Kaal
In February 2026, Bhavana and I travelled to Rajasthan — not as tourists, but as people looking for something older than memory. We were tracing our roots.
Among the things I discovered was the etymology of our surname. The name Kalantri is believed to derive from kalan — rooted in the Sanskrit and Hindi kaal (काल), that most profound of words, which carries within it the entire sweep of human existence. In Hindi, kaal unfolds across all three dimensions of time: bhootkal (भूतकाल) — the past, what has already been; vartamankal (वर्तमानकाल) — the present, this very moment; and bhavisykal (भविष्यकाल) — the future, what is yet to come. The suffix tri denotes a profession. Somewhere in the distant past, our ancestors were the people who kept time for others — who told the farmer when to sow, when to harvest, when the season had turned.
It is a meaning I find quietly fitting for a family that has spent generations in medicine. A physician, too, lives at the intersection of all three dimensions of kaal — reading the past of a patient’s history, attending to the present of their suffering, and trying to shape the future of their survival.
Our great-great-grandfathers came from Phalodi, in the Marwad region of Rajasthan. Sometime in the last 150 years — the exact decade unknown, the reason unrecorded — they left the desert and came to Maharashtra. What brought them here, how they survived the journey, what they carried and what they left behind: none of this was ever spoken of at home. My father never told us where we came from. And I, absorbed in the forward motion of my own life, never thought to ask.
That silence is one of the reasons I am writing this memoir.
The Morning of Two Births
I have always envied those who can summon their earliest days with cinematic precision — the exact shade of a wall, the scent of a room long gone. My own beginnings resist such clarity. They survive only as a soft haze, stitched together from family hearsay and the occasional unreliable memory that surfaced years later.
I made my entry at 6:26 in the morning on Thursday, August 15, 1957. It was India’s tenth Independence Day. While a thirteen-year-old Bobby Fischer was busy unsettling chess masters halfway across the world and the silver screens glowed with Mother India, I arrived quietly in Wardha. I never mistook this coincidence for grand symbolism. It felt simply like a private signal from fate — gently tethering my life to the country’s celebration before either of us knew what we were celebrating.
I was the last of six children born to Parvati and Gokuldas. My mother, married at fourteen after only four years of schooling, had filled our home with children by the time she was thirty-two. My father’s formal education had ended at the seventh standard. Orphaned at three, he had started with nothing, drifting from his village to Wardha in 1932 in search of a foothold. Through sheer, stubborn duty — the kind that does not announce itself — he eventually rose to lead the local Bajaj group.
The Old Way of Coming Into the World
When I recently asked my eldest sister Asha — fifteen years my senior and possessed of the inconvenient gift of remembering everything — how exactly I was born, she answered as if she had been waiting decades for the question.
She reminded me of the old way.
The eldest siblings had been born in our grandmother’s house in Barshi, amid ancestral walls and women who knew their business. The middle brigade and I, however, were born at home in Wardha. There were no hospital beds, no sterile green curtains, no nurses barking orders in a corridor. I was delivered by the local dai — a woman Asha spoke of with genuine respect. She was a professional without a degree, her authority derived from experience rather than textbooks.
It was a year that cared little for the precision of medicine. A pregnancy was not a project; it was simply a fact of life. There were no blood tests to fret over, no antenatal appointments to schedule, and certainly no ultrasounds to ruin the surprise. Halfway across the world, Virginia Apgar had recently designed her famous scoring system for newborns, but word of this medical revolution had not yet reached our doorstep. No one clipped a monitor to my toe or calculated my score with clinical solemnity.
I was just another cry in a house already full of them, held together by my mother’s quiet, unacknowledged strength.
An hour after I arrived, India woke up. It was a morning of unfurled flags, long speeches, and the sticky sweetness of laddoos. My life began in that sliver of time between a personal cry and a national anthem — unscored, unmonitored, and blissfully unaware that a date, like a birthplace, is often just a matter of convenience.
The Golden Age of Administrative Fiction
The trouble began in June 1973.
