The Sweet Box at the Airport

The Train Out of Wardha

My transition from a settled life to a student life began not on a plane, but on a rain-soaked platform in Wardha. On the evening of 9 August 2004, Bhavana and I boarded the train to Mumbai. As the train picked up speed and the familiar yellow signboard of Wardha station disappeared into the monsoon mist, the weight of my decision finally sank in.

I was forty-five. A Professor of Medicine. A father. And yet I was leaving everything I had built, my home, my hospital, my family, to study across the ocean. A lump rose in my throat. I turned to the window and watched the green fields of Vidarbha slide past, hoping the year ahead would be worth this separation.

Mumbai in the Monsoon

Mumbai, in August, was doing what Mumbai does best. It was raining as if the city had offended the clouds. The sky was a stubborn grey sheet and the roads looked like shallow rivers.

We went to see Mr PL Tapadiya’s cousin, Mr Kamal Gandhi, who had come from Kolkata for an emergency angioplasty at Jaslok Hospital. Even getting back to Thane after that visit felt like a small exam. We boarded a Mumbai local in peak hour. The compartment was packed with wet clothes, damp hair, and people pressed so close that you stopped trying to find space and simply surrendered.

It was chaotic, uncomfortable, and strangely familiar. The kind of energy you only notice when you are about to leave it behind.

The Sweet Box

My flight to San Francisco was scheduled for 2:00 AM. At the airport, Bhavana and my cousin Surendra stood with me near the departure gate. My niece Jyoti could not come. She had just delivered her son, Daksh.

I was preparing myself for a proper goodbye, when the check-in counter produced a small disaster. The staff told me my luggage was overweight.

For a moment I felt my stomach drop. I did not have the money for excess baggage. I did not have the patience to argue. I simply unzipped my suitcase right there on the polished airport floor and began pulling things out like a man searching for his own common sense.

Clothes. Books. Files.

Then my hand touched a large box. Bhavana had packed a kilogram of homemade sweets for me. A piece of home, carefully wrapped.

I held it for a second and then handed it back to her. “Keep this,” I said.

It was a small decision, but it felt symbolic. I walked towards immigration a little lighter, and not only in kilograms.

Albany: My First Anchor

San Francisco greeted me with jet lag and a strange kind of silence. Then I saw Madhu.

He was there at the arrivals, smiling, solid, familiar. I did not realise how much I needed that one known face until I saw him. He drove me to his apartment at 1040 Jackson Street in Albany, a quiet leafy neighbourhood about three miles from the UC Berkeley campus.

Nikita was waiting at home. She was doing her MPH too. She had cooked an Indian meal and the smell of dal and rice felt like a welcome that went deeper than words. That first evening, sitting in their living room, eating warm food after a long journey, my anxiety eased.

Madhu and Nikki were my first anchors in America. Their kindness told me something simple: you are not alone.

Studio MN 244

A week later, it was time to stand on my own feet. I moved into Studio MN 244 at the Manville Apartments, at the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Channing Way. The building buzzed with student life. My room was on the second floor.

When I opened the door for the first time, I noticed two things: light and silence.

It was a 260-square-foot studio, tiny compared to my bungalow in Sevagram, but neat and efficient. There were light-coloured cabinets, a clean countertop, and big windows that poured in California sunshine as if it came free with the rent.

The flat was unfurnished, but it had a built-in desk, a bookcase, and internet ports that worked without coaxing. For someone who had lived all his life surrounded by family or colleagues, the solitude felt odd. There was no one to talk to when I woke up. No one to share tea with.

But there was a novelty that fascinated me: a coin-operated washer and dryer in the unit. I felt ridiculously proud the first time I managed laundry without ruining anything.

Walking Shattuck Avenue

Soon my days fell into a rhythm shaped by geography. I had Haste Street on one side, Durant Avenue on the other. The AC Transit stop was close, but I mostly walked.

Every morning I slung my backpack over my shoulder and walked to the School of Public Health. The air was crisp and smelled of eucalyptus, roasted coffee, and something faintly salty from the ocean. I passed bookstores, cafés full of students hunched over laptops, and the mix of street performers and homeless people that gave Berkeley its strange, restless character.

In Wardha, I needed a scooter. In Berkeley, I needed only good shoes.

“Call Me Art”

The academic culture was another shock.

In India, hierarchy is built into the air. You say “Sir” and “Madam” before you even learn the person’s name. At Berkeley, I met people whose papers I had cited, and they wanted to be addressed like neighbours.

One of the first was Dr Arthur Reingold, Head of Epidemiology. I approached him with the respectful stiffness of a junior doctor. He extended his hand and said, “Call me Art.”

I froze.

For days, “Art” would get stuck in my throat. “Sir” tried to escape on its own. But Art was firm, and also gentle. He invited our entire MPH cohort to his home for dinner. I expected a formal evening. Instead, I walked into his kitchen and found him wearing an apron, cooking Indian food with a Tarla Dalal recipe book open on the counter.

That evening, I learnt a lesson I still carry: real authority does not need distance.

The Rawalpindi Express Class

My coursework was demanding and exhilarating. I chose Epidemiology and enrolled for twelve units. The syllabus read like a wish list I had carried in my head for years: outbreak investigation, trial design, meta-analysis.

The faculty list was equally intimidating.

But the class that truly tested me was PH 250B, Epidemiologic Methods, taught by Jack Colford Jr. Jack was brilliant and fast. His slides appeared and vanished before your brain could finish reading the first line.

Madhu had the perfect description. “Jack is the Shoaib Akhtar of Epidemiology,” he said. “Before you see the ball, it has hit the stumps.”

I began typing notes like a man chasing a runaway train. The School gave me a Dell laptop and a Stata license. At night, in my small studio, I sat with that laptop and wrestled with command lines, regressions, and my own self-doubt. Some evenings I felt too old for this. Then the code would run, the output would appear, and the joy returned.

The Kitchen Experiment

Living alone brought another challenge: hunger.

Back home, the kitchen had never been my department. In Berkeley, if I didn’t cook, I didn’t eat. My kitchenette became my laboratory. I began visiting the farmers’ market and saw vegetables I had only read about: artichokes, Brussels sprouts, kale. I tasted strawberries that felt like sunshine and bread that crackled properly when you tore it.

I learnt to chop onions without injuring myself. I learnt to make a basic dal. My meals were not masterpieces. They were survival food. But there was a quiet satisfaction in eating something made by my own hands.

And on days my experiments failed, Berkeley fed me kindly. Thai curries on Telegraph Avenue. Burritos that could feed two people. Pasta near Shattuck that reminded me, faintly, of home and not at all of home.

Life on Shattuck Avenue was a solitude I wasn’t used to. But it was a productive solitude. Stripped of my title, my ward rounds, and the daily noise of Sevagram, I was free to do one thing properly.

I was a student again.

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