Beginnings

I have always envied people who can summon their earliest days with cinematic precision—the colour of a wall, the smell of a room, the exact words spoken by an adult long gone. My own beginnings resist such clarity. They survive as a soft haze, stitched together from family recollections and the occasional, unreliable memory that begins to surface only around the age of six.

I was born in 1957—a year that still feels quietly significant. Thirteen-year-old Bobby Fischer was already unsettling seasoned chess players, and Indian cinema glowed with Mother India and Pyaasa. I arrived at 6:26 a.m. on a Thursday, 15 August—India’s tenth Independence Day. The coincidence has stayed with me, not as grand symbolism, but as a small, private signal from fate, gently linking my arrival to the country’s celebration.

I was the youngest of six, born to Parvati and Gokuldas. My mother came from Barshi in Solapur district. She had studied up to the fourth standard in Marathi before being married at fourteen, and by thirty-two had filled our home with children. My father’s education stopped at the seventh standard. Orphaned at three, he began life with almost nothing, leaving his village of Taroda in Wardha district in 1932 and making his way through Kharangana-Morangana to Wardha town in search of work and a foothold in the world. Through intelligence, steady labour, and a stubborn sense of duty, he rose to lead the Bajaj group in Wardha.

I entered the world in premises owned by the Bajaj group, which housed their electrical sales offices. Nearby stood Gandhi Chowk, where my father worked; the Laxminarayan Mandir; and Durga Talkies, one of Wardha’s three cinema halls at the time. That house was demolished just a year ago, erasing a physical space that had anchored many of my earliest memories and leaving me to rely even more heavily on recollection.

My eldest sister, Asha, was fifteen years older than me, while JP, just above me, was six years ahead. Recently, I rang Asha in Bhopal to ask a question I had never bothered with earlier—how I was born. She answered as though she had been waiting decades for someone to finally ask.

Asha has the inconvenient gift of remembering everything: dates, places, who said what, and where. She reminded me that she and our second eldest brother, Ashok, were born in our grandmother’s house in Barshi. That was the old way—ancestral walls, familiar smells, and women who knew exactly what to do without announcing it.

The middle brigade—Pushpa, Om, and JP—were born at home in Wardha. There were no hospital beds, no green curtains, no nurses calling out numbers, only home deliveries carried out with the quiet confidence of those days. I belonged to that tribe too, arriving in circumstances that were unremarkable then but feel almost improbable now.

I was born at home on the Bajaj Electricals campus, next to the Laxminarayan Mandir, a curious address with industry on one side and divinity on the other. According to Asha, I was delivered by the same dai who “handled” most births in that neighbourhood, a word she used with respect rather than irony. These were professionals without degrees, whose authority came from experience rather than certificates.

There were no blood tests, no antenatal check-ups, and no ultrasounds. I arrived naturally, without a Caesarean section, into a noisy, crowded household held together by my mother’s quiet strength. This was before forceps became fashionable and before fetal monitors traced reassuring zigzags on screens. There was no pulse oximeter clipped to a newborn’s toe and no Apgar score calculated with clinical solemnity. Virginia Apgar had described her now-universal scoring system barely five years earlier, and India had not yet received the memo.

I was born at the stroke of dawn. An hour later, the country would wake up to celebrate its tenth Independence Day, with flags unfurled, speeches delivered, and laddoos distributed. Somewhere between a personal arrival and a national anniversary, my life quietly began—unscored, unmonitored, and entirely unaware that timing, like birthplace, would later acquire meaning.

Years later, official records offered a different version of my entry into the world. In June 1973, while applying to Government Medical College, Nagpur, I encountered a problem. I was underage by eight months, and the rule was clear: you had to be seventeen. Losing a year over a technicality felt both unnecessary and cruel.

This was the pre-digital era, a time without databases, Aadhaar cards, or hospital records. Things could be “managed” with a straight face and a small payment, and my date of birth was quietly adjusted. It was common enough then; many people in my generation seemed to arrive conveniently on 1 January or 1 July, neatly aligned with the school calendar. I recently discovered on Facebook that nearly twenty of my friends had been officially born on 1 July, a triumph of paperwork over biology.

In my case, the Nagar Parishad produced a new birth certificate. A clerk, probably after being offered a few rupees, obligingly backdated my arrival to 15 August 1956. With a single stroke of ink, I became eligible for admission to GMC Nagpur, achieving on paper a small miracle—I was now born three months before I could possibly have been conceived.

That correction made me the youngest in my medical class, and decades later it nudged me out of service early as well. I retired from Sevagram in 2021 at the official age of sixty-five, though I was actually a year younger. I entered medical school a year early and left the faculty a year early, with nothing tragic or dramatic in between. Just one small adjustment in a dusty register, and an entire life quietly rearranged itself around it.

What’s in a Name?

My birth chart was drawn up by a well-known astrologer, Mr Chimniram Shastri. After careful calculations, he announced that my name would be Devendra Kumar and foretold good health, prosperity, and respect. The prediction was impressive. The name did not last.

My father was unmoved by horoscopes. He listened politely and put the chart aside. What mattered to him was sound and symmetry. My elder brothers were Omprakash and Jaiprakash. My name, he felt, should belong to the same family. So he joined the two and arrived at Shriprakash. It pleased his ear, and that was reason enough.

From Shriprakash came SP—a shortening everyone adopted without question. My wife, friends, colleagues, and even patients call me SP, often SP Sir. It suits me: brief, efficient, oddly intimate. My mother, true to her logic, softened it to “YesPi,” a tender twist no one else could match.

