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1.2
Cycles and the Medico Bus
Life in the Seventies
The Tonga and the Dari
My education began, not with a love for books, but with a strong dislike for school. In the late 1950s, my sisters say, I was enrolled in Jamnalal Bajaj Bal Mandir. In those days the school was a small cluster of huts behind Magan Wadi, simple enough to be mistaken for a quiet backyard.
Every morning the tonga arrived with its familiar clip-clop, as if it had come to collect a passenger who had committed some offence. Other children climbed in and went along with their fate. I treated it like a moving jail. I cried loudly, protested with all my strength, and once or twice even bit the poor tonga-wallah, who had done nothing except hold the reins. What Mirabai Mundra and Yamunatai Jajoo tried to teach me in those days has vanished from my mind. What I remember clearly is the art of refusing to go.
By 1962, when I was five, I was sent to the Nagar Parishad School near the district hospital. The building is no longer there, but I can still see it in my mind. We went barefoot. We carried heavy cotton bags on our shoulders, as if we were transporting grain rather than books.
Inside the classroom there were no benches. We sat on a thin mat—a dari—in neat rows, knees touching, elbows careful not to stray. Our world began at one end of that woven strip and ended at the other.
Our teacher was Mr. Champalal Chaubey. He taught us everything—alphabets, tables, and the puzzling business of long division. His desk stood before him like a throne. When the noise in the room grew too cheerful, he brought his palm down on the wooden top with a sharp crack. The silence that followed was immediate and complete. At times, the same desk served a different purpose. On hot afternoons, he would stretch his legs on it and take a brief nap, leaving us to scratch away at our slates, careful not to wake the king.
At home, discipline followed me. A private tutor came and called me “Prakash.” He was patient and steady, guiding my chalk across the slate as though my future depended on each letter. But the street outside had its own lessons. Now and then I disappeared to play with friends, returning only when it suited me. My tutor would look at me without anger, only with a quiet disappointment, as if I had missed an important class in life.
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For years I looked at a bicycle the way one looks at a rare creature—admiring it from a distance and wondering if it would ever belong to me. It was sleek, shining, and always in the possession of boys who seemed to have everything. I was twelve before I came to it, rather late by the standards of our lane.
My salvation arrived in the form of Sunil Pawar, who came one day to our house with his bicycle. He lived next to our home and was studying with me at Craddock. Sunil had mastered what he called the “small push.” It was his special gift to beginners. He held the seat firmly while I climbed on, wobbling like a new-born calf, my feet hunting for the pedals and my mind preparing for disaster. He ran beside me for a few seconds, steadying me with one hand, and then—without warning—he let go.
For a moment I did not realise it. I was moving on my own. The road slid under me, the wind rose to meet my face, and I felt a freedom that was both thrilling and frightening. My landings, however, were less poetic. I had a strange difficulty getting off without creating a small scene. I would stop, hesitate, and then collapse with the bicycle, as if we had decided to fall together. Sunil watched these tumbles with the tolerant amusement of an elder brother, as though this was the proper way to learn.
Soon the bicycle stopped being a novelty. It became a habit, and then a necessity. By the time I reached college, I rode as if I had been born on two wheels. I could ride without holding the handlebar, and I took corners with the confidence that belongs only to the young and unhurt.
Wardha, in those days, felt made for cyclists. The roads were quiet, the town moved at its own pace, and a boy on a bicycle could believe—without being laughed at—that he was king of the street.
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The Final Lesson of Sunil Pawar
Years have a way of changing the roles we once took for granted. I went on to become a physician. Sunil Pawar returned to the earth, managing his family farm, measuring his days by seasons and soil.
Life was not gentle with him. First, he lost his son to a spinal tumour. Later, in 2016, his wife Shubhangi died of a brain tumour. These were the kind of blows that leave a man quieter, even when he continues to work and smile in company.
In 2021, our childhood arrangement turned itself around. The boy who had once held the bicycle seat for me now lay in a hospital bed, and I became his doctor. He was battling laryngeal cancer. A tracheostomy had taken away his voice, but it did not take away his presence. We spoke in a different way—through signs, small gestures, and the steady understanding that grows between two people who have known each other for a lifetime. During my visits, he would look at me for a moment, and I would know what he meant.
Sunil’s last decision surprised no one who knew him well. Like his father and his wife before him, he chose to donate his body to the Anatomy department of Sevagram medical college. It felt fitting. In the same halls where I had once learned the map of the human body, Sunil offered himself as a lesson to students who had never heard his name.
I often think of that “small push” he gave me as a boy—his hand steadying the seat, and then letting go at the right moment. In the end, he did something similar again. Quietly, without drama, he helped others move forward.