The story of Stetho in Sevagram is centred on a small corner of central India — a place most maps overlook. Sevagram is a village seven kilometres from Wardha, in Maharashtra, and has been home, since 1969, to the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, founded by Dr Sushila Nayar. I arrived here in 1982 to begin my career as a young physician, and stayed.

But the book does not stay put. It travels back to Wardha, my hometown, and Nagpur, where I trained for nine years at Government Medical College — its lecture halls, its dissection room, and the hostel rooms I moved through, always, it seemed, numbered 99. It follows my in-laws’ city, Indore, and Bhopal, where I was married and where much of Bhavana’s family still lives. It crosses the Himalayas twice, once on foot to Har ki Doon in 1999 and once by road on a Char Dham pilgrimage in 2019. And for a year in 2004–05, it moves to Berkeley, California, and the wider Bay Area — a small studio apartment on Channing Way, a circle of friends who became family, and a School of Public Health that changed how I thought about evidence and uncertainty for the rest of my working life.

A few other places recur more briefly but leave their mark: Denver, where an old Wardha friend fed me Gujarati food and we watched cricket until two in the morning; Vancouver, where our daughter Amrita trained and later Guangzhou, where a missed connection and a stranger’s kindness turned into one of the book’s stranger chapters; and Delhi, the gateway city for nearly every pilgrimage, wedding, and conference that runs through these pages.

Sevagram, though, remains the still centre all of this returns to — a village small enough that the barber, the postman, and the bank clerk have not changed in forty years, even as everything else has.