In December 1987—exactly a year after my father died—Bhavana and I decided to change the map of our lives. We moved out of the familiar comfort of Jaishree Bhavan in Wardha and into the MGIMS campus at Sevagram.
It was not a grand leap. It was a quiet shift. But it changed everything that came after.
We were allotted Flat No. 13, on the first floor of the Type 2 quarters near Kasturba Vidya Mandir. It had two bedrooms, a small drawing room and a kitchen that quickly became the busiest room in the house. We owned little then, so the move was almost embarrassingly easy. One truck, a few steel trunks, and we were done.
To set up our new kitchen, I took my seventeen-year-old niece, Surekha, on my scooter to Sitabuldi in Nagpur. We returned like proud hunters with our trophies: a gas stove, a Sumeet mixer-grinder and a 165-litre Kelvinator refrigerator.
Soon afterwards, a black-and-white Digichrome television arrived. Ulhas Jajoo and Mr C. B. Taori helped coordinate it, as if buying a television were a public-health programme requiring teamwork and planning.
Once we settled in, colony life took over—quickly and completely.
We were surrounded by young lecturers—Dr Ramji Singh, Dr M. V. R. Reddy, Dr Deepak Kumar Mendiratta, Dr Ajay Agrawal, Dr Ashok Sharma, Dr Naresh Kumar and Dr Naresh Tyagi—and many others whose doors stayed open more often than closed. Privacy existed, but it was not treated as a sacred right. In a two-minute walk, you could meet twenty people you knew. If you looked even slightly troubled, someone was likely to ask, “Kya hua?”
Evenings had their own rhythm. Badminton in the open, cups of coffee that never stayed hot, and snacks that travelled from one house to another without needing permission. Birthdays were rarely private family affairs. One child blew out the candles, and the whole block ate the cake.
These were the years when our neighbours gradually became part of our lives.
Dr K. K. Ghuliani, who headed Community Medicine, brought the discipline of the Armed Forces Medical College to his department. He ran it with military precision. At home, however, he was a gentle man who could lose himself in an intense game of Scrabble or a long conversation about cricket.
His wife, Mohini, was a force of nature. She had grown up in a Pune military family and seemed incapable of sitting still. At the staff club she organized children’s plays, taught campus women knitting and flower arrangement, and made newcomers feel at home. When family circumstances eventually took the Ghulianis back to Pune, K. K.’s letters to us carried the same warmth as his conversations across the garden wall.
Dr Radheshyam Naik, from Forensic Medicine, was almost his opposite. Quiet and soft-spoken, he was an introvert almost to a fault. As warden of the boys’ hostel, he dealt with undergraduate mischief with a remarkably forgiving philosophy: “Boys will be boys.”
The campus had little entertainment in those days, so Naik started a weekend cine club. He also had an unusual appetite for learning. He studied Arts, Management and Law, eventually topping his LLB examination at Nagpur University. His postgraduate student was sitting beside him in class.
His forensic lectures could be unexpectedly entertaining. He brought in plots from films such as Waqt and Ittefaq, finding ways to make a subject concerned with death a little more lively.
Then there were Dr Samit Kumar Ghosh and his wife, Laxmi.
Ghosh, our Professor of Anatomy, was a self-made man from Jalpaiguri. At home he wore a traditional dhoti, spoke Hindi with a delightful Bengali accent and insisted on dissecting cadavers himself rather than leaving the work to untrained assistants.
He loved nature, birds and dogs with an intensity that admitted no compromise.
When the Ghoshs moved to Sevagram, they adopted two female street dogs, Lali and Kali. The dogs lived indoors and slept on the family mattress. They were not pets in the usual sense. They were members of the family.
One day, Lali and Kali disappeared.
Mrs Ghosh rushed out of the house, hair uncombed and still in her informal house clothes, searching for them. She stopped Dhirubhai, the school’s Director, and asked whether he had seen the dogs. Dhirubhai was not known to be a dog lover. I can imagine his bewilderment when he realized that the missing Lali and Kali were not people but dogs.
Ghosh’s rough exterior concealed an unexpected tenderness.
In 1999, we bought a second-hand Maruti 800. Bhavana was learning to drive while managing her job in the IT department, two children and the daily chaos of an Indian household. One Sunday morning, while reversing out of our driveway, she misjudged the distance and hit Ghosh’s shiny, well-kept car.
There was a dent. A conspicuous one.
Bhavana was mortified. She knew Ghosh’s temper and imagined the lecture that awaited her. She went to him, apologized and waited.
Ghosh looked at the dent. Then he looked at Bhavana.
Instead of scolding her, he turned to me.
“Kalantri, why are you not helping her more?”
I was stunned.
He pointed out how much she was already carrying—her job, the children and the household—and told me that I should share the burden.
The dent remained on his car.
Bhavana returned home with tears in her eyes, relieved by a kindness she had not expected.
That was Ghosh. He could be fiery, but when it mattered, he saw the person before he saw the problem.
Our neighbours were also woven into the milestones of our family life.