Shriprakash lives mostly on official paper—mark sheets, marriage certificate, driving license, income tax returns, Aadhaar card, passport. In life and conversation, I’ve always been SP. I sign informal letters and notes the same way. I never asked Father why he chose it. I like to imagine Sri Prakasa, the parliamentarian of the era, flickering in his mind—or perhaps not. In the end, it hardly mattered. SP stayed with me: two small letters that quietly grew into a lifelong identity.

The Rituals of Childhood

As a one-year-old, I had so little hair it sparked household debate. What strands I possessed lay flat and silky, earning me the nickname “Khrushchev” from someone attuned to world affairs—the Soviet Premier’s famously sparse dome. My eyebrows fared no better: mere whispers above my eyelids. They’ve barely thickened with age. In short, I was a remarkably under-furnished child.

By four, politics had lost its grip; mythology claimed me instead. My sisters Asha and Pushpa—now eighty-four and eighty—still chuckle at how I demanded a dhoti, a precise tilak on my forehead, then led elaborate pujas and reenacted epic scenes with grave solemnity. I would solemnly inform my mother, Parvati, that she was not my real mother—my true one was Parvati, the Hindu goddess dwelling in the Himalayas.

Very early, I devoured the Mahabharata and Tulsidas’s Ramayana. Though as I grew older, that fervor waned; I became less religious.

Birthdays in those days were quiet. There were no balloons, no candles, no midnight wishes. Yet they carried weight. My mother followed her own small ritual. She would wake me before sunrise and rub a paste of turmeric and milk on my skin, meant to guard health and fortune. Then she dressed me in a new shirt and shorts stitched by the local tailor, and fed me freshly made pedha.

She never remembered her own birthday. No one celebrated it. Perhaps that is why she marked mine so carefully, investing the day with a tenderness that needed no audience.

The Houses We Lived In

We lived in three houses, each marking a stage of my growing up.

The first stood near Gandhi Chowk, a rented place where I spent my first six years. Life there was simple, even spare. We had no telephone, no scooter, no refrigerator. A flush toilet was something we had only heard about. That house was pulled down not long ago, flattened by a bulldozer, taking with it the bricks and walls that had held my earliest memories.

From there we moved into quarters inside the Bachhraj Cotton Factory, where my father worked. That house had a life of its own. The steady clatter of the ginning machines was the soundtrack of our days. The air always carried the smell of raw cotton. Fine white fibres floated in and settled everywhere—on chairs, clothes, and hair—like a light, stubborn snowfall. Cotton seeds lay scattered on the floor, making it slippery underfoot. It was from this house that I walked to school each day, along roads coated with dust and time.

In 1965, my father bought a large building in Wardha known as Kesrimal Kanya Shala. It had once been a girls’ school, built in 1936, and had long outlived its pupils. He paid forty-four thousand rupees for it—a sum that caused raised eyebrows and long pauses in conversation. For us, it became Jaishree Bhavan.

The building stood with a certain dignity, as if it remembered its earlier life. Its halls were wide, its ceilings high, and the garden carried the scent of jasmine, especially in the evenings. Over time, the house became more than shelter. We grew up within its walls, were married there, and eventually watched our parents take their final leave.

Even now, when I visit my brother’s family, the house seems to speak—not in words, but in recognitions: a doorway, a window, the kitchen, the old garden, a patch of shade. My brother Ashok died suddenly on 24 December 2025, at the age of eighty-two. The house has outlived him too.

When my father bought the place, it was hardly fit for a family. Classrooms do not make homes easily. He decided to renovate and engaged Mr Shivdanmal, a Padma Shri–winning architect from Nagpur, known then for landmarks such as Saroj Talkies and the Mahatma Phule Market.

My father took the work seriously. He went to the site every day, asked questions, corrected measurements, and spoke at length with the workers, all the while picturing what the place would one day become. Local workers were hired. Under his watchful eye the school slowly shed its old skin. Walls shifted, rooms appeared, and a generous porch took shape. By the early 1970s, that porch had become a subject of casual admiration in Wardha.

My father had an eye for proportion and an impatience with compromise. The result was a house that felt ahead of its time, though he would never have used such words.

We moved into Jaishree Bhavan in 1968. A year later, in the summer of 1969, Ashok was married. His bride, Kanta Mantri, was seventeen and came from Bhatkuli in Amravati district. The house received her and made space for her to settle. From here she went each morning to Yeshwant Arts College for her BA, a journey she made for three years. On some days, my father sent her in his Ambassador car—an event so unusual in Wardha then that it rarely passed without comment.

Around that time, I shifted schools—from Craddock High School to Swavalambi Vidyalaya. The new school lay barely a quarter mile away. We wore Gandhi topis and walked home by noon, often lingering at the gate before entering, as if the house needed a moment’s notice.

Jaishree Bhavan has remained constant while everything else has moved on. It has watched us change, argue, celebrate, and grieve. Like an old observer in the corner of the room, it says nothing. Yet, if one listens closely, it remembers everything.

The Inn of Life

I have often smiled at the expression permanent address. What, after all, is permanent?

We spend our lives—and much of our savings—building what we call dream homes. We arrange the furniture with care, hang photographs on the walls, and let memories settle into corners. We behave as though the house will outlast us. Yet once the people leave, a home quietly slips back into being a structure of brick and stone.

There is a Zen tale I like. A monk once visited a king’s palace and asked for a night’s stay at the inn. The king bristled. “This is not an inn,” he said. “It is my palace.”
The monk nodded. “Who lived here before you?”
“My father.”
“And before him?”
“My grandfather.”
“And where are they now?”
“They are dead.”
The monk smiled. “A place where people arrive, stay for a while, and then leave—what else can it be but an inn?”

I return to that story because it makes me look at my own life differently. We are all guests, even in houses we build with such conviction. We call them permanent, but deep down we know they are only stops along the way. When I strip it down, I realise the only address I truly carry is what I remember—and what remembers me.

← Previous

Contents

Next→