The secretary, Ms. Bilimoria, had watched him haunt the corridor outside Dr. Praful Desai’s office for three days. Each morning he arrived early, waited with the patience of someone who has decided that this particular door will eventually open, and each afternoon he left without the conversation he had come for. On the fourth day, she pushed him in. “Go,” she said, with the exasperation of a person who finds waiting more painful than the thing being waited for. “Tell them what you have to say.”

He told them the truth: that he could easily secure a postgraduate seat at his parent institution in Sevagram, but returning there, or leaving Bombay, was not an option he was prepared to consider. He needed a surgical seat in the city. A vacancy had just opened. The university’s registration window was closing in two days. Dr. Desai, the director of Tata Memorial Hospital, looked at him and then at Dr. R.S. Rao, the medical superintendent. Something passed between them. They offered him the seat.

What followed was a sprint that Parag Shah still describes with slightly breathless pleasure: an overnight train to Sevagram on an unreserved berth, the migration certificate collected from the registrar’s office before it had time to wonder why someone wanted it so urgently, a dash to Nagpur, then back to Bombay. He arrived at the university office with forty-five minutes to spare. He was now an MS candidate in General Surgery at Tata Memorial, assigned to Dr. Ashok Mehta’s unit, and the story that began in a corridor had acquired its proper beginning.

The Trajectory Before Sevagram

He was born on 18 April 1962 in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, where his maternal grandfather had built a modest trading concern. His father, Dr. Anop Shantilal Shah — a physician trained in the 1956 batch of KEM Bombay — had briefly considered making a life in East Africa before returning to India months after his son’s birth. Parag arrived in Mumbai carried across the Indian Ocean by his mother, and the city of Ghatkopar became his permanent anchor from that point forward.

His father’s practice, his school at Gurukul across the lane from the family flat, and SIES College in Sion were the geography of his formation. At SIES, his parallel with Manish Kothari — same school, same college, same MGIMS, same internship at Sion Hospital — seemed too consistent to be coincidence. They had been shaped by the same institutions into people who were recognisably different but recognisably from the same place.

Why medicine? It was never quite in question. His father had set the pattern: a KEM-trained physician who spent his working life in honest private practice. Parag wanted to show that the pattern could be continued and perhaps exceeded. He sat for the PMT after a year of preparation that included reading every Gandhi-related text in the MGIMS prospectus list, having been briefed by Nisha Shah — his SIES classmate, already at MGIMS a year ahead — that the Gandhian Thought paper was not an afterthought but the decisive element. He sat the exam in Delhi, staying at Gujarat Bhavan, and qualified.

The early weeks in Sevagram unsettled him more than he had anticipated. His mother never visited the campus; his father came once. The fortnightly train home on the Calcutta Mail — newspaper sheets on the floor, three or four batchmates stretched across the unreserved compartment, the particular pleasure of home food waiting at the other end — became as necessary as sleep. The Bombay contingent cohered naturally: Manish, Parag, Sujata, Meena, and several others who found in each other’s company the mitigation of displacement.

Tata Memorial and the Education of a Surgeon

The postgraduate years at Tata Memorial were shaped by the particular character of the institution: a cancer hospital whose surgical faculty represented, in those years, India’s various communities and regions rather than a single elite tradition. The logic was partly sociological — patients felt more comfortable with surgeons who shared their language or heritage — and partly clinical, since the cases were severe and the operating lists long. Parag moved through postings at Central Railway Hospital, Mulund Municipal Hospital, Sion, and even a stint as locum registrar at KEM.

At KEM, on his very first emergency duty, a case of duodenal perforation arrived. He offered the procedure to the houseman, Samuel Thomas, thinking to be collegial. Samuel had performed ten cases but had never truly understood one; he said so afterward. The surgery went well because the MGIMS training had given Parag what he had not yet consciously inventoried: the fundamentals. Not technique borrowed from a particular operating style, but principle — the understanding of what the tissue was doing and why, which made the specific choice of how to address it secondary. Over butter-dripping pav bhaji after midnight, he silently thanked the teachers who had drilled this into him.

