By Maitphang Syiem
Some people are known best not by their titles, but by what they did in the ordinary hours: the evenings after rounds, the mornings before the hospital woke up. Dr. John Lalremsiama Sailo Ryntathiang was that kind of person. Today, on the sixth anniversary of his passing, we remember him not only as Meghalaya’s most beloved physician and founder of Bethany Hospital, but as a man whose life was made of things most obituaries miss a guitar kept within reach, a hillside farm in Ri-Bhoi, a pencil that never stopped sketching what could still be built. Those who knew him say he had a way of making the world feel more deliberate. He did not simply move through it. He paid attention to it.
To understand Dr. Sailo, one must begin before him in the bloodline he carried with quiet pride. His father, Captain Lalrinthanga Sailo, was the first Mizo to graduate from the Indian Military Academy, who walked the disputed edges of the McMahon Line and died in the frontier of NEFA, now Arunachal Pradesh. His maternal grandfather was Dr. Lukira, the first Mizo doctor. His mother, Kong Dicky Sailo Ryntathiang, was a well-known educationist and social worker in Shillong. He came from a family of people who were first at things not through ambition, but through the willingness to step where others had not. Dr. Sailo carried this legacy quietly. He rarely spoke of it, according to those close to him. He simply got on with things which, in its own way, said everything.
There is a particular kind of intelligence that institutional education cannot fully contain. Dr. Sailo had that kind. He graduated from Assam Medical College in Dibrugarh, completed his postgraduation at AIIMS New Delhi, won the Gold Medal, and became a Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians (FCCP, USA) placing him among the finest internists. By any measure, these were remarkable achievements for a young doctor from Shillong. But his colleagues will tell you that his credentials were the least interesting thing about him. The part of him that people speak of with the greatest warmth was the man who could not stop learning from the world itself. He had a deep curiosity about music, design, art, farming, and how a building could be made humane—how architecture could serve healing as much as medicine could. He drew, sketched, and leaned over blueprints with the same intensity he brought to a case file, always asking, “How can this be better?” The growth of Bethany Hospital from a modest clinic on Nongrim Hills Road in 1992 to a 175-bedded multi-specialty institution by 2011 was the work of a man who understood that care needs a worthy space. He funded students, represented Meghalaya in the Indian Medical Council, and travelled to conferences not to be seen, but to learn. He could not stop learning because he could not stop caring.
Those who visited Dr. Sailo at home remember a guitar always within arm’s reach—not mounted on a wall or kept in a case, just there, the way a familiar tool stays close to the person who uses it regularly. His love for music was genuine and well-known among family, colleagues, and patients alike. The guitar was as much a part of his identity as his stethoscope. What struck people was not that a doctor played music, but how naturally the two sat together in him. He listened to his patients the way a musician listens to a composition: not just for what was being said, but for what was underneath it. The hesitation in a voice. The symptom mentioned last. He brought the same patience to both.
The same hands that examined patients and held a guitar also turned the soil. Dr. Sailo’s farmhouse in Nongpoh, Ri-Bhoi District, was his sanctuary—the place where the physician became a man again. He farmed, planted, and watched the seasons do their slow, honest work. In a region where Khasi tradition recognises the earth not as a resource but as something owed respect, his farming was not a pastime. It was a practice.
He knew those Nongpoh roads well—had walked them, known the families along them, understood what it meant to fall ill far from a hospital. That familiarity is what drove him to build an outreach facility there. It was not a strategic decision. It was a personal one. His patients in that valley were not strangers to him. He had breathed the same air.
Dr. Sailo was a devout Christian quietly so, in the way that tends to be most lasting. His family described him as someone who actually lived by what he believed: a man of peace who did not raise his voice, who could find something to smile about even on difficult days, and who was, above all, genuinely compassionate. His faith showed up not in pronouncements but in decisions: returning to Shillong when a career in Delhi was well within reach; building clinics in places where the economics made little sense; paying for a student’s education without making it a story.
In Khasi philosophical tradition, “Ka Hok” righteousness, the right way is not merely a moral code but a way of living in alignment with something larger than oneself. By that measure, Dr. Sailo belonged to a tradition much older than any institution that gave him a degree. Every choice he made—to come home, to build where others would not, to fund a stranger’s education, to pick up the guitar at the end of a long day of rounds—reflected a man who understood what he was here for.
Dr. Sailo passed away on the morning of 15th April 2020, at 2:45 AM. He had been unwell due to COVID. Life, in its infinite mystery, does not always reveal its reasons to us. It reminds us once again that death, like the first breath, belongs to a design far greater than our own understanding. He did not leave because his work had ended. He left because some journeys simply cannot be extended by human will alone.
What he left behind is not easily catalogued. It lives in the patient from a Ri-Bhoi village whose diagnosis changed the course of their life. In the student whose fees he quietly covered. In the nurse who watched how he treated people and decided that was the standard she would hold herself to. In everyone who, at the end of a hard day, picks up a guitar and lets the music say what words cannot quite manage. He did not speak about legacy. He built one, steadily, without announcement, over the course of a life.
Six years on, those who knew Dr. John L. Sailo Ryntathiang still speak of him in the same way not as a towering figure, but as a good man. Thorough. Warm. Honest about what mattered. In Shillong, that tends to be the higher praise. Bethany still stands at Nongrim Hills. The fields of Ri-Bhoi still turn with the seasons. And the things he cared about—healing, learning, the soil, the music—go on, carried forward by people he shaped, many of whom never knew that was what he was doing. Dr. John L. Sailo Ryntathiang did not merely live a life. He composed one in chords and soil and stone and care, in the languages of the guitar and the stethoscope and the seed.
(Writer is a Nephew and a Geospatial Expert)
