In the spring of 1975, the gates of the GMC hostel finally creaked open, offering us a liberation that felt suspiciously like a coronation. For the top twenty rankers, the rewards were aristocratic: single rooms in the wings, a luxury of privacy that most first-year students could only contemplate with envy. The rest of us, the hoi polloi of the medical meritocracy, were content to share rooms in what we considered the promised land. We sold our rickety chairs and bruised tables, rolled up our mattresses, and marched toward the hostel buildings with the fervor of pilgrims reaching a holy site.
Suddenly, the suffocating oversight of landlords and the nervous scrutiny of electricity meters vanished. I was allotted Room 99 in Hostel No. 4, on the third floor. Whether by some cosmic design or a mere administrative fluke, that number attached itself to me like a second skin. For the next seven years—migrating from Hostel 4 to 3, then 2, and finally the postgraduate quarters—I would inevitably find my trunk parked outside a door marked “99.” In the world of cricket, ninety-nine is a state of high anxiety, a “nervous” threshold where batsmen freeze. For me, it was a sanctuary; Room 99 became my personal 10 Downing Street, a fixed point in a shifting world.
Liberty is a dangerous thing in the hands of nineteen-year-olds. We used our newfound freedom to explore the nocturnal geography of the city. We would glide through the sleeping streets on our bicycles, pedaling toward Panchsheel Square for a late-night snack, or marching seven kilometers to Saroj Talkies to catch a midnight show. On one particularly absurd night, ten of us walked the entire distance to watch Ujala—a film nearly two decades old—reveling in the sheer pointlessness of the expedition. The hostel wardens, usually clinical registrars far too exhausted by the day’s rounds to play policeman, simply looked the other way.
However, the hostel had its own internal hierarchy, policed by “permanent residents”—men who had failed their finals so frequently they had become part of the architectural furniture. These veterans felt a pedagogical duty to “educate” us. Every night at nine, we were summoned like fresh recruits to a tawdry cabaret. We were made to parody popular songs, tell jokes, or act out scenes for their bored amusement. It was a tyranny of the mundane. Eventually, as with all autocrats, they grew weary of their own cruelty. The ragging ceased as abruptly as it had begun, leaving us with a strange sense of relief and a repertoire of stories we would polish for years to come.
Inside those walls, life was less about textbooks and more about the art of the distraction. We discovered the seductive, obsessive pull of Teen Patti. It was a game played with a religious intensity that saw us huddling over cards in sessions that bled into the dawn. I too was drawn into the orbit of the bluff, fueled by the irrational hope that luck would eventually recognize my merit and tilt the pile of small coins in my direction. We played until our meager pockets were emptied or sleep finally claimed us; fortunately, this particular flirtation with ruin was short-lived, as the glamour of the gamble eventually faded.
When we weren’t losing coins at cards, we were losing our dignity in the Table Tennis hall on the second floor. Most of us possessed the athletic grace of a wounded hippopotamus; we had not so much “acquired skills” as we had developed a rudimentary ability to ensure the ball landed somewhere—anywhere—on the opposite side of the table. It was a game of frantic scurrying and hopeful lunges, played with a seriousness that was entirely inversely proportional to our actual talent. If the ball stayed on the table for more than three seconds, it was considered a sporting miracle.
Yet, the memory that remains most vividly etched in the mind is the sensory assault of the morning bath. In those days, geysers were a decadent fantasy and buckets were non-existent. The bathroom doors had been beaten to death by generations of impatient students and could no longer be closed, meaning one simply learned to abandon modesty. We would sit beneath the cold tap, eyes squeezed shut against the chill, and surrender to the flow. Our relationship with water was one of unthinking trust; we drank directly from the washbasin taps, blissfully ignorant of RO systems or the modern fetish for sterilization. There was no “safe” water then—only water—and aside from the occasional, character-building bout of dysentery, we remained remarkably, perhaps stubbornly, healthy.
