Life in the PG Hostel

In 1979, a new postgraduate hostel came up on the GMC campus—freshly built, orderly, and unmistakably modern by our standards. For residents who had spent years adjusting to makeshift arrangements, it felt like a quiet luxury.

Until then, we lived in a dormitory with sixteen beds, no individual rooms, and no privacy. A tired resident would look for an empty bed, drop onto it as if shot, and steal whatever sleep he could before the next call dragged him back to the wards. That dormitory sat on the first floor of the hospital building—convenient, yes, but also noisy, crowded, and permanently half-awake.

The new hostel stood facing the dental college, solid and self-assured, with the wards and OPDs barely a hundred metres away. For once, exhaustion did not require a long walk.

Our hostel warden was Dr. H. C. Attal, then Associate Professor of Medicine—a man who combined discipline with his own brand of English. He was short, wore an untucked bush shirt with trousers and chappals, and spoke in a manner that invited more smiles than fear. But he was strict. A lift of his eyebrows was enough to tell you he had no patience for nonsense. He never owned a scooter or moped and depended entirely on residents to ferry him around, as if it were an accepted part of our training.

His trusted lieutenant was Mr. Chimurkar, the clerk—who knew everyone, everything, and, more importantly, where to find it.

I was allotted Room No. 99 on the second floor. I had always liked the number. The room overlooked the busy stretch of road that ran from the GMC entrance to the Dean’s office, and from my window I could watch the campus move through the day—students, nurses, patients, ward boys, and doctors in a hurry, all flowing in the same direction.

The room itself was simple and sufficient: a table, two chairs, a cot with a mattress, and a compact almirah. Two toilets and bathrooms were shared among ten rooms, and a single telephone at the corner of the wing connected us to the hospital PBX. It was our lifeline—temperamental, unpredictable, but indispensable.

The hostel was neatly divided into two wings: ladies on the left, gents on the right. It was perhaps the first time men and women stayed under the same roof in a common hostel, though the demarcation was clear and unquestioned.

The ground floor housed the mess. The menu displayed a steadfast commitment to brinjal and potato, accompanied by chapatis that arrived shrivelled and dal that arrived lukewarm—and both disappeared without leaving much of a memory. One friend put it best: you needed spiritual discipline to taste hostel food.

Several of my 1973-batch classmates lived close by—Ramesh Mundle, Harish Baheti, Madhusudan Bagdia, Shriram Kane, among others. Hostel rooms, as a rule, tended towards disorder. Mine was an exception. Whether by obsession or habit ingrained since childhood, I kept it scrupulously clean. I swept and swabbed the floor daily, arranging things with a care that amused some and baffled others.

I still had my old bicycle from undergraduate days and trusted it completely. Throughout my MD years, it carried me through the then-quiet streets of Nagpur, faithful and uncomplaining.

The hostel felt precious because it replaced what we had known just a year earlier. In the old dormitory, sleep came in fragments. Once, after an especially punishing day, Dr. Pande, Dr. Deshpande, and Dr. Warhadpande collapsed onto their beds still in hospital scrubs, as if even changing clothes required energy we no longer possessed.

Calls from the wards had to be delivered physically. A ward attendant—almost always a woman—would walk to the dormitory, locate the resident, have the message written down, obtain a signature, and return with it. On one memorable night, when the attendant called out for Deshpande, Dr. Pande—half-asleep and thoroughly disoriented—assumed the call was for him. He scribbled an order to “inject adrenaline and start cardiac massage,” unaware that the message was meant for the obstetrician managing fetal distress with faint heart sounds.

There were no mobile phones then. The PBX failed often. Messages travelled on foot, and confusion travelled with them. Fatigue was constant, and errors were always waiting.

Against that memory, the new PG hostel—with its privacy, its order, and its modest comforts—felt like progress. It did not make life easier. It simply made it more bearable.

And at that stage, that was more than enough.

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