I tied the knot with Bhavana on February 17, 1984. I was twenty-seven; she was twenty-two. It was a classic arranged marriage, orchestrated by family networks and a stroke of serendipity involving a broken-down car.
Looking back, the timing feels significant. It was just weeks before the Maruti 800 first rolled onto the streets of Gurgaon, signalling a new, faster India. But our beginning was rooted in the old ways—slow, deliberate, and guided by family.
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The Accident at Dewas
Fate often disguises itself as inconvenience. In October 1983, I was travelling from Bhopal to Indore with my brother-in-law, Jijaji. Thirty-five kilometres short of our destination, near Dewas, our car sputtered and died. While waiting for a mechanic, we killed time by visiting Mr. Pralhaddas Singhi, Jijaji’s elder brother who lived nearby.
There, we ran into Mr. Suresh Laddha, a 33-year-old businessman from Balwadi who had recently moved to Indore. When he learned I was an unmarried physician from Wardha, his eyes lit up. He immediately thought of his niece, Bhavana. He rushed home to tell his sister-in-law, Mrs. Kamal Laddha, who happened to be visiting from their village.
Mrs. Laddha didn’t waste a moment. She changed into an elegant sari, struggling slightly with the pleats in her haste, and rode pillion on Suresh’s scooter to meet me at the Singhi home. She was visibly relieved to hear I was a doctor from Wardha. Decades earlier, in the 1950s, she had stayed at the Mahila Ashram in Wardha with her aunt, Mrs. Suman Bang. When I mentioned I knew her cousin, Dr. Abhay Bang, and colleagues like Dr. Ulhas Jajoo, the anxiety in her eyes softened. The connection was made.
A few weeks later, the formal machinery of the Marwari arranged marriage kicked into gear. A delegation—Shri Rajmalji Laddha, Professor Yadav Zamvar from Mumbai, and Dr. Suraj Mandora—arrived in Wardha to vet the prospective groom.
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The Muddy Road to Balwadi
Two weeks later, it was my parents’ turn. They travelled to Jalgaon to meet Bhavana’s uncle, Sharad Manudhane, in his small two-room flat. From there, the journey to Balwadi—190 kilometres away—was an adventure in itself.
Mr. Manudhane borrowed an Ambassador car from a neighbour, and they set off through the dense forests of Shirpur and Sendhwa. A heavy rainstorm battered the roof of the car, the wipers slapping a hypnotic rhythm against the windshield as they navigated the muddy roads. But the destination was worth the trek. My parents were charmed not just by Bhavana’s poise and education, but by the warmth of the Laddha family. They returned to Wardha with a clear verdict: we would be lucky to have her.
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The First Meeting
In November 1983, I visited Bhavana’s modest home in Raj Mohalla, Indore, for the formal “viewing.” I was accompanied by my elder brother Om and my brother-in-law.
The meeting lasted thirty minutes. It was a stiff, formal interview typical of the era. I sat across from her, introducing myself, discussing my career, and delicately enquiring about her education. She was shy but possessed a quiet grace that filled the room. We didn’t go to a coffee house or a garden; we sat in her living room, acutely aware of the family members listening from behind the curtains.
I stole glances at her. She was stunning—a BSc graduate from Holkar Science College who had also studied medical laboratory technology in Mumbai. But more than her beauty or her degree, I sensed a shared temperament. I wasn’t looking for a professional peer; I was looking for a partner. Driving back to Wardha, I knew I had found her.
My father finalized the date: February 17, 1984. I had six weeks to prepare.
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The Economics of 1984
It is hard to convey to a modern reader just how modest our beginnings were. In 1984, my salary as a medical college lecturer was ₹1,500 per month. Even five years later, by the time our second daughter was born, it had only risen to ₹5,900.
We owned no car, no computer, no mobile phone. A flight was a luxury we couldn’t imagine; we travelled strictly by second-class train. Yet, we never felt poor. A train ticket to Mumbai cost a fraction of our salary. We found joy in library books, evening walks, and cinema halls. As my friends Dr. Ramji Singh and Naresh Kumar often remind me, we lived simply, but we lived well.
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The Art of the Wedding Card
I threw myself into the wedding preparations, starting with the invitations. Mr. Ramesh Fattepuria pointed me to a skilled screen printer in Sitabuldi, Nagpur. The cards cost 90 paise each—a total of ₹270 for 300 cards.
Screen printing was a slow, manual art. Ink was pressed through a mesh stencil onto the paper, one card at a time. I wrote the text in Hindi, keeping it elegantly simple and adding a request that was rare for the time: “No gifts, please.” I hand-wrote the addresses on all 300 envelopes myself. It was laborious, but I was proud of the result.
