“Fit? How can this boy be fit for admission? He came with a plaster on his leg!”

The words carried from the director’s office across the Kasturba Hospital courtyard, and Jayant Vagha, sitting in a wheelchair in the July heat, heard them clearly. He had fractured his leg before the admission process and arrived at MGIMS in a state that did not, on the face of it, suggest a promising medical career. Dr. Sushila Nayar was not wrong to be dubious. But she had not yet spoken to Dr. Ramdas Belsare.

Belsare, the orthopaedic consultant, was a man who preferred plain speech. He tugged at the plaster, studied the X-ray, delivered his assessment without softening it — if the fracture healed badly, there would be a limp — and then, in the same unflinching register, reversed the verdict. “Your head is not broken. Your brain is intact. Legs heal. This boy is fit.” The plaster was cut. Jayant was wheeled to the principal’s office. Dr. Nayar, who had just declared him unfit, found herself marking him fit instead. The ink dried. He was in.

He tells this story at every opportunity, and he has had many, because for forty-five years Jayant Vagha has been the unofficial historian of MGIMS Sevagram’s class of 1980. His batchmates still call him when they need to remember a roll number, a hostel room, a year. His own memory for these things is encyclopaedic, and he cannot entirely explain why. It is simply the way his mind was made.

A Wardha Boy with Music in the Walls

He was born on 10 March 1963 in a house on what was then called Bachelor’s Road in Wardha — now Dr. J.C. Kumarappa Road — delivered not in any hospital but at home, by his Mai Talpade. This detail, which he notes with the wry pleasure of a paediatrician who knows exactly what the guidelines say about home deliveries, was accompanied by another tradition of doubtful modern sanction: his father, in the ancient custom, dipped a golden ring in honey and touched it to the newborn’s tongue. These were the origins of Jawant Vagha, doctor in waiting, in a house where the walls held music.

His mother was an accomplished classical vocalist, trained by a disciple of V.D. Paluskar; her gurubandhu was none other than Vasantrao Deshpande. She sang on All India Radio for nearly five decades. His maternal grandfather had served as Minister of Public Health in the Central Provinces cabinet in the 1940s. His father taught English at a school in Nagpur, then at Deenanath High School, where he also introduced his son to Tarkhadkar’s translation exercises and Wren and Martin’s grammar with the precision of a man who believed there was no shortcut to language. Jayant stood first in his class that year. The whispers that followed — that the son of the schoolteacher had merely benefited from proximity — annoyed his father enough to transfer him to Hadas High School, where the headmaster initially doubted whether the boy could manage the standards. He came second in several subjects. The headmaster came personally to apologise.

Medicine, however, was not Jayant’s idea. He has said so consistently, to anyone who has asked. It was his parents’ wish, and he followed it — which is not the same as reluctance, simply an honest account of how paths begin. His own passion was for stories: for the Marathi dramas his mother sang beside, for the history embedded in his grandfather’s career, for the way a well-placed detail could hold a listener more firmly than any argument.

He joined the Institute of Science in Nagpur for his B.Sc. Part I, where he performed without distinction in chemistry — a weakness that would re-emerge during the MBBS years with spectacular consequences. But in the Gandhian Thought paper of the MGIMS PMT, nurtured on Wardha’s political history and a grandfather who had met Gandhi, he scored 86 out of 100 — the highest in both Maharashtra and non-Maharashtra categories. It was this paper that carried him to Sevagram, fracture and all.

The Red Button and What Followed

The orientation camp was held in Rustam Bhavan inside Gandhi’s Ashram, boys sleeping on one side, girls on the other, all on reed mats on the floor. Krishna Mohan, a classmate from Andhra, rose at four each morning to clean the washroom before prayers, his Telugu-accented English sounding like music to Wardha ears. A transistor radio in the corner received crackling news of the world: Jimmy Carter had defeated Edward Kennedy. These were facts absorbed in the small hours of a different century, against the scent of khadi and mosquito coils, and they lodge themselves in memory as the significant and the trivial always do — without hierarchy, without apology.

