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2.5
Hanumannagar Days
Suhas and me
Entering medical school is demanding for any student. For those of us who came from vernacular schools, it felt doubly so. Overnight, English became the language of instruction. It was like being pushed onto a steep hill and told to climb—without being warned how breathless it would make you. Anatomy and physiology arrived with vocabularies of their own. For a while, it seemed we were learning medicine and learning English at the same time, both at full speed. The distance from family only sharpened the strain.
The first few months at Government Medical College, Nagpur passed in a blur. I missed home—its ease, its familiar rhythms, the soft safety of Wardha. The food in Nagpur did little to console me: regular, plentiful, and nearly tasteless. And hovering over everything was the lingering threat of ragging. I did not know how to confront these small but persistent anxieties. I only knew how to endure them.
Homesickness settled in quietly but firmly. My friend Suhas Jajoo and I began to long for Wardha the way one longs for shade in May. Each weekend we found our way back, as if the train could carry us not just across distance, but back into comfort. To make these journeys easier, we bought a three-month railway pass. For the princely sum of ₹37, it gave us unlimited travel in a third-class compartment between Nagpur and Wardha. It was a small expense that bought an immense kind of relief.
Every Saturday evening we boarded a train bound for Wardha. By Monday morning—before the city had properly woken—we were back at Wardha station, waiting for the 4 a.m. Dadar–Nagpur Express. The ride to Ajni took about ninety minutes. From there we walked the last mile to the hostel, bags light, minds slowly bracing themselves for another week.
We followed this ritual for nearly three months. Gradually, without noticing exactly when it happened, Nagpur began to feel less alien. The corridors grew familiar. Faces stopped looking like strangers. The days became predictable. Homesickness loosened its grip.
Looking back, those early weeks taught me something simple: resilience does not arrive with a drumbeat. It grows quietly, like a habit. And it grows faster when you are not alone. More than textbooks or lectures, it was friendship that helped us learn to belong.
* * *
The First-Year Grind
After a year in a non-ventilated room at the Bachhraj factory’s ginning press, I finally moved to a better place—with Suhas. Our new home was a modest two-room flat on the first floor at 484, Hanuman Nagar, and it felt like an upgrade in dignity. It was only half a mile from the medical college—close enough to walk without feeling punished.
Hanuman Nagar was a favourite among medical students for the same reason: it was near the college, cheap enough, and full of flats that landlords were willing to rent to boys who lived on optimism and mess food. Years later, during batch reunions, we discovered that the families of our classmates Sujata Sawangikar and Sanjay Warhadpande also lived in Hanuman Nagar. At the time, we had no idea. We were too busy surviving.
To make life easier, we hired a cook—Parasnath Sharma Chaturvedi—who cooked for the five of us sharing the flat. He was a Brahmin from Uttar Pradesh: short, slender, and equipped with a nasal twang that could cut through any conversation. We were vegetarians then, and remain so now, and Parasnath cooked simple meals that felt, to us, almost perfect.
Once a month, Suhas and I would cycle to Itwari to buy grains, oil, and spices. We brought the bags back balanced on our cycles, as if we were transporting treasure. We also took turns bringing ghee from our respective homes—a small luxury that made even ordinary dal taste like a reward.
Ulhas, who was doing his MD residency, lived with the seriousness of a man guarding a national secret. We were only months away from our first MBBS exams, and Suhas and I had developed a fondness for newspapers—the Indian Express and Tarun Bharat. Ulhas considered this a dangerous hobby.
“Waste of time,” he declared.
And in those days, we did not debate such orders. We obeyed them. We followed Ulhas the way soldiers follow a general—no discussion, no rebellion, no “this is our right.” If he said stop the newspapers, we stopped them.
We shared meals with Dr. Suresh Chhajed and Prakash Gupta, Ulhas’s classmates from the GMC Class of 1968. Those dinners—simple food, tired bodies, and talk that drifted from medicine to life—quietly turned into friendships that lasted far beyond Nagpur.
As the first MBBS exam came closer, we grew serious. Money was always tight, and paper was not something you wasted on repeated mistakes. So we bought a slate and chalk and practised anatomy diagrams on it—draw, erase, draw again. The slate made perfect sense: economical, reusable, and unforgiving. If your diagram was poor, you wiped it out and tried again.
We studied wherever we could, whenever we could. Even bathing became a shared academic exercise. One of us would stand under the tap while another read aloud from a textbook outside, the bathroom door slightly ajar. We revised muscles and nerves with soap in our eyes and cold water on our shoulders. It sounds absurd now, but at the time it felt like discipline.
We were tired, often anxious, sometimes lonely—but we persisted. And we cleared the first year.
In retrospect, those months did not just teach us anatomy and physiology. They taught us how to manage scarcity, how to live with uncertainty, and how to keep going when you had no choice. They made us tougher, yes—but more importantly, they made us resourceful.