(Some of you reading this have walked and run with me, played tennis and basketball, squash and cricket with me. This one's for each of you.)

When I was younger, so much younger than today, family and friends began to notice that I stood a little awkwardly. Maybe I never needed anybody's help in any way, I don't know. But the awkwardness was most obvious in photographs, where I would invariably stand with one foot out to the side. They also found I ran a little oddly, even though I was active and loved playing outside.

Eventually an older aunt and my mother lay me down and actually measured my legs. By a couple of inches, one was shorter than the other. My mother took me to a well-known Bombay doctor, who confirmed the difference in the lengths and said that I must have had a mild attack of polio. (Polio was, of course, much more prevalent and frightening then than it is now.) To make up those inches, he said, I would have to wear a boot with a thick sole.

So I began wearing this heavy boot, and I was clearly unhappy with it. I couldn't run around much anymore; instead, I stumbled here and there. My parents were dismayed, but then this is what the well-known doctor had recommended.

About then, the family moved to Aurangabad. Friends there suggested to my mother that she take me to a local doctor. A surgeon by training, he was making something of a name for himself treating orthopaedic problems.

When he saw me, he asked: "Is he an active child?"

"Yes", said my mother. (She remembers him asking his question "angrily".)

"Then throw away the boot and don't ever mention the polio to him."

I don't remember those words, nor this meeting, nor even this entire brush with polio. But when I look back from too many years later, I know how surely the doctor changed my life. I grew up playing every game I could, even getting sort of good at tennis and basketball (my cricket career, though, is limited to a first-ball dismissal and one wicket.) I have run races short and long - well, if 10K is long. I swim and have done plenty of hiking.

And not once in all the years since we threw that boot away have I been conscious of any problem with my legs. (I did have a basketball injury in 1987 that, thirty years on, resulted in knee surgery to repair a damaged ligament.) People tell me I have a very slight stoop to one side when I walk, compensation for the couple of inches. That, I don't mind at all. Someone once compared it to the gait of the tennis maestro Stefan Edberg, which was one reason I married that someone.

Of course, my parents eventually told me about this episode from my childhood. So I always wanted to meet the doctor who turned my life around. It took me forty years, but one evening in March 2006 in Nagpur, I finally did meet him. In the meantime, he had won for himself a deal of quiet admiration in orthopaedic and other circles, and in 2002, a Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian award.

That's Dr Vikram Marwah. At over 80 in 2006, he was still seeing patients. He told me many people didn't like coming to him, because he prescribed simple solutions, and suggested that they learn to live with their particular problem rather than expecting complete cures. People didn't want to hear that kind of wisdom. Still, enough had come to appreciate his ordinary common sense, his can-do attitude.

For years, he applied those qualities at week-long camps he held in various parts of rural Maharashtra. ("Not the Rotary-Lion kind of camps," he said with a twinkle, "not those one-day things where you do some work and go home to have a beer.") Polio victims, kids with deformities, they would flock to these camps, drawn by Marwah's three-As approach to his work.

"Treatment," he told me, "should be Available, Appropriate, Affordable." With each "A" - and somehow they seemed upper-case as he spoke - a finger rose from his fist.

"After all," he went on, "what's the use of fixing fractures if you're going to charge Rs 20,000 for it? Who can afford that?"

In the same vein, Marwah described some of his ideas for simple solutions to orthopaedic problems. One has stayed in my mind: an artificial leg he once made using, of all things, a cycle stand. "At that time," he said with yet another twinkle, "you could get a stand for Rs 3.75!" Affordable, oh yes.

Marwah took me to a little hospital he had run for a quarter-century. We met a clutch of poorer children he had identified at his most recent rural camp. Three had club feet, several had burn deformities that had curled up their fingers or toes ... cases like those, on down the line. The next day, he said, his team was going to operate on them, apply plastic surgery to the burn injuries ... on down the line.

And as I mingled with them, I wondered. What must it be like for a kid to get back his fingers? To be able to walk with feet straight ahead for the first time in her 8-year-old life? In just over 24 hours, it struck me, these ten kids would likely have answers.

To my surprise, I was almost envious. I wanted to experience that new outlook on life, that delicious freedom from disability.

But then I remembered. This very doctor once gave me that very feeling.

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Vikram Marwah died in 2013. I never met him again.