The trachea was severed. The crowd outside the small government hospital in Hinganghat pressed close, its murmur low and insistent. Three interns — Jasbinder, Arvind, and Poonam — stood over a young girl whose kite string had cut her throat open. No suction machine, no equipment, no senior doctor within reach.

Arvind acted first. He sucked the clot out with a catheter and his own mouth. Jasbinder and Poonam worked beside him. When the wound was stitched and the child’s thin cry finally rose in the room, the crowd outside heard it and erupted. Some lifted the three interns onto their shoulders.

The local newspaper ran the story the next morning, a photograph of the girl beside them. Villagers brought guava, papaya, and oranges to their quarters. Farmers whose names they did not know told them not to leave when the posting ended. The projector at the local cinema would rewind a film if they arrived late, as a matter of civic honour.

Jasbinder would carry this memory as a touchstone for the rest of her career — proof of what the profession was, at its most essential, for.

A Grandfather’s Promise

She was born on 9 December 1961 in Odhpur, a village in Hoshiarpur district, Punjab. Her parents worked in Chandigarh — her father as a finance and commerce clerk who eventually became a superintendent, her mother as a JBT schoolteacher. The youngest of three children, Jasbinder was left largely to the care of grandparents, aunts, and an uncle in Delhi during her early years.

Her grandfather was an exceptional man who had once been admitted to a medical college in Lahore and could not join it, the money having run out before the fees could be paid. He found his living in the railways instead. But the dream had not died — it had simply migrated to a new generation. He patted the girl’s head and said, with complete conviction: “One day, my granddaughter will wear the white coat.”

Jasbinder carried this promise with her across every school she attended, every examination she prepared for, every setback she absorbed.

She studied at Khalsa School in Karol Bagh, topping nearly every class. Later, when her parents brought her back to Chandigarh, she joined Sri Guru Gobind Singh College in Sector 26. There, away from her grandparents’ household for the first time, she lost focus and scraped through in the second division. She sat on the terrace one evening, watching the sunset, and told herself: “Jasbinder, this is not you.”

She returned to Delhi, joined Gargi College for BSc Zoology Honours, and enrolled at Sachdeva coaching classes. She prepared for medicine the second time with the deliberateness of someone who had already tasted a near-miss.

The Telegram and the Unreserved Compartment

In July 1979, a telegram from Sevagram arrived confirming her admission. The news was read and re-read, passed around the household, absorbed as a collective triumph. There were only three days to reach Wardha, and no train reservation. Jasbinder and her father pushed their luggage through the train window, scrambled into an unreserved compartment, and spent twenty-four hours in the company of farmers, noise, and heat. By the time they reached Wardha, her father’s shirt was soaked through, and she had already learned her first lesson in endurance.

Sixty Students, Sixteen Girls

Out of sixty in the 1979 batch, sixteen were girls — a number that felt significant in the way that small numbers in a new world always do. They came from across the country: Neelam Parashar from Adampur near Jalandhar, Neena Munsif from Banaras, Poonam Jaiswal from Faridabad, Vineeta Nangia from Panipat; from Bombay came Bhavana, Bindu, Geeta, Neela, Nisha, Parul, and Smita; from Central India, Shama Tomar and Ashalata Jagtap; and Jyoti Narsinghani from Hyderabad.

The orientation camp at the ashram wove them together. They stood in line one afternoon on the hostel terrace while seniors in mock-commanding voices demanded they salute with their chappals raised. Up went the slippers. The seniors doubled over. The awkward initiation dissolved into laughter, and by evening they were eating at the same table, laughing at the same small foolishness. Ragging in those years had an affectionate quality that hardened, over weeks, into permanent friendship. The seniors who had pulled their legs the hardest became the ones they later called on in a crisis.

