01/07/2026
6am, the landline rings. Gautam who has been up all hours with his PMT prep has snoozed off at the dining table into a mug of gone-cold coffee, jerks awake & picks it up.
“Ji namaste, aaj Doctor Saab baithengi?”
“Ji nahin, din bhar khadi rahengi,” he says, groggy & silly, then immediately gets one THAT look from Mumma, before she takes the phone out of his hand.
Her patients have the numbers, landline, cell. The phone rings at will, at the exact moment garam garam rice is served on the plate. I grew up to that ringing of the phone. Papa going, getting up from dinner, up from homework, from a badminton game. “Papa’s on call.” Three words that meant that he didn’t belong to us for those hours. One of the first things I remember is me, age 3, holding on to his vast back behind him on the scooter on a Sunday morning on the emptiest roads - the whole country shut indoors watching Ramayana on TV. Why I was there going with him to attend to an emergency, I will never know. Mumma was at a camp, perhaps, so there was nowhere to leave little me.
Mumma is still going to camps. Every third Sunday of the month, she wakes up & goes to Mandla, deeper into the forest belt where mental health comes after all other health (which is the case everywhere still mostly). I cannot go anywhere in MP, recce or shoot, and not meet someone who is the someone of one of her patients. She was to have retired at sixty, we joked about it being her ‘best before’ age. Her patients won’t let her stop. She’s seventy.
And now Gautam, walking in after them. I do not know, where he grew the braves from - the softest of us, the gooey overflowing heart I was put on this earth to shield, choosing the worst of the nights, the trauma, the accident, the hit-and-run, all the things I have forbidden from the family WhatsApp group otherwise they would keep putting these surgery videos there. He goes towards exactly those things, to fix, to mend, to save. This little one who wanted to take Naniji to the mechanic to get her limp repaired.
Daughter, sister, first patient (like first lady) to three fine doctors. Happy Doctor’s Day, fam.
(This photograph is from so long ago but it’s my favourite of them.)
