Destiny rarely announces itself. More often it slips in quietly, disguised as an ordinary day. For Ashwini, it arrived through a coaching class in Nagpur.
In the early 2000s, Nagpur had become the natural migration site for medical aspirants from across central India. Students travelled in with holdalls and anxious parents, rented small rooms, and disappeared into libraries and classrooms. The days were long, the food forgettable, and the conversation always circled back to ranks and cut-offs. It was hardly a romantic setting, yet this is where many modern love stories begin—between notes, mock tests, and shared worry.
In April 2004, Ashwini was preparing for the entrance examination of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences. Wardha’s easy pace no longer suited the intensity he needed, so he moved to Nagpur. Rajabhau Khapre from our Pharmacology department offered him a small room in Giripeth, a practical kindness that, unknowingly, set the stage for everything that followed.
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The Girl from Kunkuri
At Guidance Point on West High Court Road, Ashwini joined a batch of equally tense students. Among them was Shaily Jain, an eighteen-year-old from Kunkuri, who had studied at Carmel Convent in Raigarh and had come to Nagpur with the same dream. She stayed in Bajaj Nagar and carried herself with a quiet seriousness, the kind you see in students who know that effort, not luck, will decide their future.
There was no dramatic introduction. They began the way most friendships begin—sharing notes, discussing questions after class, walking out together after long tests. Anxiety is a great equaliser; it dissolves formality. Familiarity grew almost unnoticed.
Around that time, my elder sister Pushpa lived in Giripeth, close to Ashwini’s room. Every Sunday I travelled by bus from Wardha to Nagpur to spend the day with them. Those Sundays were not leisurely visits. I carried sheaves of notes and a sense of duty, because my task was to coach Ashwini—and whoever else turned up—for the most feared component of the entrance test: Gandhian Thought.
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The Sunday Sesions
In the MGIMS system, Gandhian Thought could undo a brilliant student. No matter how well you scored in Physics, Chemistry, or Biology, failing to cross the minimum marks in that paper meant the end of the dream. I had spent months condensing Gandhi’s autobiography into handwritten summaries and questions.
Our sessions became routine. A few students would sit cross-legged on the floor with notebooks open while I spoke, drawing diagrams on scrap paper and translating philosophy into plain language.
One Sunday, Ashwini arrived with Shaily.
She sat quietly at first, almost apologetic about taking up space, but her attention never wandered. When I paused to ask a question, she answered softly but precisely. She didn’t merely memorise; she seemed to think her way through the ideas. Over the weeks she kept returning, and gradually her shyness faded.
What I remember most is not any particular conversation, but the ease between the two of them. They sat side by side, sharing a book, arguing gently over answers, laughing at small mistakes. Nothing theatrical. Just the unselfconscious companionship of two young people walking the same steep road. I was teaching them Gandhi, but in those afternoons they were learning each other.
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The Results Day
n April 2004, Ashwini and Shaily travelled to the Hislop College centre in West Nagpur to take the entrance examination for the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences. Like hundreds of others, they walked out with admit cards folded into their pockets and a silence that comes only after long exams.
Entrance results rarely distribute joy evenly.
When the results came, the news hit us hard. Shaily’s name was missing. Ashwini had done well, but for the two staff seats he stood third—close enough to imagine success, far enough to lose it. For a day or two the house fell unusually still. We moved about normally, spoke of ordinary things, and avoided the subject because there are disappointments for which parents have no useful sentences.
So we turned, as families do, to a practical alternative. Ashwini enrolled at Fergusson College in Pune for Biotechnology. He packed methodically and tried to sound cheerful on the phone, but the detour weighed on him. For a boy who had grown up wandering hospital corridors and treating stethoscopes like toys, anything other than medicine felt temporary, as though he were waiting in the wrong queue.
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The Call from Berkeley
That year I left for the United States to begin my MPH at University of California, Berkeley. I told myself it was necessary, yet a part of me wondered if I was chasing my own growth while my son struggled with his.
A few weeks later the waitlist moved, a seat opened, and Bhavana called to say simply, “He got in.” Ashwini returned to MGIMS. I thought the crisis had passed.
Then, in July 2006, an email arrived that unsettled me more than any entrance result.
But success in the exam did not bring immediate peace. While Shaily began her own journey of recalibration elsewhere, our home was facing a silent storm.
In 2006, Ashwini sent me an email that served as a clinical awakening for me as a father. It was a mirror held up to my own obsession with work, forcing me to see the “other side of the coin.”
Ashwini wrote that he felt I was always busy—at the hospital, with a book, or on the laptop—and that we were living like strangers in the same house. He did not want advice or money. He wanted time. And then, plainly and without drama, he added that Shaily was the person he wanted to spend his life with.
It read less like rebellion and more like a plea. For the first time, I realised that while I had been busy being a professor, I had forgotten to be a father.
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The First Email
Shaily’s first email arrived on 16 January 2005. It opened with a careful “Dear Uncle,” the kind of address that carries both respect and distance. The note was measured and direct. She did not ask for favours; she asked for guidance—what to read, how to prepare, what options remained if one door closed.
When dentistry proved too expensive and government seats too scarce, she adjusted without complaint and joined Biotechnology Engineering in Raipur. That quiet course correction impressed me more than any entrance rank. Many students cling stubbornly to a single dream and lose heart when it slips away. Shaily simply chose the next path and kept walking.
Over the months her emails grew less formal. They began to include small details of her life—debates she had entered, articles she was reading, poems written late at night. Without noticing, we had slipped into an easy correspondence. I would reply like the teacher I have always been, marking up her drafts, fussing over margins and font sizes, pretending to discuss formatting while smuggling in affection.
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A Mother’s Yes
When Shaily first met Bhavana, the formalities lasted barely five minutes. After the initial greetings, Bhavana asked her a few simple questions—about her parents, her studies, how she had managed alone in Nagpur—and then mostly listened. That is her way. She watches quietly, storing impressions, saying little. By the end of the visit she was already moving about the kitchen as though nothing unusual had happened, but I knew the evaluation was complete.
The same day she wrote to me, in her characteristically brief style: “I feel relieved. Ashu has chosen well.” In our home, that sentence carried the weight of a blessing. Once Bhavana says yes, the road ahead clears almost on its own.
In January 2010, that quiet assent took us to Kunkuri for the engagement. As we entered the venue, a large banner announced, Patni Family Welcomes You. Someone explained, with pride and a laugh, that this was their Jain sub-tradition, and we found ourselves folded into it without ceremony. What stayed with me, though, was not the banner or the rituals but the sight of a granite church rising from the red soil of the small town—solid, unexpected, and serene against the sky. I remember thinking that Shaily was much the same: steady, self-possessed, and quietly present, as though she had always belonged there and we had simply taken time to notice.
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Full Circle
Years later there is a symmetry that still amuses me. The boy who once hid between the pillars of the department now teaches there. Ashwini is a Professor in the same institution where he once chased dragonflies as a child. Shaily, trained as an engineer, found her place in hospital administration, moving through wards and offices with the same steadiness she once brought to coaching classes.
They live with us in Sevagram with their daughters, Diti and Nivi. Our days overlap—home, hospital, school—all within walking distance. It is an ordinary life, and therefore a deeply satisfying one.
Looking back, nothing about their story felt dramatic at the time. It grew quietly—through shared notebooks, Sunday classes, hesitant emails, and one honest letter from a son to his distracted father. That, more than anything else, was when I understood that love does not arrive with trumpets. It enters softly and stays.
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