The Clerk and the Certificate

She had the certificate. The problem was the wording.

She had won a national-level elocution competition while studying at JB Petit High School for Girls in Mumbai — a distinction she was proud of, had kept the certificate for, and had produced at the Mumbai medical college admissions office in 1977 with the expectation that it would earn her the twenty grace marks that might compensate for the difference between her examination score and the cut-off. The clerk looked at the certificate, looked at her, and returned it.

“It must mention university, madam. Not national.”

That was it. Twenty marks, and the distinction on the certificate was national rather than university-level. She was not admitted to a Bombay Corporation medical college. She enrolled, half-heartedly, in a BSc Pharmacy course, wondering how long it would take for the dream of medicine to loosen its grip.

It took less than a year.

The Form

During a pharmacy practical in 1977, a friend mentioned a medical college in a village called Sevagram, somewhere in Wardha district — a place students wore khadi, studied among farms, and lived in close contact with the communities they would eventually serve. Suchitra Pandit listened, and felt something stir.

She got the prospectus, filled the form, paid the fee by money order, and arranged to sit the entrance examination in Nagpur. She made her brother come with her — he was unenthusiastic about the journey but agreed. She bought the books prescribed for the Gandhian thought paper, read all four of them with concentrated attention, and found in the ideas of Sarvodaya and swaraj something she had not expected: a quality of poetry, of thought that reached beyond strategy into vision. The paper, when it came, did not feel like examination.

She passed. She was called for interview.

A Complicated Childhood

She was born on 11 August, in Kolkata — but childhood was a succession of cities, following her father, a food technologist trained in the United States who had worked at Central Food Research Institutes across India. Nagpur, Mysore, Bangalore, Bareilly, Delhi. Maharashtrian by heritage, she was educated at Nirmala Convent in Bareilly and St. Mary’s before arriving in Mumbai for JB Petit and, eventually, Mithibai College’s Inter Science course.

Marathi was her third language. She arrived in a Marathi-medium world with the particular confidence of someone who has had to adapt before and knows she can manage.

The Interview

She was not alone when she arrived in Nagpur for the entrance test — she had her brother, whom she had insisted accompany her. A stern professor on the interview panel looked at her file, noted that she was doing well in BSc Pharmacy, and asked the question directly: why leave it?

“I want to be a doctor,” she said.

That was her entire answer. He did not press her.

Her father, waiting outside, asked about donation fees. The clerk smiled. “Standard university fees. One thousand rupees khadi deposit. If she breaks the khadi code, we deduct. Otherwise, it’s refundable.”

She was in.

The Adjustments

The orientation at Gandhi Ashram was the particular immersion that Sevagram required of all its students. Electricity was unreliable. Food was plain. Rules were strict. When they asked for volunteers for toilet-cleaning duty, Suchitra stepped forward while others hesitated. Her teachers noticed.

Ragging followed, as it always did. Seniors from other states called the Bombay students soft, too accustomed to comfort. She ignored them. “They’ll know us better soon,” she said. They did. The seniors who ragged her most became, over time, her closest friends — among them Aruna Jain, Mamta Javalekar, and Nishita from the 1976 batch, whose friendships have outlasted all the years since.

There were four of them from Mumbai: Swaraj Chaudhary, Mohini Gandhi, Pradeep Sood, and her. They walked in straight lines during ragging season, eyes lowered, dependent on seniors for mundane transactions like buying idli-sambar at the India Coffee House. In their free time between lectures, they found each other and laughed about it.

Karanji Kaji

The village posting was Karanji Kaji — small, without electricity, a dialect she did not speak, with the perpetual worry, in Vidarbha’s fields, of snakes. Her assigned partner for the posting did not appear. She went alone.

The villagers welcomed her with sweets and taak and the particular trust with which rural communities received the young doctors-in-training who came to them. They shared their illnesses. They shared their stories. They treated her, she said later, like a daughter. She followed Dr. Ulhas Jajoo on foot through the surrounding hamlets, collecting health data from huts she would not have been able to find alone. The smell of untreated ulcers and infected wounds had nauseated her at first. Within weeks, it was simply part of the work.

The Sevagram summers were punishing — taps ran hot, fans circulated hot air, air coolers were unavailable, and relief came only with the monsoon. She survived the summers, as they all did, through the fellowship of shared misery.

Eight Years

She became a doctor. Then a specialist. She built, over the following decades, a practice in obstetrics and gynaecology that brought patients from across the country to her door. She spoke at conferences; she received awards; she trained residents who themselves went on to careers she could trace. The girl who had been turned away from Bombay’s medical colleges because a certificate said national rather than university became, by any measure, one of the profession’s distinguished practitioners.

When the Sevagram WhatsApp group buzzes with old photographs and unchanged jokes, she finds herself back in the village immediately — the khadi uniforms, the brinjal curry in the mess, the sound of bhajans in Gandhi Ashram’s morning air, the unreserved train compartments that brought them all home.

Fifty years, she says. Fifty years and Sevagram has not faded. It has grown more vivid.

Dr. Suchitra Pandit completed her MBBS at MGIMS Sevagram and post-graduate training in obstetrics and gynaecology. She built a distinguished clinical practice and taught students of medicine for decades. She lives in Mumbai. She was once a girl who missed twenty grace marks. Sevagram, she says, gave her everything else.