward a life. Neither of them knew it then. They were just two small-town boys chasing different versions of the same ambition.

The List of Six Colleges

The year was 1977, and medical entrance examinations demanded a kind of dispersed courage: you applied everywhere that did not require domicile, sat every paper, waited across multiple results. Samir applied to AIIMS Delhi, CMC Vellore, PGIMS Chandigarh, JIPMER Pondicherry, BHU, and MGIMS Sevagram. He also applied to the medical colleges in Patna and Dhanbad, where local connection might help.

Of MGIMS he knew only fragments: that it was far, that it followed Gandhian principles, that getting in was harder than it appeared. When the notification arrived for the entrance examination, he prepared with the thoroughness that had always been his instinct. He went to the Rajghat bookshop, bought the Gandhian texts, and read them as he would read anything he intended to be examined on: completely, carefully, with a pencil in his hand.

That preparation, made without any guarantee that it would matter, was the decision that determined everything.

The Interview, and Mr. Deshmukh

Two days before the interview, he and his father arrived in Wardha by the Eastern Railway. There was one hotel near the railway station that served both as accommodation and restaurant; they stayed there. His father had come along, perhaps more nervous than his son.

The interview itself has since faded almost entirely from memory. He remembers Dr. Singh and Dr. M.L. Sharma on the panel; the questions they asked have dissolved. What he remembers clearly is the feeling of sitting in that room and understanding that the written examination had been within his control, while the interview was not. They could have chosen otherwise and justified it. He was aware of this, and aware that there was nothing to be done about it except answer as honestly as he could.

When his name appeared on the final selection list, the feeling was, as he described it years later, pure elation.

What followed was a small scene that stayed with him longer than the interview itself. After the selection, they were directed to meet Mr. Bhausaheb Deshmukh, the administrator who managed admissions. His father, a modest man from a coal town who had no experience of institutions where money did not eventually enter the conversation, leaned forward quietly and asked: “Sir, how much donation do we need to pay?”

Mr. Deshmukh burst out laughing.

“Donation? Here? No, no. Everything here is on merit. Your son got in because he earned it. All you need to pay are the regular tuition and hostel fees.”

His father’s sigh, long and heavy with relief, was the sound of a man discovering that the world occasionally works as it is supposed to.

The Fortnight at Gandhi Ashram

His first impression of Sevagram was honest: it was remote. Wardha was ten kilometres away, and the college sat in a landscape of flat fields and wide sky that had nothing of the coal town energy he had grown up in. But remoteness, he found, has its own intelligence. The silence of the place did not oppress him. It grew on him slowly, the way habits grow when they are not noticed.

Before the academic year began came the orientation camp at Gandhi Ashram — a fortnight that had nothing to do with stethoscopes or anatomy books and everything to do with a different kind of education. Morning prayers at dawn, cooking duties, sweeping floors, cleaning utensils, cleaning the sandas. The concept of seva — self-service as a form of discipline rather than a form of servitude — was entirely new to him. He had come to become a doctor. He found himself, first, learning to clean a bathroom without resentment.

The schedule was structured, the days were full, and the gaps between scheduled activities were filled with the inventive mischief of a group of teenagers who had not yet found better ways to spend their energy. One night, someone rang the Ashram prayer bell at three in the morning instead of five, jolting the entire camp into waking prayers in the dark. On another occasion, a group returned from Wardha at two in the morning and proceeded to wake their batchmates, announcing with great gravity that it was time for morning prayers. His batchmate Batra, a man of genuine conscientiousness, actually got up, took a shower, and was making his way to the prayer ground before he understood what had happened.

These were, he would say later, the purest days of the whole seven years — untouched by examinations, by clinical anxieties, by the slow accumulation of medical responsibility. A fortnight of austerity and laughter in equal measure, before everything got serious.

Block A, Room A-32

After the camp, the batch moved into Block A of the boys’ hostel. He was in room A-32 in the first year. In the second year, they shifted to Block E, which remained home for the rest of the MBBS. He was never a morning person; early classes had a tendency to proceed without him unless the subject was one he had decided, for his own reasons, was worth the alarm. He did not pretend otherwise, then or later.

The friends who formed around him were partly circumstantial — proximity on the same hostel floor creates a specific kind of closeness that has nothing to do with selection and everything to do with the fact that you are always there when someone needs tea at eleven at night. Ravi Gupta he had known from his Delhi days. Rakesh Sood, Varinder Bedi, Danny Naik, and Ravi Bhatnagar lived on the same floor; they became, in the way of medical students everywhere and in no way more than in Sevagram, a small, self-sufficient world.

They spent hours together discussing cases, and hours not discussing cases. They cycled to Wardha in groups on the evenings when Sevagram’s small inventory of entertainments had been exhausted. In the final year, a deficit of surgical attendance required a group of them to forgo summer vacation and attend make-up clinics. Dr. Chaturvedi agreed to teach them through the break. They grumbled. They were grateful, in retrospect, with the particular gratitude one develops for people who gave you more than you were owed.

The Non-Aligned Group

The Students’ Council elections were a civic education that no curriculum had thought to include.

The batch divided, as batches do, along the fault lines that were available: the Maharashtra group, the Punjabi contingent from North India, and what came to be known, with some amusement, as the non-aligned group — students from Bihar, Bengal, Odisha, and the southern states who had arrived without the pre-existing solidarity of a regional majority. The two larger camps were roughly matched. This meant that the non-aligned held the deciding vote. In electoral terms, they were the kingmakers.

What followed was Samir’s first education in the mechanics of negotiation. The canvassing was serious — late-night conversations, carefully positioned cups of chai, arguments that mixed genuine principle with transparent self-interest in proportions that varied by candidate. Nobody called it politics. It was, of course, exactly that. He absorbed its rhythms without quite realising he was learning something that would be useful to him for the rest of his professional life: how to sit at a table where multiple interests are present and find the outcome that most people can live with.

What Sevagram Built

A coal town boy who had gone to Calcutta to study engineering and found himself unable to face his father came, by the indirect route of a friend’s suggestion and a Gandhian bookshop near Rajghat, to a place that had nothing obviously in common with anything he had planned. Sevagram was remote, austere, strange in its demands, and entirely unlike any institution he had imagined himself attending.

It gave him medicine, which was what he had come for. It gave him, more slowly and less obviously, something harder to name: the capacity to sit in rooms that are not quite comfortable, in institutions that make demands of a person rather than simply accommodating them, and to find, after the initial resistance, that the demands were worth meeting. The sandas cleaned at dawn. The prayer bell at five in the morning. The summer of make-up clinics. The solidarity of the non-aligned.

He thinks of Alok Shrivastava sometimes — the friend from school who suggested medicine with the casual certainty of a man who already knew what he was doing. He thinks of his father’s sigh in Mr. Deshmukh’s office, and what it meant to come from a family for whom the honest answer — no donation, no queue-jumping, your son earned his place — was not something to be taken for granted. He thinks of Batra heading toward the prayer ground at two in the morning, wet from a shower, before the laughter of the corridor reached him.

These are the things that last. The examinations are a matter of record. The knowledge has been applied and extended across a career. But the texture of those years — the particular quality of life in Block E, in Room A-32, on the cycle road to Wardha at dusk, in the half-dark of the Ashram prayer hall — that is what Sevagram finally is, when the degrees and the professional achievements are set aside and a man asks himself simply what the place meant.

Dr. Samir Mewar completed his MBBS from MGIMS Sevagram with the batch of 1977. He topped the written entrance examination for non-Maharashtra candidates in his year, clearing a field drawn from across India.