The hostel mess provided a different kind of training: an education in endurance. We were served a democratic misery of pale brinjal-potato curries, rotis as dry as ancient parchment, and a dal so watery it could have been used as a laboratory reagent. Sundays, however, were a festival of gluttony. When the news of unlimited gulab jamuns broke, a strange expectancy would settle over the wing. I watched in horrified admiration as boys challenged each other to feats of athletic consumption, swallowing dozens of syrup-soaked balls without a hint of a burp.
Most rooms were a chaotic sprawl of books and film star posters, but I took a pride in my own quarters. Room 99 was an island of order. It was always clean and tidy. Those years shaped us in ways the lecture halls never could. We learned the high art of shared survival, how to tolerate a neighbor’s snoring, and how to forgive the small trespasses of communal life. We were young, we were invincible, and we were perfectly happy to drink from the tap and hope for the best.
In 1979, a new postgraduate hostel rose on the GMC campus—freshly built, orderly, and unmistakably modern by the standards of the time. For residents who had spent years adjusting to makeshift arrangements, it felt like a quiet luxury.
Until then, we had lived in a dormitory with sixteen beds, no individual rooms, and zero privacy. It sat on the first floor of the hospital building—convenient, yes, but permanently half-awake. A tired resident would hunt for an empty bed, drop onto it as if shot, and steal whatever sleep he could before the next call dragged him back to the wards.
Communication was primitive. There were no mobile phones, and the PBX failed often. Messages travelled on foot, and confusion travelled with them. A ward attendant—almost always a woman—would walk to the dormitory, locate the resident, and obtain a signature on a call book.
On one memorable night, an attendant called out for “Deshpande.” Dr. Pande, half-asleep and thoroughly disoriented, assumed the call was for him. He scribbled an order to “inject adrenaline and start cardiac massage,” unaware that the message was actually for the obstetrician managing fetal distress with faint heart sounds. Fatigue was constant, and errors were always waiting.
***
The Move to Order
Against that chaotic backdrop, the new hostel felt like salvation. It stood facing the Dental College, solid and self-assured, with the wards and OPDs barely a hundred metres away. For once, exhaustion did not require a long walk.
The hostel was neatly divided into two wings: ladies on the left, gents on the right. It was perhaps the first time men and women stayed under the same roof in a common hostel, though the demarcation was clear and unquestioned.
I was allotted Room No. 99 on the second floor. I had always liked the number. My window overlooked the busy stretch of road running from the GMC entrance to the Dean’s office. I could watch the campus move through the day—students, nurses, patients, ward boys, and doctors in a hurry, all flowing in the same direction. The room itself was simple: a table, two chairs, a cot, and a compact almirah. Two toilets and bathrooms were shared among ten rooms, and a single telephone at the corner of the wing connected us to the hospital PBX. It was our lifeline—temperamental, unpredictable, but indispensable.
***
The Warden and the Mess
Our warden was Dr. H. C. Attal, then Associate Professor of Medicine—a man who combined discipline with his own unique brand of English. Short, dressed in an untucked bush shirt and chappals, he spoke in a manner that invited more smiles than fear. But a mere lift of his eyebrows was enough to signal that he had no patience for nonsense. He never owned a vehicle, depending entirely on residents to ferry him around as if it were an accepted part of our training. His trusted lieutenant was Mr. Chimurkar, the clerk who knew everyone, everything, and—most importantly—where to find it.
The ground floor housed the mess. The menu displayed a steadfast commitment to brinjal and potato, accompanied by shrivelled chapatis and lukewarm dal. Both disappeared without leaving much of a memory. As a friend put it, you needed spiritual discipline to taste hostel food.
Several of my 1973-batch classmates lived close by—Ramesh Mundle, Harish Baheti, Madhusudan Bagdia, and Shriram Kane. While hostel rooms tended towards disorder, mine was an exception. Driven by an obsession ingrained since childhood, I kept it scrupulously clean, sweeping and swabbing the floor daily—a habit that amused some and baffled others.
I still rode my old undergraduate bicycle. Throughout my MD years, it carried me through the then-quiet streets of Nagpur, faithful and uncomplaining.
The new hostel—with its privacy, its order, and its modest comforts—felt like progress. It did not make residency easy. It simply made it bearable. And at that stage, that was more than enough.