Kishin Gehi's promise benefited his family, Anniston

May 15—Decades ago, long before he became one of Anniston's best-known physicians, Kishin Gehi made a promise to his bride's family: If her father allowed her to accompany Gehi to America, in a year they would return home to visit.

Home, by the way, was India.

"He told me about the United States and how nice it is, how nice people are and the hospitals and all that, and that you will be fine coming," Chandra Gehi said. "But my father was a little bit reluctant to let me leave my family."

Given patriarchal blessing, the husband-and-wife duo of doctors soon became examples of highly educated immigrants who embraced life in America and bolstered the communities in which they lived, including Anniston.

Kishin Gehi, who died May 7 at age 79, brought to Alabama a reputation of a kindhearted doctor who enjoyed meeting patients and learning the nuances of their individual lives.

"He was a family physician, very, very caring," Chandra Gehi said. "He would know about the whole family, he would talk to them. He was very compassionate, very kind, he would never lose his temper, and the patients loved him so much." So, too, did the nurses, she said.

Preordination, not personal choice, may have pushed Gehi into his career selection. Medicine not only is his and his wife's professions — Chandra Gehi is a neurologist who still practices in Anniston — but it dominates his family's tree. Though his father was an aeronautics engineer, "his sister was a doctor, his younger brother was a doctor, his brother-in-law is a doctor, his nephews are physicians," Chandra Gehi said, an illustration of many Indian parents' preferences for children to choose professional careers that offer financial stability.

That trend even meandered into their courtship. The Gehis met in Bombay because Chandra and one of his sisters attended the same medical school.

"Over there, all of our parents, even if they don't have money, they will borrow and put children through school and college," she said. "We didn't have to work until you finished. They would encourage you, they would make it very convenient."

In America, hospital residencies and job assignments took the Gehis on a tour of two of the Southeast's larger cities: Memphis, Tenn., where the couple toured Elvis Presley's Graceland mansion, and Birmingham, where Gehi completing his training in nuclear medicine.

Raising their sons, Anil and Sanjay, while juggling medical careers with nighttime shifts proved arduous. Chandra Gehi retells a story from early in their marriage when their first child was an infant and her husband — then working in pathology — was called one morning to the hospital at 2. She was already there, working an overnight shift.

Dead-of-the-night babysitters aren't ubiquitous.

"So he said, 'What should I do with our child?'" Chandra Gehi remembers. "I said, 'You can't call anyone at 2 o'clock.' We didn't have family here. So he would bring the child to the hospital and let me hold it ... But we worked around it."

In 1977, at Anniston's apex as one of Alabama's largest mid-sized cities, Dr. Warren Sarrell recruited Gehi to join Anniston Medical Clinic. Chandra Gehi followed a year later, becoming Anniston's first full-time neurologist.

"'Oh, you are going to Alabama,'" people remarked when Sarrell lured them east, she said. "But we trained in Birmingham, so Anniston wasn't too far."

Here, amid the city's burgeoning community of immigrant doctors, the Gehis dove into work and their new Appalachian foothills home. He switched specialties, becoming a family physician, which broadened his practice. He also became a man hard to simply describe: Born in Karachi before the Indian partition, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro after graduating medical school. He learned Swahili while studying in Nairobi. He learned Bengali while studying in Calcutta. He also spoke English, Hindi, Gujarati and Sinhi, one of which he learned when one of his siblings married in another community.

Friends taught him to shoot. He collected things and loved to travel. As his sons grew, he assisted with local Boy Scout troops, performing their required physicals and joining them on camping trips. Though awful hours and numbing stress are often embedded in hospital careers, "we didn't think about ourselves," Chandra Gehi said. "We just worked around the children. That's how we were taught, to pay lots of attention and bring up children properly."

With their sons grown and Gehi's retirement in 2010, a figurative travel agent blessed his family's life. It's as if he and his wife spun a globe and booked airplane tickets to wherever it stopped. They toured Italy. They flew to Spain. They visited Greece. They went to Turkey. And China. And Brazil. Twice a year, every year, they flew somewhere.

Occasionally, they'd return to India, just as they had decades before, a promise kept to his wife's father.

As Gehi's health declined this spring, his sons traveled, too. Back to Anniston, where they spent his last 10 days at his bedside.

"Oh, yeah," Chandra Gehi said. "He was very proud of his sons."

Phillip Tutor — ptutor@annistonstar.com — is a Star columnist. Follow him at Twitter.com/PTutor_Star.