After the fortnight, the batch moved into the A Block hostel. Rooms were allotted by PMT rank. Jayant chose Room 20, directly above the Bele and Premdas office, overlooking the Indian Coffee House. The ragging was immediate. Seniors instructed freshers to sew a bright red button onto the third spot of their shirts and to keep their eyes fixed on it — a prohibition against looking up that lasted, in practice, until some members of the batch simply refused to comply. Sheikh Zubair, a classmate of unusual nerve, actually jumped from the second floor when instructed to do so. He landed without injury. The seniors cheered. The ragging diminished after that, partly because it had nowhere obvious to escalate.

The mess food was relentless in its monotony. Every preparation, regardless of the vegetable it began with, arrived accompanied by potato. The word for this phenomenon was aloo, and it recurred like a motif across baingan, gobi, and palak, each time without apology. The Madras Hotel down the road served idlis and dosas whose fragrance drifted into the morning air as relief. Later, Kranti Gutta — father of badminton champion Jwala Gutta — opened another eatery across the road and introduced the batch to noodles with tomato ketchup. In 1980, in Sevagram, this qualified as exotic.

Anatomy offered joy. Jayant won the Kothari Brothers Gold Medal with 84 percent, placing him six marks below the university topper from GMC Nagpur. For a brief, heady season, he felt invincible. Then Pathology arrived, and with it Dr. Naseeruddin Khan.

Dr. Khan read his lectures from dog-eared notes, punctuating sentences with the particular hazard of heavy paan consumption. The first four rows of his classroom were reliably empty. His doctrine was absolute: reproduce the notes precisely. Jayant, young and overconfident, cited Robbins in his first pathology paper instead.

“Who is roll number thirteen?” The voice came in the classroom, the answer sheets redistributed, and the grade announced: two out of fifty. The paper was then torn into fragments and scattered in Jayant’s face like confetti at a celebration he had not been invited to attend. He sat in the wreckage of his answer sheet and understood, for the first time, something the Anatomy gold medal had not prepared him for: that knowledge is not always what is being measured.

Children and the Work of Staying

In October 1985, he married Sunita, who had just completed her MBBS at GMC Nagpur, five days before his MD Paediatrics examination began. The timing was neither planned nor resented; it was simply the tempo of a life that had found its pace. He spent that year almost entirely in the ward — rounds, admissions, the overnight emergencies that are paediatric medicine’s particular texture. His co-resident Paresh Desai, who married just months later, covered for him unfailingly on weekends, urging him home without complaint or expectation of return. “Go,” Paresh said, each Friday. “I’ll take care of your duties.” He went. It is a debt of friendship that Jayant has never forgotten.

He cleared his MD on the first attempt in 1988. He joined the department as a lecturer, worked alongside Kiran Shankar Banerjee through 1990, then resigned in early 1991 when it became clear that the institution had no permanent position to offer. He came back to Wardha — to the city where he was born, on a street that had changed its name, in a house that no longer stood — and opened his paediatric clinic on 16 March 1991.

Parents came. Word spread. He charged honestly. He did not over-investigate. He was careful with antibiotics and more careful with expensive brands. Some colleagues, watching his prescription pad, said he was too idealistic for the market. He did not argue. He understood that the reputation he was building was not the one they were tracking.

In 1997, Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College in Sawangi — where his wife Sunita would later head the Pathology department — invited him to join as a faculty member. He accepted. Twenty-eight years later, he is still there, teaching medical education to a college that was itself young when he arrived. He has supervised more than forty postgraduate students. His contribution to the assessment of teachers and teaching — a field known in the trade as medical education — has become a second vocation, running alongside clinical paediatrics without displacement.

He is still the unofficial archivist. He still remembers the roll numbers. He still notices, in every child who enters his clinic, the specific, unrepeatable weight of a small person’s trust placed in an adult’s competence. His mother’s voice, somewhere in the background of his earliest memory, continues to carry.

Dr. Jayant Vagha completed his MD in Paediatrics from MGIMS, Sevagram. He established a paediatric practice in Wardha in 1991 before joining the faculty of Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Sawangi, where he has worked for over twenty-five years. He has contributed extensively to medical education and postgraduate training. He lives and practises in Wardha.