In January 2023, once I had gone back to being only a teacher and a physician, the condolence messages kept arriving anyway — one most months, another name quietly leaving the hospital directory and entering the past. It struck me that if I didn’t start asking now, these lives would simply vanish, as if they had never been lived at all. So I began to ask.

That became “Sevagram Remembered” — an oral history of the doctors who trained here between 1969 and 1980, MGIMS’s first twelve founding batches. It now holds a hundred and fifty portraits, of doctors now scattered across twenty-two countries, men and women who arrived when the campus had no paved roads and barely a building, and who built the place by simply living in it. Reading their answers back to me each month, I found the same thing again and again: none of them remembered the shortages. They remembered who taught them to suture, who sat with them through their first death, who fed them when the mess ran out of food.

One of them, Balkrishna Maheshwari, nearly didn’t make it into that first 1969 batch at all. He arrived for his interview in a borrowed khadi shirt — he owned none himself, and word had it Dr. Sushila Nayar had a soft spot for candidates who wore it — lent to him that morning by a second-year student named Ulhas Jajoo, whose family had already sent him his application form. He carried a handwritten letter of introduction from Vinoba Bhave’s younger brother. He got through the interview. Then, back home in Erandole, he heard nothing at all — because a clerical error at the new college had mailed his admission letter to another candidate entirely, a man with a similar name in Nagpur. It was Ulhas Jajoo’s father, Narayandas, a professor of economics in Wardha, who noticed the mix-up and walked Balkrishna’s own father into the principal’s office to sort it out. The seat was confirmed. Maheshwari went on to top the university, took his MD in paediatrics, and built, in Mumbai, a reputation less for degrees than for the kind of bedside manner patients remember by name.

Another, from the 1979 batch, took a stranger path to a stranger ending. Ashok grew up in Pulfail, a Wardha neighbourhood the town associated with bootlegging, the son of illiterate fruit-and-vegetable sellers who had no land and no government job, only what they could carry to market each day. He was, by his own account, an indifferent student until one afternoon he stood watching his parents haggle over bananas in the sun and thought, if I continue like this, I will be no better than a burden. He read his way into MGIMS on borrowed textbooks, took Radiology when his classmates all said Surgery was where the future lay, and built a practice from a second-hand ultrasound machine in a rented Hanumanpura room — paid for by his wife’s mangalsutra, his own wedding ring, and a bank manager who bent the rules to sanction the rest. Within a few years he was the busiest radiologist in the district.

Then a friend handed him a book by Rajneesh, with a warning that its readers were said to lose their minds. He read it at a bus stand in Yavatmal, so absorbed that the buses came and went unnoticed, until a passerby asked what could hold two doctors so still. “Rajnish,” Ashok said. The man invited him home the next day to learn meditation. Ashok went. Years later, he sold the hospital he had built from nothing, gave away the proceeds, and built a meditation monastery near Yavatmal instead, taking the name Abhik — one who is fearless. A batchmate, asked what to make of it, could only say that detachment had set him on a journey with no visible end: does every monk reach the endpoint of his spiritual journey? The question has no answer. Ashok is still walking.

Reading these profiles back, month after month, I kept finding the same pattern: none of them remembered the shortages. They remembered who lent them a shirt, who wrote them a letter, who noticed an injustice and simply walked into an office to fix it — and some of them, it turns out, walked a very long way past medicine entirely, and never quite stopped.

Alongside it grew a second, wider archive — the Architects of MGIMS, ninety profiles of the founders, deans, wardens, and staff who built the institution around those students: Dr. Sushila Nayar, the founding director, still shaping the place until 2001; Prabhakarji, a founding trustee for forty-four years; wardens, finance managers, department heads across six decades and every discipline the medical college taught.

An administrator spends his years managing what an institution needs today. I spent these three years, free of that chair, on what it will need to remember tomorrow: two hundred and forty portraits, drawn from the people who were there before I was, and the ones who arrived alongside me. Between them, they hold most of what four decades in Sevagram actually looked like.

Dr. Ishar Dayal Singh stepped off the train from Punjab in September 1969 to become the college’s first Principal — a decorated army major turned physiologist, a man who had published in The Lancet and guided twenty postgraduates, with no obvious reason to leave a settled career for a half-built medical school in a Vidarbha village. Dr. Sushila Nayar had asked him for one year. He gave five, drafting the syllabus, negotiating university affiliation, and running the Department of Physiology all at once, on a principal’s salary of seventeen hundred and ten rupees a month plus a fifty-rupee allowance, which he never once mentioned. In the evenings he sat cross-legged on the floor among his students, turban still neatly tied, and led them in bhajans on the harmonium — Gandhi’s own favourite, Vaishnav Jan To, the hymn about feeling another’s pain as your own. When Sushila Nayar wrote him a recommendation letter years later, a woman not given to effusive praise, she called him simply “an able administrator and a fine human being.” It was, by all accounts, the highest thing she ever said about anyone.

Dr. Ramvishal Agrawal built the Pathology department the same way the college itself had been built — from almost nothing, by hand. Every Sunday for months, he sent a postgraduate student to Nagpur to collect specimens and slides in two cotton sacks, and when no transport was running, the student carried them back on his shoulders through the dust. Agrawal mounted his museum specimens on old X-ray film because that was the material at hand. When the monsoon rains once got into the library he’d spent years building from thirty-five borrowed books, he went home, grabbed a stack of old clothes and one of his own shirts, and mopped the floor himself until it was dry. He called that library his child. Long after he’d left Sevagram for Pune, he kept using his new position there to open postgraduate seats for MGIMS students the college itself couldn’t yet offer — a list of names, batch after batch, who got where they were going because a man who no longer owed them anything remembered them anyway.

I never met either of them. I only inherited what they built — a college with an academic spine and a library that survived its own flooding — and it was only in writing these ninety profiles that I understood how much of what I stood on had been someone’s Sunday, spent walking eight kilometres with sacks of glass slides on his back.

This book you are reading is built the same way — one more record kept before it could be lost. Its writing was itself part of these three years: not a return to the ledgers I had put down, but an answer to the same question the archives were already asking. If I do not write it down, who will?