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The Suit and the Tailor
For my wedding attire, I turned to my friend Dr. VK Gupta, a man with a keen eye for fashion. Along with our friend Suhas Jajoo—a staunch Gandhian who wore only Khadi and had never tied a tie in his life—we scoured the markets of Nagpur.
We ended up at Lords Taylor, a renowned shop near Variety Square. It was an amusing trio: the groom, the fashion expert, and the Khadi-wearing Gandhian, all debating fabric swatches. Suhas, despite his simplicity, often cast the deciding vote. We were young, broke, and incredibly happy.
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The Midnight Procession
My father was a man who viewed rituals as suggestions rather than rules. When the pundits advised a midnight wedding for my sister, he ignored them and held it at 7:00 AM. For my brother’s wedding, he ignored the advice to leave early and insisted the procession leave Wardha precisely at midnight because “the train leaves at midnight, so why shouldn’t we?”
He applied the same no-nonsense punctuality to my wedding. He didn’t care for superstitions; he cared for schedules.
On February 16, a group of 21 Baratis—family, friends, and elders—boarded the Nagpur-Dadar Sevagram Express. We reached Bhusawal at 5:00 AM, where a fleet of six Ambassador cars, arranged by the Laddha family, waited to ferry us the final four hours to Balwadi.
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Madhumati and the Godhuli Bela
We arrived in Balwadi at 10:00 AM and were housed at Mehboob Manzil, a spacious, newly built home owned by three local cotton merchants who had kindly opened their vacant property to us.
To keep the younger guests entertained, my brother-in-law Vivek set up a VCR and screened the classic film Madhumati. The kids were so captivated by Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala that they watched the movie in fragments three times over two days.
True to my father’s wishes, there was no ostentatious procession. I refused the traditional white horse and the street dancing. The wedding took place at the most auspicious hour: Godhuli Bela—the “cow dust hour,” when twilight falls and cattle return home from the fields.
At 6:00 PM, under the soft glow of the setting sun, Pandit Chimanilalji Shastri conducted the ceremony. It was efficient—just 45 minutes. In the 1930s, Kaka Kalekar, the well-known Gandhian and Vice Chancellor of Gujarat Vidyapeeth, had studied ancient Hindu scriptures and designed a wedding manual that compressed the entire ceremony into forty-five minutes. My father, who worked with the Bajaj group, had witnessed such weddings and earnestly believed in these brief rituals—far better than the midnight feras that dragged on until dawn broke.
As Bhavana’s father placed her hand in mine during the Kanyadaan, I saw the mix of grief and hope in his eyes. We took the seven vows (Saptapadi) around the fire, signing a divine contract not with ink, but with steps.
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The First-Class Guilt
The return journey was a lesson in humility. We boarded the train from Jalgaon, where the family had booked a First Class coupé for the newlyweds. It was a luxury—privacy, padded seats, silence. But as the train pulled out, we realized that two of our elderly relatives were squeezed into the crowded second-class compartment.
The guilt was instant. At the very next station, Bhusawal, we gathered our things and swapped seats. We spent our wedding night not in the isolation of a first-class cabin, but on hard wooden berths in second class, surrounded by chattering family and shared laughter. It felt more like home than the coupé ever could.
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Life at Jaishree Bhavan
We returned to my childhood home, Jaishree Bhavan. Our room was a sanctuary—airy, cool, with large windows and a bathroom that felt luxuriously modern for the time.
Bhavana slipped seamlessly into the rhythm of a joint family. A month later, my brother Ashok and his family moved in, making the house even fuller. Bhavana’s mornings began early. She prepared tea and a hearty breakfast before I left for the medical college on my Priya scooter—a daily 8-kilometre commute.
For the first few years, I lived a double life: spending my days and on-call nights in a small room at the hospital hostel (Kabir Niwas), and my off-duty hours at home with Bhavana. She didn’t move to the Sevagram campus until December 1988.
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Honeymoon in the Hills
In late February, we took our first trip together: two weeks in Udaipur and Mount Abu. We walked the banks of Lake Pichola, marvelled at the Rajput palaces, and soaked in the history of Chittorgarh. We stayed in decent three-star hotels, a splurge for us, but true to form, we took the non-AC second-class train back home.
It was a simple start. No grand gestures, no debt-fueled luxury. Just a broken car, a rainy drive, a 35-minute ceremony at twilight, and a marriage that has lasted forty years.
Her life in Sevagram unfolded differently in the years that followed Her story in Sevagram unfolded far beyond that modest wedding, and I have written about it in Part II – The Quiet Architect..