Most people grow up hearing fairy tales and stories from their grandparents. Dr Nilima Kadambi (now 63) was no different. 

But in her case, she says, it wasn’t fairy tales her grandmother, Dr Sarladevi Khot, would tell her to put her to bed. Instead, they were real-life stories of her own early life and medical adventures. One that Nilima would pester her to retell was of the time she gave birth to Nilima’s father. 

“In 1932, my grandparents were living in Maswa village in Tanzania, East Africa. My grandmother, pregnant with her second child, wasn’t due to deliver until 20 days later. When she went into labour early, my grandfather wasn’t around to help.” 

Dr Gopalrao Khot would routinely travel to the nearby villages in Africa that were under his care. He helped the communities get timely treatment for malaria, gastroenteritis, kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis), and sleeping sickness. Around the time that Dr Sarladevi went into labour, an epidemic of malaria caused Dr Gopalrao to stay back in one of the villages where he had to supervise the medication of the patients, monitor their conditions, and document the deaths for the hospital medical records. 

“There was no way for my grandmother to inform my grandfather that she was in labour,” Nilima explains. “And so, she performed her own delivery. She instructed the 16-year-old girl (the African nanny to my father’s older sibling) to boil water, scissors for cutting the umbilical cord, and thread for securing it.” 

Once she had delivered the baby, she gathered the placenta and afterbirth and buried it in a hole, so that the big cats in the jungle around their home wouldn’t be attracted by the smell of blood.

“When my grandfather returned home, he was the father of two - the 13-month-old daughter and a newborn son!” Nilima smiles. 

As she shares this story, we’re seated at a Cafe in Bandra, Mumbai. We’re engulfed in the sounds that are typical of the hustle of a metropolis: traffic, honking, chatter, and construction. I time-travel to a different world when listening to Nilima’s stories about her grandmother, which makes it so easy to forget my surroundings until these mundane sounds snap me back to reality.

A walk down memory lane

As a........

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