In 1973, GMC Nagpur had three Mayas. Maya Khati. Maya Wanjari. Maya Bhaskarwar. Call out the name in the corridor and three heads turned. Fifty years later, it is worth asking what became of them.
Maya Khati was a farmer’s daughter from Warora. Her mother had rented two rooms in Wardha so her daughter could study science, and died before she saw her become a doctor. Maya joined Matru Seva Sangh and stayed twenty-five years. She performed nearly 50,000 tubectomies — batchmates compare the number to Tendulkar’s runs, only half in jest. She was also the first doctor at the Sangh to perform Caesarean sections, sparing Wardha’s women the trip to Sevagram.
Maya Wanjari was a Nagpur girl, a telegraph master’s daughter. In college she drew cartoons for the magazine. One showed two women watering a plant, still talking as it grew into a tree. It turned out to be a sketch of her own life. As a gynaecologist she built her practice around women the system usually ignores — the poor, the illiterate, the ones nobody had properly examined. She ran Daga Hospital, then Nagari Sahakari Rugnalaya, then her own nursing home. She kept listening. The plant kept growing.
Maya Bhaskarwar arrived from Chandrapur calling herself shy and taciturn, defeated by the city and by English. She found her footing in the hostel and her calling in anaesthesia. She married a surgeon, moved to Pune, and spent thirty years at BJ Medical College training the next generation of anaesthesiologists. The shy girl ended up training thirty MDs of her own.
Three Mayas, three different starting points — a farmer’s daughter, a telegraph master’s daughter, a transporter’s daughter. One counted patients in the tens of thousands, one counted them in attention given, one trained the people who would treat the rest of us. None of them sought praise. All of them earned it.
Maya means illusion. There was nothing illusory here.