My first house job — six months in Skin and Infectious Diseases — was over. By August 1979 I began my second, Internal Medicine, Ward 23, under Dr. B. S. Chaubey. His reputation reached me before he did, and it left me thrilled and afraid in equal measure.
Mondays were sacred, and dreaded. OPD began at eight sharp. Dr. Chaubey lived in a palatial bungalow on West High Court Road, a few metres from Shankar Nagar Square, and drove a blue Fiat. My classmate — and later co-registrar — Ramesh Mundle still remembers the registration number: MHG–8829. We had trained our eyes to spot it the way a sentry watches the road. The moment that Fiat turned into the parking lot, the grace period was over. Dr. Chaubey arrived a few minutes before eight, unhurried and exact. He tolerated many things in life, but not lateness.
So Monday mornings began before dawn. We dressed fast, skipped tea and breakfast, and rushed to be inside the OPD before he was. The waiting area was already overflowing — patients had travelled overnight from across Vidarbha, some from Madhya Pradesh, for a consultation. Most were examined by interns or first-year residents, yet they left satisfied, reassured that their OPD card carried Dr. Chaubey’s stamp. Authority, we learned, could be delivered in ink.
Ward 23 was the male medical ward. The female ward, Ward 25, was on the first floor, with its own house officer, Archana Srivastava, who would later become my Rakhi sister. Admission days were relentless — forty to fifty patients was routine, every history taken, every test collected and filed, before rounds climbed the ladder: registrar, lecturer, reader, professor.
Among the nursing staff, Brother Bansod and Sister Lalamma stood out — they had served in Ward 23 long enough to anticipate Dr. Chaubey’s preferences before he voiced them. I weighed barely forty kilograms then, and Lalamma worried quietly. Of what she meant to me, more below — I would come to know her far better in the years ahead.
After the sterner rounds, the unit drifted instinctively to the Indian Coffee House on the ground floor. Tea arrived quickly; masala dosa vanished faster. Dr. S. M. Patil was the associate professor, Dr. Viresh Gupta our lecturer. As per GMC tradition, juniors never paid. It was an unwritten rule, followed with the seriousness of a posted order.
Once a month we had a unit party at Hotel Ashoka or Moti Mahal in Sadar, marking a completed house job, a submitted thesis, an impending wedding. Dr. Chaubey attended without fail. I was usually the only vegetarian and the only one who did not drink. It never seemed to matter.
A new postgraduate hostel went up that year, two storeys, girls on one side and boys on the other. I chose Room 99, facing the dental college — clean, quiet, good for study. A telephone stood a few metres away, our lifeline to the wards and to one another. The mess tested our endurance more than any ward round: every vegetable seemed to contain potato, the rotis were thick and cold, and by the time we sat down the dal had lost both heat and hope. One friend put it best: “You have to be a yogi to taste hostel food.” Mornings redeemed the day — for twenty-five paise, the Indian Coffee House offered idlis, uttapam, or yet another masala dosa.
Then, almost without warning, the house job ended. We had lived in a tight loop — sleep, wake, work, eat, sleep again — with little time to reflect on any of it.
In September 2026, as I was putting the final touches to this memoir during a month-long visit with my daughter, Amrita, in Richmond, my phone rang. The screen flashed a name that instantly summoned a distant past: Lalamma John. I answered, only to hear a voice I had not heard in nearly five decades. She challenged me to identify her, and her delight was palpable when I guessed correctly. She remembered me in surprising detail—recalling my sincerity and even my handwriting—and was thrilled to finally bridge the years between us.
Her call took me back—not to that initial six-month house job, but to the two years that followed. With those early house jobs behind me, I had returned to Ward 23 as a resident, once again under Dr. Chaubey. Lalamma was a staff nurse in her mid-twenties then. Soft-spoken with a Kerala accent, she moved swiftly from bed to bed while I seemed to live on the ward, there almost round the clock. On Mondays, admissions could run to fifty, and Dr. Chaubey expected every history, every examination, and every report filed before he arrived at eight. Much of the basic laboratory work fell to a small side-room attached to the ward: complete blood counts on a Neubauer chamber, malaria smears, urine testing for protein and glucose, ESRs, and stool examinations. There was little room for delay, and even less for mistakes.
Lalamma took me under her wing. She seemed to know, without being asked, what would save me a few precious minutes—drawing blood, filling out pathology and X-ray requisition forms, quietly keeping things moving when the ward threatened to overwhelm me.
But what I remember most is the tea. She would brew a cup for me and, on occasion, even feed me. There was nothing romantic about it, despite what a novelist might make of the scene—it was the simple tenderness of an elder sister caring for a younger brother. By the end of those two years, I weighed only forty-one kilos. Perhaps, to her, I looked like what I was trying so hard to be: a young doctor who worked honestly and spoke gently to his patients.
We spoke for several minutes before she began, without a trace of hesitation, to name the old Medicine house officers one by one: Ramesh Mundle, Archana Srivastava, Nandu Chandak, Jayant Pandey, Shriram Kane, Aziz Khan, Harish Baheti, Sharad Pendsey, Pradeep Jalgaonkar, Manohar Sarda, Shyam Zawar, R. B. Kalamkar. The names came effortlessly, as if she had kept them safely preserved all these years.
Now in her mid-seventies, she is retired and living with her husband in Nagpur. When I married in February 1984, she and several other nurses from Ward 23 at GMC Nagpur came to my reception in Wardha. This time, I promised, I would go and visit her rather than wait for the phone to ring.
Forty-seven years on, her call brought back not the rounds or the case sheets, but a cup of tea, a helping hand, and the quiet kindness of someone who had looked after a thin, anxious young doctor when he needed it most.