Roll Numbers to Life Stories

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Sir Terry Pratchett once wrote, “If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going.” I had read that line much later, of course, but it described exactly what I felt about my batch at Government Medical College, Nagpur.

It really did feel like yesterday when we walked through those imposing gates in 1973—two hundred and four young men and women, convinced that life was long, health was permanent, and the future was something that would politely wait for us. We threw ourselves into dissections and ward postings, into canteen arguments and late-night study sessions, behaving like people who had never heard of the word “deadline.” In those days, we worried about viva questions and internal marks. We didn’t yet worry about blood pressure, joints, or the quiet arithmetic of age.

That arithmetic became impossible to ignore in 1998, when we met for the first time after graduation. It was our Silver Jubilee reunion, and it arrived with the kind of shock you get when you suddenly see yourself in an unflattering mirror. We looked at one another and noticed the grey hair, the expanding waistlines, the new paunches, and the lines that twenty-five years of living had etched into familiar faces. We were still ourselves, but we were also—unmistakably—older. The spirit remained eager; the biology had started negotiating its own terms.

As a physician, I knew what those terms usually were. I knew what happened silently inside arteries and joints. I knew how memory could become selective, and how quickly names could slip away even when faces stayed stubbornly familiar. Somewhere in that unsettling realisation, a thought took root: before time blurred us into a fog of “I think he was in our batch,” I should try to preserve us properly. Not as a sentimental gesture, but as a record. A name attached to a face. A roll number attached to a life.

I didn’t want a dry directory of phone numbers and clinic addresses. I wanted a chronicle—something that captured what life had done to the Class of ’73 after it released us into the world. Who stayed in Vidarbha and served quietly in small towns? Who became professors and heads of departments? Who migrated across oceans, and why? Who left medicine altogether? And who had already left this world without giving us a chance to say a proper goodbye?

So, sometime around 2014, I began maintaining a database of my batch—methodically, almost obsessively—and started writing individual profiles of my classmates. It turned into a project that felt like equal parts detective work, census-taking, and affection. The profiles gradually piled up on my Google Drive, waiting patiently for the one thing every manuscript waits for: a publisher—or at least a generous funder.

The great excavation

Tracking down two hundred and four classmates would have been easy if we had graduated in the age of email and LinkedIn. But we belonged to a time when people simply disappeared. When we passed out, there were no mobile phones, no WhatsApp groups, no Facebook timelines, and certainly no digital breadcrumbs. A person changed cities, changed jobs, and vanished. The only evidence that he had once existed in your life was a faded photograph and a nickname that still made you smile.

I began with what I had: old lists, half-remembered addresses, a few phone numbers scribbled on paper, and a willingness to be embarrassed. I spent hundreds of hours making calls that began awkwardly and ended emotionally.

“Hello… is this Dr Deshpande who studied at GMC Nagpur in 1973?”

There would often be a pause. Then a sharp intake of breath. Then laughter, disbelief, and the sudden opening of a floodgate. Names came tumbling out. Incidents resurfaced. People I had not spoken to in decades began talking as if we had met last week. I listened more than I spoke. That, I realised, was the only way to do it properly.

The work was slow because I refused to outsource it. I wanted to hear voices, not just collect information. I took notes by hand, like a stubborn old-fashioned clerk, and then typed them out late at night. I checked dates, cross-checked spellings, verified details, and edited each profile until it read like a person rather than a list. Somewhere along the way, I stopped being merely a batchmate and became a reluctant archivist of my own generation.

The collaborators in the hunt

No project like this survives on one person’s enthusiasm alone. I was the one doing the writing, but the work gathered momentum because others joined in—some deliberately, some accidentally, and some with the zeal of people who had been waiting for an excuse to reopen old memory trunks.

