The cries split the night.

“Hey Bhagwan! Hey Bhagwan!”

Harminder Kaur woke in the middle of the night to find half the girls’ hostel already crowded around her bed. Beside her, glistening in the lantern light, coiled with the unhurried composure of a creature that had chosen its resting place and saw no reason to leave, was a large cobra.

Her legs went cold.

Someone ran to call Vandana.

“Don’t move,” Vandana whispered, urgent and low. “Don’t scream. Just jump out quickly.”

Harminder blinked, grasped the situation in the half-second that mattered, and leapt.

The boys from the hostel arrived with sticks and the particular courage of people who decide to act before thinking too carefully. The snake was dealt with. A bonfire claimed it. The air smelled of smoke, dust, adrenaline, and the sharp relief of disaster narrowly avoided.

Then, in the way of the young and the surviving, they laughed. They laughed until dawn, replaying the moment — Harminder’s leap, the sticks, the bonfire — and Harminder said, with the perfect timing of someone shaken out of her sleep:

“You were more frightened than I was.”

Sevagram taught her two things that night: how thin the line is between life and death, and how quickly fear, in the company of friends, becomes a story that lasts fifty years.

Childhood and the Question That Started Everything

She was born on 12 February 1961 in Jalandhar, Punjab, the daughter of Bhajan Singh, an officer in the Indian Air Force, and Bij, his homemaker wife. The family moved with the service — that particular rootless childhood of Air Force households, where the school changed and the friends changed and what remained constant was the family itself.

The seed of medicine was planted when she was four years old.

In 1966, when Lal Bahadur Shastri’s body was brought back from Tashkent to Delhi, her father took her to pay respects.  She was small, the hall was vast, and the man in the glass case did not speak. She pulled at her father’s hand.

Papa, why is he not speaking?

Why do people die?

Where do they go?

Her father, patient and steady, gave the only answer that made sense to him: “If you want answers to these questions, become a doctor.”

She did not know then that the same Shastri had, a year before his death, asked Dr. Sushila Nayar to establish a medical college in Sevagram. She did not know that the college he had helped bring into existence would one day be the place where her own answers began.

The Rough Road

She was not the groomed PMT aspirant of coaching classes and rehearsed strategies. She was someone who tried for things and encountered closed doors and kept walking until a door opened.

Her first attempt was at the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune. She had hoped that her father’s years in the Air Force might count for something. They did not.

Her father was disappointed. Around the same time, he resigned from service and accepted a posting in Zambia. With the discipline and certainty of Air Force life suddenly gone, Harminder found herself standing on uncertain ground, her plans no longer as clear as they had once seemed.

Then, by chance, she met an old school friend — Neelam Parashar, whose father knew Harminder’s. He mentioned the entrance examination at Sevagram. She applied half-heartedly, without expectation. The interview call surprised her. She travelled to Sevagram with her mother, carrying cautious hope into the principal’s office.

The interview began, the panel’s questions were forming — and then a group of senior students burst in, shouting slogans for postgraduate courses. In the disruption, Harminder was pushed out. Her interview ended before it had properly started.

Days later: not selected.

She enrolled in B.Sc. Part II in Jalandhar, accepting the verdict. Then the telegram arrived: a waiting list candidate had been called. She and her mother rushed back to Sevagram. The orientation camp was almost over. She slipped into the new life two days late, breathing a gratitude that had surprised even her.

The Six Sizzlers

The class of 1978 had nineteen girls and forty-two boys — the same numbers, by an unexplained coincidence of destiny, as the 1977 batch before them.

Harminder found her tribe within weeks. Six of them cohered into a unit that the rest of the campus would come to know as the Six Sizzlers: Karuna, Vandana, Sadhana, Mala, Anjali, and Harminder. The name arrived from outside, attached to them by a campus that had noticed their collective energy. They wore it without embarrassment.

They were known for their laughter, their pranks, and the particular solidarity of young women who have decided that the opinions of people who do not understand them are not worth managing. They were also known — and this was the observation that those who knew them best always made first — for genuinely caring about one another.

Life in Sevagram was unlike anything any of them had known at home, but Harminder had the advantage of a background that had already stripped the unnecessary from daily living. She had moved often, adapted often, built attachments quickly and carried them across distance. Sevagram’s austerity — the khadi, the early prayers, the hostel rooms without indulgence — was not a hardship to someone raised in Air Force quarters where simplicity was structural.

