At 5:30 a.m. in Hyderabad, while most of the city is still stretching into the day, Dr. Suri Srimathi is already on her yoga mat. She is 92. After pranayama she will drive herself to work, review cases, and—if the list demands it—walk into an operating theatre and deliver a baby. She has been doing some version of this for more than sixty years.

“I completed my MBBS in 1958, and I have been practising for the past 60 years,” she says, as if the sentence is the most ordinary thing in the world. It is not. Those six decades include an estimated two lakh deliveries, government hospitals across Telangana, teaching posts, a home clinic opened after “retirement” in 1999, and patients who now bring their daughters and granddaughters to the same doctor.

The girl who chose medicine when the neighbourhood turned away

She grew up in a household that believed in discipline and yoga. Her father, Suri Raghava Deekshitulu, ran yoga centres in Andhra Pradesh and was still cycling in his nineties. The spark for medicine came earlier and harder: her brother and sister fell desperately ill with smallpox.

“When we were young, my brother and sister got smallpox. They were extremely sick,” she recalls. Doctors saved them. She decided she would become one of those doctors.

That decision cost the family. In the 1950s, a young woman dissecting cadavers was enough to invite social boycott. Relatives stopped speaking to them.

“My parents had to face society’s backlash,” she says. “Our relatives stopped speaking to us.” Then, with a small smile: “Once I became a doctor, they were the ones who would boast about it.”

She completed MBBS at Osmania University in 1958 and MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 1965. There were twenty-three seats reserved for girls in a batch of a hundred. She took one.

Sangareddy, 1959: one doctor, three jobs

Her first independent posting was a district government hospital in Sangareddy. A mother brought in a girl of thirteen or fourteen.

“Her mother said, my daughter is pregnant, please examine her. When I examined her, I was shocked. The girl was eight months pregnant. This was the first medical case of my career.”

There was no separate anaesthetist, no paediatrician standing by.

“I was the anaesthesiologist, the gynaecologist and the paediatrician,” she says. She gave the anaesthesia herself and performed the caesarean. The baby lived. That scene—one young woman carrying three roles in a poorly equipped theatre—stayed with her.

She would later work at Osmania Medical College, Gandhi Medical College, Government Maternity Hospital, Niloufer Hospital, Sagarlal Memorial Hospital and Bapuji Hospital. For thirty-five years she served in the public system. Then she “retired” and opened a clinic in her own house because, she said, pregnant women in the locality still needed someone who would not turn them away.

“I needed to look after the pregnant women in my locality. So having a clinic here was important.” Consultations at home; deliveries and surgeries at nearby nursing homes. Even now she still operates. “The other day I did three surgeries including Caesarean. In caesarean, twins were delivered.”

Three generations, one pair of hands

Patients bring old photographs.

“They came and showed me photos, but I didn’t recognise them. But the child in that photograph was delivered by me.”

Koteru Tulasi, holding a baby, told cameras: “Dr Suri Srimathi did all my three caesareans.” She had been nervous about the doctor’s age. “Initially, I was a little apprehensive… But she instilled confidence in me.”

A former student and fellow gynaecologist, Dr Rajani Kumari, put it more sharply: “Sometimes, our hands may tremble but not hers.”

Dr Srimathi has delivered grandmother, mother and granddaughter in the same family. “Three generations have been under my care,” she says.

Why she will not stop

People ask her the obvious question. She answers without drama.

“As long as God gives me patience and strength, I will continue to do this work.”

And then the line that has travelled farthest:

“We cannot refuse to treat people when they need help, right?”

She still reads journals, attends meetings, talks to medical representatives. She still drives. She still begins the day with the yoga her father taught her. When someone wonders why a 92-year-old does not rest, she turns the question around: if we do not stop eating or sleeping, why should we stop working while the strength remains?

That is the biography, humanised: not a list of degrees, but a woman who once faced a closed door from her own relatives, who once held a terrified teenage mother and three medical roles at once, and who, decades later, still ties her mask and walks into theatre because someone is knocking.