T. F. Badodekar became one of the unexpected heroes of this story. Ironically, during college, we had barely spoken. We shared Medicine as a discipline, but not friendship as a habit. Yet, in the summer of 2014, he became my right hand. He had a memory that worked like a steel trap and an energy that felt almost unfair for his age. Hardly a day passed without a phone call. He dug out contacts as if he were excavating fossils, dictated details to me, and followed up relentlessly. We ended up bonding more in our sixties than we ever did in our twenties.

He did not live long enough to see the project reach print. He passed away in the winter of 2014, leaving behind a silence where his daily enthusiasm used to be. But his presence remained embedded in the work. Every time I found a missing classmate because of a lead he had provided, I felt as if he was still quietly doing his rounds.

Manik Khune kept me going in a different way. If Badodekar was the relentless sleuth, Manik was the steady opening batsman who made sure the innings did not collapse. He knew the stories of classmates who had stayed back in small towns—the “now it can be told” details that never appeared in formal alumni notes. He read, corrected, edited, and gently pulled me back when I became too sentimental or too long-winded. In a project that threatened to become unwieldy, he provided rhythm.

Distance did not weaken the effort either. Harsha Sheorey in Melbourne and Sharad Jaitly in New York helped connect the international dots. They made the Class of ’73 feel like a global village long before we started using that phrase casually. Time zones did not stop them. They kept the momentum alive, and they made sure that the diaspora did not become invisible.

Raymond Maugham added another layer. He flew from Barbados for the 2013 reunion with the confidence of a man who knew how to frame a moment. A professional photographer with a large presence, he did not merely attend; he documented. At the VCA Stadium, he moved around with his camera as if he were collecting evidence of time itself. Many of the photographs that eventually found their way into the draft were his. He did not just take pictures; he captured expressions, hesitations, and that unmistakable mix of pride and disbelief that comes when old classmates meet after decades.

There were others too—Vinayak Sabnis, who had the gift of storytelling and a nose for the amusing scandal; Ravindra Jharia, Mohan Gupte, Vivek Deshpande, and many more. Each one helped locate a missing piece of the jigsaw.

The domestic cost

Every long project has a silent sponsor. Mine was Bhavana.

When I began, she thought it was a harmless phase—some calls, some nostalgia, a few evenings spent laughing into the phone. She assumed it would fade away like most hobbies do. Instead, it expanded. Weeks turned into months. My evenings disappeared into long conversations with people I hadn’t seen in forty years. I monopolised the computer. I interrupted dinner to scribble down a forgotten nickname. I behaved like a man possessed by the fear that if he didn’t write something down immediately, it would vanish forever.

Bhavana endured it with the kind of patience that spouses acquire either through love or exhaustion. She tolerated my obsession, gave me the freedom to keep working, and pretended not to notice how often I said, “Just five more minutes.” If she had not absorbed the domestic inconvenience, this entire exercise would have died quietly in the recycle bin of my computer.

A book that waited

By the time the draft took shape, it had become more than a list. It carried the arc of lives—careers that soared, careers that stalled, personal tragedies, private triumphs, quiet service, and occasional reinvention. It reminded me that our batch did not produce one kind of doctor. It produced every kind of human being.

I circulated the draft during the reunion at the Vidarbha Cricket Association ground in Nagpur in December 2013. I watched classmates flip through pages, pause at photographs, widen their eyes, and break into laughter. Some pointed at faces and said, “Arre, look at him!” Others went quiet for a moment, reading about someone they had assumed was still around. It was then I understood that the work had value—not because it was impressive, but because it was necessary.

Since then, I had kept updating the database—phone numbers, addresses, family details, career changes—adding new profiles, refining old ones, and storing everything carefully on my Google Drive. The material waited, as manuscripts often do, for the right time and the right patron. It waited to be printed, bound, and held in hands that once held anatomy textbooks in 1973.

In the end, the Class of ’73 book was never meant to be a monument. It was meant to be a mirror and a map—showing us where we had come from, where we were, and how far we had travelled, often without even noticing.

If nothing else, it gave me one quiet satisfaction: before time could blur us into anonymity, I had tried to call each person by name.

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