She was standing before a class of restless third-graders in Thrissur, chalk in hand, trying to hold their attention, when her father appeared at the doorway. He was panting. He had run all the way from the post office.

“You have been selected,” he said, his voice trembling. “Medical college. Sevagram.”

In that moment, in a schoolroom that smelled of chalk dust and small children’s tiffins, the life of Pushpam Chakupurakal changed direction.

A Temple Town Childhood

She was born on 3 February 1948 in Thrissur, in a home not far from the Vadakkunnathan temple, where the annual Pooram festival fills the streets with twenty-one caparisoned elephants and the air with the thunder of percussion. Her father ran a small pet shop. Her mother, quiet and strong, raised six children — four daughters and two sons — with the practical economy of a woman who understood that love and resources were not the same thing.

Almost her entire childhood unfolded behind convent walls. Primary school at the local sisters’ convent. High school at St. Antony’s, where she lived in the hostel. Parents dropped their daughters at the gate at the start of term and collected them only in the vacations. The world outside — its streets, its films, its unguarded conversations — did not exist for the girls inside. The bell, the rosary, the dormitory, and the classroom were the universe.

Later she moved to St. Mary’s College, Thrissur, another all-girls institution. When she finally arrived in Sevagram in August 1969, it was the first co-educational institution she had ever attended. At twenty-one, she was walking into a world of men for the first time.

A Mother’s Instruction

The ambition to become a doctor had a specific origin. Her mother had spent years in quiet submission to a domineering mother-in-law, and had watched that submission narrow her world to the dimensions of a kitchen. “Study hard, Pushpam,” she would whisper. “Be independent. Don’t let anyone dictate your days and nights.” The instruction carried the weight of everything her mother had not been allowed to do.

Her father, though not formally educated, supported her in his own undemonstrative way. And then there were the doctors at the government hospital near their home — a couple who moved through the neighbourhood with a settled authority that seemed to her, as a child, like the most admirable thing a person could possess. They became her models without knowing it.

She had just finished her B.Sc. when her father spotted a small advertisement in a local Malayalam newspaper — not The Hindu, not The Times of India, but a local paper, the kind that rarely carried news of consequence. A new medical college was starting at Sevagram. The family had never heard of the place. He insisted she apply.

The Journey and the Forgotten Word

The journey to Sevagram from Thrissur was her first real encounter with a country larger than Kerala. She and her father travelled to Madras, then boarded the Grand Trunk Express to Wardha East. Her father knew no English and very little Hindi; she knew Hindi as a school subject but had never spoken it aloud with any confidence.

At a station somewhere along the route, he asked her to get water from a shop. She froze. The word — the simplest word — had gone entirely from her mind. Pani. She could not remember it. They laughed about it later, but in the moment it was a small humiliation that sharpened her sense of how far she was from home.

From Wardha station they took a tonga, the horse-drawn carriage jingling along dusty roads lined with tamarind trees. She had never ridden in one before. She felt that she had stepped not merely into another state but into another era.

At the interview, she was asked: why do you want to become a doctor? She spoke of the convent education — its discipline, its emphasis on compassion and selfless service. She spoke of her poor parents and their encouragement. She spoke of her dream to serve. It was everything she had. It was enough.

A Village Unlike Any Convent

Sevagram in 1969 was austere in ways that might have defeated a girl less prepared by years of institutional life. The students rose before dawn for the Sarva Dharma Prarthana — an all-faith prayer that moved through Sanskrit, Urdu, and English without pause. Khadi was compulsory. Meat was discouraged. The shramdan — sweeping, cleaning, the physical work of maintaining a campus — was expected of everyone, boys and girls alike.

For Pushpam, none of this was foreign. The convent had already given her prayer, service, and discipline. Sevagram felt less like an imposition and more like an extension, only simpler, more austere, and set in the red earth of Vidarbha rather than the rain-washed green of Kerala.

What was new was the company. She was one of fourteen girls in a batch of sixty, and her closest companion through all five years was Saroj Taksande, with whom she shared a room from the first week. They shared clothes, worries, notes, and the specific domestic intimacy that forms between two people who have slept in the same room through five monsoons and three professional examinations.

The other girls became her world: Jayashree Deshmukh, Rajani Rane, Lata Chaudhuri, Bhakti Dastane. Bhakti, a Wardha girl, would disappear on Friday afternoons to spend weekends at home and return on Monday mornings carrying news of the outside world. For the rest, the college was the world.

Wardha on Sunday

The height of excitement in those years was a Sunday film at Durga Talkies in Wardha. The journey itself — on foot, by bus, through the flat Vidarbha landscape — was half the pleasure. Once, she and Jayashree Deshmukh walked to Wardha at dawn, drank coffee at a small roadside stall, and took the bus back. A morning’s adventure that cost almost nothing and was remembered for decades.

Once, they bunked an anatomy session to catch a matinee. It was, she would concede later, perhaps not the most responsible use of their time. But the memory of sitting in the dark of Durga Talkies, watching a film while their classmates bent over cadavers in the dissection hall, had a flavour that no responsible choice could have provided.

Within two years, she had learnt enough Marathi to converse with patients in the wards. For a girl who had once forgotten the word for water in Hindi, it was a quiet triumph.

From Sevagram to Zambia

After internship, she went to GMC Nagpur for a diploma in gynaecology and obstetrics, then returned to Thrissur to work at the newly founded Amla Cancer Hospital. In August 1978 she married. Her husband had been posted to Zambia, and by December of that year she was living in Lusaka — a city and continent she had not imagined when she stood in a Thrissur classroom watching her father run across the courtyard with a yellow telegram.

The Zambia years were shaped by an epidemic. HIV moved through the population with a speed and brutality that overwhelmed every system. She watched it enter families through husbands returning from the mines, pass to wives, transmit to newborns. Death was not an occasional visitor to the wards; it was a resident. Those years left marks that would not fade.

In 2004, she completed a public health degree at Johns Hopkins, focusing on HIV treatment and prevention. That same year, she lost her husband. She stayed in Zambia, which had by then become home in the fullest sense — a place she had arrived at as a stranger and had remade, year by year, into somewhere she belonged.

The Long View

She finds it difficult now to attend the annual reunions of the 1969 batch, though she longs to. The distance is real; so is the passage of time. But when she closes her eyes and returns to 1969, she finds it still vivid — the seventeen-year-old girl from Kerala who arrived in Sevagram not knowing what pani meant, who had never shared a classroom with a boy, who had learnt everything about prayer and nothing yet about the country she was living in.

Sevagram gave her medicine. It also gave her, at twenty-one, her first clear encounter with India as a whole — its languages, its conflicts, its affections, the particular quality of human warmth that she found between people who came from everywhere and found themselves, by some mixture of idealism and accident, in the same dusty village trying to become doctors.

She carried that warmth into Zambia. She carried it through the epidemic. She carries it still.

The red soil after the first monsoon rain — fragrant, briefly cool — remains the image she reaches for when she thinks of Sevagram. Some memories, she says, do not fade. They deepen.

Dr. T.R. Pushpam completed her Diploma in Gynaecology and Obstetrics from GMC Nagpur. She practiced at Amla Cancer Hospital, Thrissur, before moving to Zambia, where she spent decades working in women’s health and HIV medicine. In 2004 she completed a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, with a focus on HIV prevention. She continues to live in Zambia.