Tapping into the many tales of Dr Ernest Borges Road

Renee Maria Borges, daughter of Dr Ernest Borges, and I walk down Dr Borges Road and we reflect on the odd intersection Parel once represented: the mills klaxon and the toon-taan-toon-taan of the ambulance vying with each other

The jamun tree outside the building of the College of Physicians and Surgeons on Dr Ernest Borges Road in Parel begins a bombardment of ripe fruit. Dr Borges’s youngest daughter looks up and says, “It’s a barbet eating the fruit.”

Writer Jerry Pinto interacts with daughter of Dr Ernest Borges, Renee Maria Borges, an Indian evolutionary biologist and professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, as they walks down memory on Dr E Borges Road in Parel, Mumbai. (ANSHUMAN POYREKAR / HT PHOTO)

I envy such easy familiarity with nature. My friend, the late Shirin Sabavala, would often record the spritely antics of the glyricidia outside her balcony and Shanta Gokhale’s emails still talk of a morning walk over a carpet of peltoforum. Despite a close study of Dr Sharadini Dahanukar’s ‘Green Solace’ (original name in Marathi: Hirwaai), I am still not very familiar with such greenery as still survives in the city.

But then Renee Maria Borges is a behavioural ecologist who, at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, studies how fig wasps and figs communicate biochemically; and how fungi-harvesting ants keep parasites at bay. She is also the author of a book on her illustrious father, ‘In Ernest Quest: E J Borges, Legendary and Revered Cancer Surgeon’ (Cinammonteal Publishing, 2022).

“My father died when I was ten,” she said. “This book was also a way of finding out more about him.”

We walk down Dr Borges Road and I reflect on the odd intersection Parel once represented: the mills klaxon and the toon-taan-toon-taan of the ambulance vying with each other. Renee Borges emphasises that her father was not intent on becoming a cancer surgeon. As we pass the KEM Hospital, she tells me her father’s story: “He was diagnosed with tuberculosis when he went to the United Kingdom after his MS to do his FRCS examination. He spent some time at a sanatorium in Brighton for the ‘balmy sea air cure’. Then he came back and was sent to Ahmednagar to convalesce and he practised there for a while.

“He was happy there but my grandfather was concerned about his unmarried son and kept scanning the ‘Situations Vacant’ columns. My father interviewed at KEM but they wanted him to set up an orthopaedic ward and he couldn’t see himself doing that. Then the Tata Memorial Hospital, a new one at the time, offered him a job. They threw in a lure: they would sponsor his return to England to finish his FRCS. He did and added a stint at Memorial Sloan Kettering where they had the new Cobalt machines so that he could learn about radiation therapy and bring those skills back. Dr Ernest Borges came back and the rest is medical history. He became the cancer surgeon, doing a variety of difficult surgeries, from oesophageal surgeries to rectal resections.

“The book began at a symposium on ‘Dr Borges as a Mentor’. I was involved and as I had some editing experience, I was going through the papers to prepare a brochure and the idea took root there,” says Renee Borges.

She says now that she regrets the tardiness of her decision. “So many of the people who knew him have passed on. My mother too passed but I wonder whether she would have been comfortable talking about him. She was a very reserved person.”

Gracie Borges, a mathematics teacher, would have a huge role to play in the lives of her five surviving children: Anita (an onco-pathologist), Nina (a financial analyst in New York, now retired), Rita (a food writer) and Eric (a cardiologist). For Dr Ernest Borges developed stomach cancer and was given less than a year to live.

“He decided he would not tell the family anything, not even his wife. Instead, he took us on a wonderful vacation to Kashmir. I have lovely memories of that time. When he had to have surgery, he invented the myth that it was a peptic ulcer.”

Perhaps Gracie in her quiet way suspected something for she demanded a medical report. “My father got a doctor friend to write up a report stating that it was a peptic ulcer. This was shown to her. Afterwards the report was destroyed.”

Even his daughter Anita, then in her second year MBBS, was kept in the dark about her father’s condition. “He fought it alone but he blazed like a light for us.”

In a life-and-death struggle with cancer, Dr Borges found the time to get his youngest daughter a puppy. “I think he knew that the unconditional love of a dog might give me something to cling to in those dark days.”

Dr Borges’s legacy lives on. In a street name, in the memories of doctors and patients, in the home at Kala Nagar where cancer patients may stay with family members.

“Then, as now, people would come and live on the pavements around Tata Memorial. My father was deeply distressed by this. He said often to his juniors: ‘Surely we can do something for them?’ Years after his death, Dr Praful Desai asked the mayor for land and the Dr Ernest Borges Memorial Home came up in Kalanagar.”

The good we do is not always interred with our bones.

(And on that happy note, this column comes to an end. Remember to keep walking and looking and recording and responding. Achcha toh hum chalte hain.)