I was desperate to enter Government Medical College, Nagpur, but I was eight months too young. The rule was rigid: you had to be seventeen. To a teenager, losing a whole year to a calendar felt less like a regulation and more like a personal injustice administered by the universe.
Fortunately, this was the pre-digital age. Long before Aadhaar cards and iron-clad databases, reality was negotiable. It was the golden age of administrative fiction, where inconvenient facts were quietly managed with a straight face and a modest fee. Half my generation seemed to have arrived on the first of July — a date neatly packaged for the school inspector. Even today, I notice on Facebook that twenty of my friends share a July 1st birthday. It is a grand collective victory of the pen over the womb.
In my case, a clerk at the Nagar Parishad performed a similar miracle. Fuelled, perhaps, by a few rupees, he backdated my birth to August 15, 1956, with a single stroke. Suddenly, I was eligible for medical school. I had also achieved a biological impossibility: on paper, I was now born three months before I had even been conceived.
That ink-stained lie made me the youngest student in my medical class. Decades later, it forced me into an early official retirement. In August 2021, I received a letter informing me that my regular service was over — because the records showed I was sixty-five, even though I was actually only sixty-four. I had entered medicine a year early, and now the rules insisted I leave a year early.
But I have not gone anywhere. The Institute graciously asked me to stay on as Emeritus Professor. I am still here in Sevagram, still working in the Department of Medicine. My official status in the register may have changed. My work with patients and students has not.
What’s in a Name?
My birth chart was prepared by a well-known astrologer, Mr. Chimniram Shastri. After much mathematical squinting, he announced I was to be Devendra Kumar — a name destined for health, prosperity, and the world’s respect. It was an impressive forecast. It lasted exactly until it met my father.
My father was a man unmoved by the stars. He listened to the astrologer politely, then set the horoscope aside the way one might set aside an old newspaper. What mattered to him was not the alignment of planets but the symmetry of sound. My elder brothers were Omprakash and Jaiprakash. It stood to reason that my name should join the family rhythm. He settled on Shriprakash. It pleased his ear, and in our house, that was reason enough.
Like many long Indian names, Shriprakash soon shrank to SP. Everyone used it — my wife, my colleagues, my siblings, eventually my patients. The name suits me: brief, efficient, and intimate. Only my mother softened it to YesPi — a tender twist she alone used, and which I have never heard from anyone else.
Today, Shriprakash exists only on paper — on mark sheets, licences, and tax returns. In the real world, I have always been SP. I sign my notes this way. Whether my father named me after Sri Prakasa, the famous parliamentarian, I never thought to ask him. Perhaps he did. It hardly matters. Two small letters became my identity, and an identity, once worn long enough, becomes the person.
The Rituals of Childhood
At one, I had so little hair it became a matter of family concern. The few strands I possessed lay flat and silky, earning me the nickname Khrushchev from Professor Ramkrishna Vora, a neighbour with a keen eye for world affairs who saw a resemblance to the Soviet Premier’s famous dome. My eyebrows were faint then and have not thickened much since. In short, I was a remarkably under-furnished child.
By four, politics gave way to mythology. My sisters still laugh remembering how I would demand a dhoti and a tilak to lead solemn pujas around the house. I informed my mother, Parvati, that she was merely a substitute — my real mother was the Goddess Parvati in the Himalayas. I devoured the Mahabharata and Ramayana with a passion that would eventually, gradually, and somewhat reluctantly, give way to anatomy textbooks.
Birthdays were quiet affairs in those days — no balloons, no candles, no midnight calls from friends. Yet they carried a weight that modern celebrations, for all their noise, rarely do. My mother followed her own ritual. She would wake me before dawn to rub a paste of turmeric and milk into my skin — a golden guard against ill fortune. She would dress me in a new shirt and shorts, fresh from Hedau Tailor, who ran a shop near Durga Talkies. He had an annual contract with our household. My father would hand him yards of cloth; Hedau would glance at us, estimate our size without a measuring tape, and return with shorts that were invariably oversized — optimistically stitched to fit next year’s growth.
