Meera Bhardwaj By

Decades ago, a schoolgirl in Multan (now in Pakistan) stumbled upon the biography of Marie Curie, the first woman scientist to win the Nobel Prize. Inspired by her, the girl adopted Curie as her role model. From running around the Multan borstal to her stint in refugee camps post-Partition and ending up setting a super specialty hospital in Bengaluru, Dr Sita Bhateja has led an extraordinary life, touching the lives of many people.

Today, at the age of 86, she still heads the Sita Bhateja Super Specialty Hospitals, operating on patients every day. Working non-stop for 66 years as a doctor, she has helped deliver over a lakh babies, which include those belonging to three generations of some families. On some days, she performs three operations followed by 25 consultations. “I feel satisfied with my life and very happy helping others. In my dictionary, there is no place for boredom or exhaustion,” she says.

Dr Bhateja moved to Bengaluru (then Bangalore) in 1957, where she worked in CSI Hospital for eight years and then for 34 years in St. Martha’s Hospital. “I was crazy about working and did not take a salary from CSI. Martha’s used to pay me `250 per month for my petrol expenses,” she says. “In 1993, I had to leave Martha’s as it was tough working in a Catholic institution during those days. By then I had started my own hospital. Today it is a super specialty hospital run by my son Arvind, a neurosurgeon.”

In Multan, her grandfather was an “expert in borstal jails. It was a big household, a joint family with our house in the jail compound. We were a progressive family and my grandfather being an educationist, I was sent to the best schools. We were brought up to be courageous and independent. We travelled on our own and I learned doing things very early in life.”

About the Partition, she says, “It was an escape from a country built on hatred and bloodshed. I was just 15, and with great difficulty, traversing from place to place and using every form of transportation, we escaped to India without a stitch on our backs.”

She came to Mumbai and started studying. “I wanted to become a doctor to help my country. I had no food or money,” she says. After finishing her studies, she worked for two years in refugee camps in Kurukshetra, Yola and Jammu Tavi during 1949-50. “They gave me a salary of `400 and most of the cases used to be of child birth. For the next eight years, I worked in Cama Hospital (in Mumbai) and married an army officer,” she adds.

Apart from being a doctor, she is also a stamp collector. Her collection was viewed by former presidents Pratibha Patil and K R Narayanan as it is widely considered as one of the finest stamp collections of pre-Independence India. “My collection is of immense historical value. I used to research each and every stamp thoroughly,” she says. However, her stamp collection from her school days could not be retrieved from Pakistan.