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2.4
Cycles and the Medico Bus
Nagpur, 1973—two wheels, one bus, and a white coat
The roads were gentler then, especially in the mornings. Shops were still lifting their shutters. Vegetable vendors were arranging their baskets. A tea stall would hiss and spit as the first kettle boiled. We pedalled through this half-awake city in white shirts and black shoes, trying to look like future doctors and not like boys who still missed home.
The bicycle gave us speed, but it also gave us cover. In those first months, it helped me slip past the places where seniors liked to loiter. I rode fast, kept my eyes ahead, and reached the campus without inviting attention. Ragging taught me one skill early: how to stay invisible.
For nearly six months my lunch box opened not in a hostel or canteen, but at a small roadside eatery in Ajni, near the TB ward. It had a few benches, a tired-looking counter, and tea that tasted the same every day. I didn’t go there for the food. I went because it felt safe. It became my small refuge in a city that still felt too large.
Years later, Chandrashekhar Meshram summed it up in one line: life was simple then, but never dull. Aziz remembered the rides more than the lectures—how the road, the effort, and the shared silence stitched us into a group without anyone announcing it.
Students today arrive on scooters and cars, sealed off from the city behind glass and helmets. I arrived slower and more exposed—dust on my trousers, sweat at the collar, and a mind that was still learning how to be brave. Yet those rides, with their small fears and small freedoms, remain one of the gentlest adventures of my first year.
But the bicycle was only one half of my Nagpur transport story. For many of us—especially those living in western Nagpur—the real institution was the city bus.
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The Medico Bus
If you lived far from the college, the city bus was not public transport. It was a lifeline.
The ride to Government Medical College was about fifteen kilometres, and it took close to ninety minutes each way. It was slow, crowded, and stubbornly long. Yet it carved a deep groove in memory. Between 1973 and 1978, hundreds of medical students rode that route through summers that scorched the skin, monsoons that soaked you through, and winters that turned Seminary Hills unexpectedly cold and crisp. We boarded that bus for one reason: to reach the 8 a.m. class before the professor arrived.
I did not ride that bus every day, but in my first year I heard enough about it to feel as if I had. The stories travelled faster than the bus itself. And many of the details I remember now come from Sharad Jaitly—told over years, with the kind of affection that only old bus rides can earn.
Sharad and Rajiv Garg lived at Seminary Hills. Their day began with a bus that originated from Vayu Sena Nagar—Route No. 76 or 77, an irony no one could explain. Laxmi Rao was usually the first passenger. At six in the morning he would climb in, alert and upright, as if he had already attended one lecture.
By the time the bus reached the CPWD Type 4 colony around 6:20 a.m., Laxmi finally had company. Sharad and Rajiv would board—Lambu and Chhotu, as they called themselves—and declare that the day was blessed. Goddess Laxmi had arrived.
The bus then descended from Seminary Hills through air that felt unusually pure and cold for Nagpur. That was the luxury of the route—a brief stretch of freshness before the city woke up and turned noisy.
At Civil Lines, Harish Motwani joined, ready to start the party. At Ravi Nagar Square came Ashok Badhe, and then Tillya—late Vivek Kulkarni—who carried a booming laugh and a talent for turning even a sleepy bus into a debating society. Sharad said the moment Tillya entered, the bus woke up—driver, conductor, passengers, everyone.
From Ramnagar, Mohan Gupte and Ravindra Jharia boarded, sometimes with a couple of seniors. Jharia later recalled his own small daily pilgrimage. He would walk nearly a kilometre from Yogiraj Flats at Hindustan Colony on Amravati Road to Ravi Nagar Square just to catch this bus coming from Vayu Sena Nagar to GMC. The direct ticket cost twenty paisa—“a princely sum,” he would say, smiling. Seniors and even a few lecturers rode the same route, which meant jokes were carefully measured until the bus had moved on.
By the time the bus reached Laxmi Bhavan, the crowd thickened. Sanjay Gadre, Sanjay Chandorkar, Vinayak Sabnis, Hema Deoras, Avinash Deshmukh, Uday Gupte—our classical vocalist and instrumentalist—and, if memory serves, Renu Solanki. From that stop onward, the bus stopped being a city bus. It became a medico bus.
White coats began to dominate. Most students carried them folded over their arms, protected like examination hall tickets. Other passengers watched with mild curiosity—some as secret admirers, some as future aspirants.
After a month or two, the medical students bought monthly bus passes. Conductors began to recognise faces. There was a quiet mutual agreement: no questions asked. A nod was enough. The pass sat tucked safely inside textbooks—Hutchinson, Satoskar, or Thorpe—sharing space with underlined paragraphs and folded corners. Sharad joked that he would still pat his bag once in a while, not to check the pass, but to ensure he was carrying the right book—just in case the conductor suddenly became diligent.
Inside the bus, a small class system formed on its own. Medical students occupied the front half as if it were first class. The conductor did his rounds mostly in the rear half—the economy section. After a few months, he stopped bothering altogether. He would sit in a corner seat at the back, enjoying the same bumpy, sultry ride like everyone else. Even authority, it seemed, could grow tired.
At Shankar Nagar Square, there was one checkpoint that mattered. The bus passed Dr. B. S. Chaubey’s majestic bungalow on West High Court Road. But what reassured students was not the bungalow. It was his blue Fiat parked in the porch. If the Fiat was there, the bus was on time. If it wasn’t, the bus suddenly felt slower and the jokes became shorter.
The bus picked up the studious Dua brothers from the 1972 batch and moved towards Mor Bhavan at Jhansi Rani Square terminus, collecting more company on the way—Vandana Kamdar, Kishore Kedar, and others. By Mehadia Square, Dhantoli, the orchestra was almost complete. Ajit Pradhan, Harsha Sheorey, Jayant Pande, Ramesh Mundle, and Sriram Kane climbed in to complete what Sharad fondly called the ’73 Symphony.
From Seminary Hills to Ajni Chowk, the trip took about ninety minutes. Not bad for a four-cylinder, stick-shift ST bus making thirty stops in light traffic. They would disembark with the smug satisfaction of men who had extracted full value from a ticket.
By then it was usually around 7:30 a.m. White coats were pulled on—still carefully protected all through the ride—and the last kilometre to the amphitheatres was done on foot, briskly, in a respectable posture, led by Tillya, who still could not suppress his laughter.
There was one last ritual before the first lecture: an urgent visit to the toilet. Then they entered the hall, sat down, opened notebooks, aligned pens, and tried to look as if they had arrived effortlessly. The professor would begin with the “medical news” of the day—some new discovery, some warning, some current excitement in medicine—and the day would start.
Those mornings feel unreal now. They felt surreal even then. But I understand why Sharad remembers that bus route with such affection. It was not just a commute. It was a moving hostel, a daily parade through Nagpur, a small training in endurance—and, without anyone calling it so, a lesson in belonging.