Then she would press a single homemade pedha into my hand — shaped with a small iron weight, the kind that sat permanently on the kitchen shelf, sweet and dense and smelling of cardamom. She never remembered her own birthday. No one ever celebrated it. Perhaps that is why she marked mine with such care, investing the day with a tenderness that required no audience and no applause.
The Houses We Lived In
My childhood unfolded across three houses, each marking a different chapter of growing up.
The first was a rented home in the Bajaj Electrical premises near Gandhi Chowk. Life there was spartan: no telephone, no scooter, no refrigerator. A flush toilet was a luxury we had only heard about. We lived, as most of Wardha lived, on the honest side of simplicity. That house was eventually flattened by a bulldozer, carrying away the bricks that held my earliest memories. Nothing remains of it now but what I can recall — and memory, as I have learned, is a selective and unreliable archivist.
From Gandhi Chowk, we moved to the Bachhraj Cotton Factory quarters, sandwiched between the bus stand and the railway station near Bajaj Square. The factory provided a constant soundtrack — the steady, mechanical clatter of ginning machines running through the day. The air was thick with the smell of raw cotton, and fine white fibres settled on everything: chairs, clothes, hair, the surface of a glass of water left out too long. Cotton seeds scattered across the floor made every step a minor adventure.
It was a noisy, textured, entirely alive sort of childhood.
Jaishree Bhavan
In 1965, my father did something that caused a small stir in Wardha’s drawing rooms: he bought a girls’ school.
The Kesrimal Kanya Shala, built in 1936, had vacated its premises to relocate to a new campus on Nagpur Road near Shivaji Statue Square — where it still stands today. My father purchased the old building for forty-four thousand rupees. In those days, that sum invited raised eyebrows and long pauses.
He renamed it Jaishree Bhavan — an affectionate compound of Jaiprakash and Shriprakash, the two brothers whose names graced the gate. There is a pleasing irony in this: neither of the brothers for whom the house was named ended up owning it. In the family partition, decades later, the house went to our eldest brother, Ashok.
The geography of Jaishree Bhavan defined my adolescence. A simple hedge separated us from Mr. Lulay, the town’s leading advocate, who owned a bustling chawl home to twenty-odd people. The open ground near his home served as the venue for the local RSS evening drills. I can still see myself there in ninth grade — standing in regulation khaki shorts and belt, reciting Namaste Sada Vatsale as the evening settled in around us.
To our right lived Dr. M.K. Pawar, whose son Sunil was my classmate. The intersection outside our gate was known as Wanjari Square, named after a humble cycle repair shop owner nearby. It is a small testament to the man’s local standing that while the British names on the map have long since faded, his has endured. The square is still called Wanjari Square today.
Turning a school into a home is no simple matter. My father hired a Nagpur-based Padma Shri-winning architect, Mr. Shivdanmal, whose initial advice was blunt: demolish the thirty-three-year-old building entirely and start again. My father found the idea too radical and the cost too large. A compromise was struck. Shivdanmalji agreed to renovate the existing shell — coaxing a home out of a school with a patience that the building rewarded. The real foreman, however, was often my father himself, who was at the site daily, correcting measurements and questioning workers until the school shed its old skin. By the early 1970s, the house, with its generous porch, had become a subject of quiet admiration in the town.
We moved in during 1968. A year later, my brother Ashok brought home his seventeen-year-old bride, Kanta. She had passed her matriculation before the wedding, but my father insisted she continue her education. For the next three years, she attended Yeshwant Arts College, a mile away. On the days my father sent her to class in his Ambassador car, it was an event — a daughter-in-law being chauffeured to college was unusual enough in our town to rarely pass without comment.
My brother Ashok died on Christmas Eve, 2025. The house has outlived him, as it has outlived my parents.
The Permanent Address of Memory
I often think of the Zen tale of the monk who called a king’s palace an inn. When the king took offence, the monk asked who had lived there before him. My father, the king replied, and his father before him. And where are they now? They are dead. The monk smiled. A place where people arrive, stay a while, and leave — what is it but an inn?
We call them permanent addresses. But we are all just guests.
In the end, the only address I truly carry is what I remember — and what remembers me.