3.4
Guten Tag, Sevagram
German Classes in a Village Hospital
German classes in a village hospital
In 1987, for reasons I can no longer explain with a straight face, I decided to learn German. I had no plans to travel. No professional need. Perhaps I just wanted a small escape from the daily cycle of rounds, case sheets, and prescriptions. Or maybe I wanted to prove to myself that my brain could still do something new.
Learning a foreign language in Wardha in those days was not exactly fashionable. We lived comfortably with Marathi and Hindi, and we managed our medical English as best as we could. Deutsch felt as distant as snowfall. But Wardha has its own way of surprising you.
Mrs. Sunita Kawale, the wife of the District Collector, had moved to Wardha. She was a linguist, fluent in German, and she agreed to teach.
A class of one sounded depressing, so I did what every enthusiastic beginner does—I recruited others. Dr. Sudha Jain and Dr. Anjali Ingle from Anaesthesiology joined in. Monika Ahuja, an intern with a sharp mind, signed up too. So did Parthak Pradhan and Ganesh Srinivasan, two third-year students who were always ready for anything that wasn’t PSM.
The J-Y Problem
We committed ourselves to a six-month course. Three evenings a week—Monday, Wednesday, Friday—we gathered in the Medicine seminar room. Outside, Wardha baked. Inside, we tried to sound like people from Berlin.
Grammar was manageable. Pronunciation was the real enemy.
The letter J, we discovered, behaved badly. In German it softened into a Y, which created an identity crisis for half our department. “Jajoo” became “Yayoo.” “Jain” turned into “Yen.” We said these names with great sincerity, and then collapsed laughing.
And then came the dreaded ü. We sat pursing our lips like we were trying to whistle without knowing how. The sounds we produced were somewhere between a groan and a complaint. Mrs. Kawale stayed calm through it all. She corrected us gently, as if she had been trained for this in Germany too.
The Exam That Made It Real
Despite the comedy, we took the classes seriously. In May 1987, I appeared for the examination conducted by Max Mueller Bhavan, the Indian arm of the Goethe Institute. I still remember the small thrill of seeing my score.
84 out of 100.
That number made me greedy. I enrolled for the advanced course. This was no longer about memorising words. It was about speaking without panicking.
An external examiner came for the final assessment by the Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband (DVV). The oral exam was the hardest. I spoke in careful sentences, like a man walking on a freshly mopped floor. Somehow, it worked. I scored 64 out of 90 in theory and 22 out of 30 in the oral. In December 1987, I was officially declared passed.
Germany Came to Sevagram
None of us went to Germany after that. We stayed exactly where we were—firmly in central India, with our wards, our patients, and our familiar dust.
Still, the effort wasn’t wasted. Learning a new language opens a window in the mind. It freshens the air. It also gives you the quiet satisfaction of doing something difficult just because you wanted to.
And it gave me a small party trick.
Kasturba Hospital had a few senior nurses who had trained in Germany years earlier—efficient, stern, and impossible to impress. Once in a while, I would walk up to the nursing station and drop a sentence in German.
“Guten Morgen, Schwester. Wie geht es Ihnen?”
The first reaction was always shock. Then came a smile—quick, genuine, almost childlike. For a moment, the usual doctor–nurse distance softened. We became two people connected by a language that had no business being in Sevagram.
We never went to Germany.
But for a few evenings in 1987, Germany came to us.