Kaal
In February 2026, Bhavana and I travelled to Rajasthan, tracing roots older than memory. Among the things I found was the etymology of our surname. Kalantri derives from kaal — the Sanskrit-Hindi word that holds all three tenses of time inside it: bhootkal, the past; vartamankal, the present; bhavishyakal, the future. The suffix tri denotes a profession. Somewhere back, our ancestors kept time for others — told the farmer when to sow, when to harvest, when the season had turned.
It is a fitting inheritance for a family that has spent generations in medicine. A physician also lives at the intersection of all three kaal — reading a patient’s past, attending to their present, shaping their future.
Our great-great-grandfathers came from Phalodi, in Rajasthan’s Marwad region, sometime in the last 150 years. The exact decade is unknown, the reason unrecorded. My father never told us where we came from, and I never thought to ask. That silence is one of the reasons I am writing this memoir.
The Morning of Two Births
I arrived at 6:26 on the morning of Thursday, 15 August 1957 — India’s tenth Independence Day — in Wardha, quietly, an accident of timing that linked my life to the young nation’s before either of us knew what we were celebrating.
Survival was hardly a given that year. The average Indian lived to forty-one; one baby in seven died before its first birthday; a mother took a one-in-a-hundred risk with her own life to bring a child into the world. I outpaced the actuarial tables. My parents did better still, living to seventy and eighty.
I was the last of six children born to Parvati and Gokuldas. My mother married at fourteen, had six children by thirty-two. My father’s schooling ended at seventh standard; orphaned at three, he left his village for Wardha in 1932 with nothing, and rose, through sheer persistence, to lead the local Bajaj group.
The Old Ways of Coming Into the World
I asked my eldest sister Asha, fifteen years my senior, how exactly I was born. She had been waiting decades for the question.
The eldest siblings were born in our grandmother’s house in Barshi. The rest of us, myself included, were born at home in Wardha, delivered by the local dai — a woman without a degree, her authority built on experience rather than textbooks. There were no antenatal appointments, no ultrasounds. Virginia Apgar had recently designed her newborn scoring system on the other side of the world; word of it had not reached our doorstep. I was just another cry in a house already full of them, held together by my mother’s quiet strength. An hour after I arrived, India woke up — flags, speeches, the sticky sweetness of laddoos.
The Golden Age of Administrative Fiction
The trouble began in June 1973. I wanted Government Medical College, Nagpur, and was eight months too young — the rule was seventeen, no exceptions on paper.
It was the pre-digital age, and reality was negotiable. Half my generation seemed to have been born on the first of July, a date neatly packaged for the school inspector; even today twenty of my Facebook friends share that birthday. A clerk at the Nagar Parishad, fuelled by a few rupees, backdated my birth to 15 August 1956 with a single stroke. I became eligible for medical school, and, on paper, was now born three months before I had even been conceived.
That ink-stained lie made me the youngest student in my class — and, decades later, forced an early official retirement. In August 2021 I received a letter informing me that my regular service was over, because the records showed sixty-five when I was actually sixty-four. I had entered medicine a year early; the rules insisted I leave a year early too. The Institute asked me to stay on as Emeritus Professor instead. My status on the register changed. My work with patients and students did not.
What’s In a Name?
The astrologer Chimniram Shastri, after much mathematical squinting, announced I was to be Devendra Kumar — a name destined for health, prosperity, and the world’s respect. The forecast lasted exactly until it met my father, who set the horoscope aside the way one sets aside an old newspaper. What mattered to him was the rhythm of the family’s names — Omprakash, Jaiprakash — and so I became Shriprakash. It shrank to SP within a year, and has stayed SP for sixty-nine more. Only my mother softened it further, to YesPi — a twist I’ve never heard from anyone else.
The Rituals of Childhood
At one, I had so little hair that a neighbour, Professor Ramkrishna Vora, nicknamed me Khrushchev for the resemblance. At four, I demanded a dhoti and tilak to lead solemn pujas around the house, and informed my mother that she was merely a substitute — my real mother was the Goddess Parvati in the Himalayas.
My mother’s birthday ritual for me never changed: turmeric-and-milk paste rubbed in before dawn, a new shirt and oversized shorts from Hedau Tailor — who estimated size by eye and stitched optimistically for next year’s growth — and a single homemade pedha, shaped with the iron weight that lived permanently on the kitchen shelf. She never remembered her own birthday. No one ever celebrated it. Perhaps that is why she marked mine with such care.
The House We Lived In
Three houses marked three chapters of growing up: a rented home near Gandhi Chowk, spartan even by Wardha’s standards — no telephone, no scooter, no flush toilet; the Bachhraj Cotton Factory quarters, where raw cotton dust settled on everything and cotton seeds turned every step into a small adventure; and, from 1968, Jaishree Bhavan.
In 1965 my father did something that raised eyebrows across Wardha’s drawing rooms: he bought a girls’ school. The Kesrimal Kanya Shala, built in 1936, had relocated, and he bought the vacated building for forty-four thousand rupees — a sum that invited long pauses in 1965. He named it Jaishree Bhavan, a compound of Jaiprakash and Shriprakash, though neither brother ended up owning it; in the family partition it went to our eldest brother, Ashok.
Turning a school into a home took a Padma Shri architect’s blunt advice (demolish and start again), my father’s refusal of that advice, and years of my father standing over workers daily until the school shed its old skin. We moved in during 1968. My brother Ashok died on Christmas Eve, 2025. The house has outlived him, as it has outlived my parents.
The Permanent Address of Memory
A Zen monk once called a king’s palace an inn: my father lived here, and his father before him — and where are they now? Dead. A place where people arrive, stay a while, and leave — what is it but an inn? We call them permanent addresses. We are all just guests. In the end, the only address I truly carry is what I remember, and what remembers me.