The escapes were the pleasures: cramming ten people into an autorickshaw that groaned the whole way to Wardha, arriving at Vasant or Durga or Rajkala cinemas for the six o’clock show, sprinting back to catch the last bus, sometimes missing it and walking home through the dark, laughing too hard to mind the distance.

Anatomy and Malathi Madam

Anatomy fascinated her. It was enormous and terrifying in the way only the most beautiful subjects are — the kind that make the student aware of how much there is to know and how little they yet possess.

Dr. Malathi was the department’s most formidable lecturer. Her accuracy with a thrown journal was campus legend; many a student had had his notebook returned to him at velocity. She was not gentle in the way that softens expectation. She was precise in the way that raises it.

Curiously, she liked Harminder.

The reason was the diagrams. Harminder’s notebooks were filled with histological slides and anatomical structures drawn with a clarity and care that stood apart from the average student’s work. Dr. Malathi called her to the blackboard regularly. The rest of the batch borrowed her notes as a matter of course. Give me Harminder’s notes became a standing request in the years when Anatomy occupied the centre of the curriculum.

Biochemistry was the opposite experience — territory where no love took root, where she survived by determination rather than pleasure. She survived nonetheless.

Theatre found her as it found many at Sevagram — through the cultural programme that was built into the year’s rhythm. She acted in Hindi and English plays, danced in Maharashtrian folk performances, competed in fancy dress events. Under the direction of seniors like Kishore Shah and Dr. K.K. Hariharan, she rehearsed lines until midnight in the hostel corridor. This was not extracurricular; at Sevagram it was simply how the weeks went, the studies and the stage braided together.

Gold and the Gold Medal

Final MBBS came. She passed with distinction. The gold medal was awarded.

The pride was not hers alone — it travelled to Zambia, where her parents heard the news with the particular satisfaction of people who had supported something without being certain it would hold.

Then: internship trouble. Homesickness, the pull toward her parents in Zambia, a trip that extended beyond what the schedule permitted. When she returned, she was told her internship would be extended by six months as a consequence.

She went to Dr. Sushila Nayar.

“When I came in 1978,” she said, “my interview was cut short. I was pushed into the waiting list. And now again, despite being honest, I am punished.”

Dr. Nayar listened. She smiled. “Complete your internship faithfully. I will ensure your path forward.”

The extension sent her to Dattapur Leprosy Hospital. She had not chosen this posting; it had been assigned as consequence. What she found there was not punishment but revelation. Patients with hands and faces altered by years of disease, waiting without complaint, receiving care with a dignity that asked nothing in return. The experience pressed something into her that no textbook ward round had managed. It etched compassion — not as principle but as practice — into the way she approached every patient who came to her thereafter.

The Wider World

After internship, she sought work in Delhi and Punjab. Corruption and the weight of recommendations blocked every path. She prepared for UK examinations, joined her parents in Zambia, and entered the United Kingdom in 1985. In 1992, she moved to the United States.

She married Dr. Harpal Singh Mangat in 1989. They built a practice together in Internal Medicine. Later she specialised in obesity medicine and metabolic syndrome. During the Covid pandemic, she worked with an intensity that recalled those early morning shifts in Sevagram — arranging monoclonal antibodies for patients, supporting schools with mental health initiatives, trying to assist in India where the second wave was taking its toll.

From a girl in Jalandhar who asked her father why people died, to a physician in America treating the complications of prosperity in the world’s richest country — the distance was vast and unimaginable and entirely hers.

Looking Back

She thinks of the Six Sizzlers. She thinks of the snake. She thinks of gold medals and leprosy wards and an interview that was cut short and a waiting list that moved.

She thinks of Dr. Nayar saying: complete your internship faithfully.

And she thinks of what faithfulness looks like over a lifetime — the daily commitment to showing up for whoever is in front of you, which is what Dattapur had shown her, which is what the Six Sizzlers had demonstrated to each other, which is what Sevagram had been trying to teach from the first morning prayer of the first batch nine years before she arrived.

Medicine had been her father’s answer to a four-year-old’s questions about death. Sevagram had given that answer its first real content.

Dr. Harminder Kaur completed her MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the class of 1978 and received the gold medal at final MBBS. She trained further in Internal Medicine in the United Kingdom and the United States, specialising later in obesity medicine and metabolic syndrome. She lives and practises in the United States.