He completed his MS in 1988. In the years at Sion that followed — one as registrar before the MS, five as lecturer, one as associate professor — he encountered trauma medicine at a scale that forced innovation. A technique for perihepatic packing using a T-incision was published and received international attention. He introduced conservative, non-surgical management of splenic trauma when the reflex in most institutions was still to operate. The work had the character of all good surgical innovation: it began not with a theory but with a problem that the standard approach was not solving well enough.

A conference in Barcelona and France in his final year at Sion opened the door to laparoscopy. Liver transplant did not attract him — too dependent on machines, on the systems around the surgeon rather than the surgeon’s own skill. Laparoscopy was different: an extension of surgical judgment into a new visual and mechanical register. He returned to Bombay and, in 1998, performed the first laparoscopic surgery in a municipal hospital in the city — second only to Dr. T.E. Udwadia in the government sector.

Ghatkopar

He moved into private practice in Ghatkopar in 1998, renting a small chamber at Doshi Nursing Home for ₹2,000 a month. Each morning he walked to work from his family home. The connections that city-trained surgeons relied upon — the alumni network of a municipal hospital, the relationship capital accumulated over years of departmental socialising — were largely unavailable to him. He did not attempt to replicate them. He relied on one thing: that when a patient came to him, he would listen, examine, and think, and that the diagnosis would be correct and the management appropriate.

Word moved in the direction it always moves when trust accumulates. Mothers brought children. Patients returned. He charged honestly and prescribed without unnecessary investigation. The practice built itself on the same principles that had carried him from a corridor outside the director’s office to a surgical seat at Tata Memorial: patience, directness, and a refusal to perform what was not required.

He married Dr. Preeti Dadhich in 1991. She holds an MBRD from JJ Hospital and works alongside him. Their elder son Rishabh studied law at NALSAR, Hyderabad, and now heads the legal department at a technology company in Bangalore. Their younger son Naman studied engineering at the University of British Columbia, completed the CFA, and works in Toronto with a precious metals fund. The family’s range — surgeon, lawyer, financial analyst — maps the breadth of what the next generation made of the discipline it inherited.

The Second Ascent

Past fifty, his body delivered a series of unambiguous messages: cholesterol, blood pressure, a waistline that had its own momentum. He could have managed these with medications and minor adjustments. Instead he chose running and climbing, and discovered that the choice was not moderate but total.

In 2017, at fifty-five, he enrolled in the Basic Mountaineering Course at ABVIMAS in Manali. The age limit was thirty-five. The waiting list stretched more than a year. He was advised, by people who knew the course, that he would not last and certainly would not earn the top grade. He completed the course with an Alpha grade — the highest — and won the “Keep Himalaya Clean” award. The Advanced Mountaineering Course followed the next summer.

Since then: Kedarkantha, Har Ki Dun, Roopkund, Sandakphu, Everest Base Camp. The Chadar trek on the frozen Zanskar river, each step a negotiation with ice that would or would not hold. The Mongol100 race across frozen Khovsgol Lake in Mongolia at minus forty degrees. The Pangong Frozen Lake Marathon, where he stood at 19,341 feet on Kilimanjaro’s Uhuru Peak surrounded by four MGIMS alumni — Dr. Neena Naik Thosar among them — having climbed through the night. A Guinness World Record for the Pangong marathon. The New York Marathon.

Running came without athletic precedent. He had played no sport in school, no gully cricket in the lanes. What he had was the same quality that had carried him into Ms. Bilimoria’s office and then to the university registrar’s window with forty-five minutes to spare: the conviction that a thing worth doing was worth preparing for fully, and that the preparing was not separate from the doing but identical with it.

He is sixty-two years old. He still practises surgery in Ghatkopar. He is still climbing.

Dr. Parag Shah completed his MS in General Surgery from Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai. He established a laparoscopic surgical practice in Ghatkopar, performing what is credited as the first laparoscopic surgery in a Mumbai municipal hospital. His mountaineering achievements include summiting Kilimanjaro, Trishul, and Nun, and completing the Pangong Frozen Lake Marathon. He lives and practises in Ghatkopar, Mumbai.