In October 1989, we moved to the first floor of Vivekanand Colony. Soon afterwards, Bhavana went into labour. It was around ten at night, and the hospital was barely five minutes away on foot. Dr Chhabra arrived quickly, and within an hour our daughter Amrita was born.
Ashwini, then three and a half, was thrilled.
Outside the labour ward, he met Dr Anuradha Gokarn, a house officer who was engaged to her batchmate, Fali Langdana. She asked him about a recent staff-club party.
“What did you do at the party?” she asked.
“I became Lord Hanuman,” Ashwini replied.
“But you don’t have a tail,” she teased. “How did you become Hanuman without a tail?”
Ashwini looked at her as though the answer were obvious.
“Oh, that was easy. I used Phali for the tail.”
He meant phali, the long bean vegetable. Anuradha burst out laughing. The idea of her fiancé, Fali, being used as a tail in a toddler’s costume was apparently too good to resist.
These domestic friendships sometimes spilled into our professional lives as well.
In the early 1990s, under Dean Dr J. S. Mathur, the college needed a tamper-proof system for the pre-medical entrance examination. For three blistering weeks every May, a group of young faculty members worked on it. Dr Ghosh joined them.
The heat reached 46°C. Power cuts were frequent. We worked behind closed doors, sometimes by candlelight, coding thousands of answer sheets using blind identifiers.
The same people who shared our streets were now sharing a very different kind of ordeal.
That was the peculiar pleasure of life in Sevagram. A colleague could be a neighbour, a mentor, a warden, a dog lover, a fellow worker in a crisis—or simply the person who noticed that someone else’s day had become too heavy.
Looking back, I remember less about the houses themselves than about the people who filled them.
Our doors were often open. So were our lives.
We had moved to Sevagram for work. Somewhere along the way, the people around us became part of home.
As I sit at my desktop writing these memoirs, the memory of my friend M.V.R. Reddy suddenly returns. We lost him in April 2017.
Reddy was not a doctor. He held an MSc and a PhD in Biochemistry. When he first arrived in Sevagram, he spoke neither Hindi nor Marathi, and his English was hesitant. Yet, through sheer grit and perseverance, he rose to head his department.
But that is not how I remember him.
Reddy was an ajatshatru—a gentle soul who seemed incapable of making an enemy. He was unfailingly kind and polite, sometimes almost to a fault. When I joined MGIMS in 1982, I lived in a tiny 300-square-foot flat, and Reddy lived a few quarters away. Later, we moved into Type II quarters, where our children grew up together. Eventually, we built our own houses and, almost by accident, became neighbors again.
What I loved about Reddy was his simplicity. He was never impressed by his own achievements and possessed the rare grace of downplaying them. More than anything, I remember the affection he showered on our children, treating them as if they were his own.
I saw his generosity most clearly in the small crises of life.
In 2004, I left for Berkeley for a year-long MPH, just as Ashwini entered the MBBS program at MGIMS. With me away, Reddy took him under his wing and personally tutored him. He did it quietly, without making a virtue of it. It was simply what a friend did.
A few years later, when we were building our house, I ran out of money. Reddy lent me what I needed without ever asking when or how I would return it. His trust was complete.
He was equally generous with Bhavana. When she struggled to transition the hospital laboratory from paper records to computers for the hospital information system, Reddy stepped in to help. It was a massive digital shift, but what remains with me is not the technology. It is simply that when Bhavana needed help, Reddy was there.
These quiet moments say more about him than any curriculum vitae ever could.
Reddy died suddenly at home on April 9, 2017. The sun had just broken through that morning when his milkman rang the bell. As Reddy walked to the door, he suffered a massive cardiac arrest and never woke up.
Bhavana and I were returning from Delhi on the Kerala Express. We had spent those tense days at AIIMS while Bhavana’s niece, Tulika, underwent surgery for a brain tumour. The moment we stepped off the train at Sevagram station, a frantic call from Ashwini stopped us cold: Reddy had collapsed and was in the ICU. We went straight from the platform to the hospital.
There he lay—eyes closed, without a pulse, blood pressure, or spontaneous breathing. For nearly an hour, the doctors fought to bring him back. Nothing worked.
I learned later that Reddy had been experiencing angina, mistaking the discomfort for breathlessness caused by recent weight gain. He had been waiting for me to return from Delhi so he could consult me.
How I wish he had not waited.
He could have seen another doctor. He could have walked into the hospital himself. Perhaps things would have turned out differently; perhaps they would not. I will never know. But I have often wondered whether, in some quiet way, his absolute trust in me contributed to the delay. That thought has never left me.
Years have passed, but Reddy’s memory keeps resurfacing. Mrs. Reddy has since moved to Indore, where their sons, Srikanth and Sridhar, practice psychiatry and orthopedics. Yet, in my mind, Reddy remains rooted in those Type II days, when our lives were simpler and our friendships unencumbered by status, title, or age.
We shared quarters, watched our children grow, built homes, and eventually became neighbors once more. He guided my son when I was across the ocean, carried me through a financial pinch, and stood by Bhavana when work overwhelmed her.
Such friendships are uncomplicated. They are generous. They are beautiful.
And some of them stay with us long after the friend is gone.