The Call from Pavnar

A fever, an ICU, and a choice

On November 4, 1982, the calm of Pavnar Ashram broke. Acharya Vinoba Bhave had fallen ill. He was eighty-seven, and at that age even a “simple fever” makes everyone sit up a little straighter.

The message reached Sevagram quickly. Dr K.K. Trivedi, Dr O.P. Gupta, and Dr Ulhas Jajoo went across to examine him. They found him feverish and breathless, with a cough that would not settle. He was too weak to walk out of his room. Treatment began at once, but by afternoon it was clear this would not end with a couple of injections and a good night’s sleep.

Dr B.S. Chaubey was called from Nagpur. He examined Vinobaji carefully and said it could be pneumonia—or a pulmonary embolism. The next day, Dr Ashwin Mehta, the cardiologist from Bombay, arrived. Within hours, the ashram had more doctors than devotees, and a small “medical summit” formed almost on its own.

Everyone agreed on one thing: Vinobaji needed hospital care—Sevagram or Nagpur, anywhere with better support.

Vinobaji refused.

He would not leave Pavnar.

So we did the only thing left. If the patient wouldn’t come to the hospital, we took the hospital to the patient.

The ICU inside an ashram

A small room in the ashram became our makeshift ICU. Dr Chaubey chose two of us to stay there round the clock. I was one. The other was my colleague, Dr Ramesh Mundle.

We replaced Vinobaji’s simple wooden cot with a Fowler’s bed. We kept an IV stand ready. We arranged a tray with syringes, emergency medicines, and fluids. It looked like a hospital corner squeezed into a space meant for silence and prayer.

There were no monitors. No pulse oximeter. No alarms. We relied on the oldest tools in medicine—our eyes, our hands, and our stethoscopes. For ten days, Mundle and I lived in Pavnar, taking turns, sleeping in short bursts, waking at every change in breathing. We checked pulse, blood pressure, and temperature, and listened to his chest again and again, trying to decide whether the crackles were truly less—or only quieter.

For the first few days, we treated him aggressively. Penicillin for infection. Aminophylline to ease breathing. Heparin because we did not want to miss a clot. We also checked his urine for acetone—one of the simple ways we watched for starvation and metabolic trouble in those days.

Vinobaji lay there frail and bare-chested, ribs showing, beard flowing down like a white stream. His hearing had dulled, but his presence filled the room. Even when he spoke softly, people leaned in.

A brief recovery

By November 8, he looked better. His fever came down. His breathing eased. He was awake and attentive in that quiet way of his. That evening he took nourishment—milk, honey, paneer—measured in tolas, because the ashram recorded everything carefully.

It felt reassuring, almost like his body was telling us, I’m not done yet.

We relaxed a little. We stopped the glucose and saline, and told ourselves the worst had passed. That day Dada Dharmadhikari visited. Someone recited shlokas from the Gita and the Gitaai. Later, Rig Veda chants rose and fell in the room, steady as breathing.

For a few hours it felt like we were only doing our job—not standing at the edge of something larger.

The moment he chose

That night, something changed.

At 8:15 p.m., Jaidev—Jaisimha Rao, his close associate—brought him his usual glass of milk and honey. Vinobaji lifted his hand. Not in anger, not even in refusal the way we understand refusal. It was more like a man saying, gently, “Enough.”

We tried to persuade him. We told him he was improving, that the medicines were working, that he only needed a little more time. But he refused the milk. Then he refused the medicines. Then he refused water.

As doctors, we are trained to fight for life. That is what our hands are taught to do. That night, our hands had nothing to hold on to.

Vinobaji had decided on Prayopaveshan—a voluntary withdrawal from food and water, a deliberate departure. I had read about such things. I had never seen it up close. I certainly had not imagined I would be posted beside it.

Bulletins on a board

Once his decision became known, people began to arrive. Some were anxious, some curious, and some came as if this was a national event—which, in a way, it was.

We were asked to prepare daily health bulletins. Mundle and I wrote them by hand and pinned them outside the room, like school notices.

A few lines still stay with me. On 7 November, we wrote that his condition had improved, that pulse and blood pressure were stable, that he was conscious and taking milk and honey. On 9 November, we noted that he had stopped food, water, and medicines, and that this posed a serious threat. On 12 November, we wrote that he had taken nothing for 80 hours, and yet his condition had not worsened in the past ten hours.

It felt strange to write those sentences—clinical words for something that was not purely clinical.

When the body refused to behave

After a point, Vinobaji’s survival stopped obeying our textbooks. Even without intake, his urine output increased. The swelling in his feet disappeared. We kept checking for acetone. We found none.

I remember thinking—half in disbelief and half in irritation at my own ignorance—that this man’s body was not reading the same book as we were.

We were used to simple arithmetic. Three plus three is six. With Vinobaji, it felt like three plus three became eight.

On November 12, he pressed both ears with his hands and signalled pain. We cleaned his ears with glycerine, gave medicines, and waited, but the pain persisted.

I was young then. I had seen death in wards, in emergencies, in the ICU at Sevagram. But this was different. This was not death arriving.

This was death being invited in.

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