Coming from Khalsa School, where Gurbani competitions and Path were woven into the academic year, Jasbinder slipped naturally into Sevagram’s prayer routine. She joined the Sargam group, their voices rising together in bhajans under the open sky, beside the great tree that Gandhi himself had planted. In those evenings, history, faith, and music seemed to merge into something that required no explanation.

The Terrace Library

Sevagram’s summers were a particular ordeal. Taps ran hot water from the pipes, fans pushed warm air in circles, and the only bearable place after dark was the hostel terrace. Students dragged up mattresses, pillows, and books. Lanterns flickered and table lamps glowed under mosquito nets. Someone would always peel peanuts and pass them around. Whispers of “just five more minutes” drifted between the mosquito nets before everyone was asleep.

From afar, the long whistle of a train echoed across the fields. They would stop reading for a moment, look toward the tracks, and dream aloud about where the trains were going. Then someone would laugh, and the books would open again.

Manna Bai and Tanna Bai, the hostel workers, pressed curd and sugar into students’ hands before every examination. The small ritual, offered with such uncomplicated warmth, gave them more courage than any last-minute revision.

Cricket, Wicketkeeping, and One Newspaper Line

Dr. Belokar, the orthopaedics professor, had firm opinions about girls and cricket. “If you can diagnose a fracture, you can certainly hold a bat,” he declared, and left no room for argument. So, reluctantly at first, the women of the 1979 batch took the field in white shirts and trousers, batting against medium-fast deliveries bowled by men from the 1978 batch who had been recruited for the purpose by their coach, Mr. Kamaraj Kesari — the man who had once trained Dilip Vengsarkar.

Jasbinder kept wicket, crouching behind the stumps, her palms stinging with every ball. They travelled to Amravati to play against the sports college team. The match was a rout. But the next morning, a local newspaper appeared with a line that Jasbinder kept folded in her notebook for months: “With elegant strokes, Neelam Parashar and Smita Mehta shone with the bat, and behind the stumps, Jasbinder Kaur’s sure hands stood out.” A few words in a small newspaper in Amravati. She showed it to everyone.

Music at the Centre

She had been singing since school — bhajans, shabads, group songs, even qawwalis. A small group of girls had performed on Delhi Doordarshan, sitting in front of cameras with make-up carefully applied by studio staff, feeling briefly transformed. At Sevagram, music followed her into every gathering. Her favourites were Lata Mangeshkar’s more melancholy songs — Naina Barse Rimjhim Rimjhim, Thandi Hawayen, Na Tum Hamen Jaano. When she sang them, the hall would quieten. She would open her eyes after the final note to find people still sitting in silence, as if the song needed a moment to dissolve.

Painting was another quiet constant. A portrait she made of a girl cradling an injured dog won a prize and was given as a parting gift to her friend Parul, who has kept it to this day.

Detours and Destinations

Her path after Sevagram did not run straight. After completing her MBBS and internship — three months in Hinganghat, three in Dattapur, each teaching her things that wards at MGIMS could not — she began house jobs in Gynaecology and Anaesthesia. Her father died suddenly. Dr. Tikle and Dr. Chhabra both counselled her: take a DGO rather than MD, support your family sooner. She listened.

Marriage to Dr. Varinder Saini, an MD in Chest and TB, led to Haryana. A change in postgraduate entrance rules closed clinical seats to outsiders. Her father-in-law, a professor and head of Biochemistry at Rohtak, offered to mentor her instead. At five in the morning, he would sit with her over notebooks and metabolic pathways, demanding impossible deadlines, preparing seminars overnight. She fell, reluctantly, in love with the subject.

She completed her MD in Biochemistry, alongside her DGO. She taught at Medical College, Rohtak, then at Maharaja Agrasen Medical College in Agroha — separated from her husband for four years, their daughters at different schools across different cities. When the new Government Medical College at Chandigarh opened, she and her husband were finally posted to the same institution. The family gathered again.

She became the first woman to serve as Director-Principal of a government medical college in Punjab. Her father would have been proud, she says, to see a girl from Chandigarh — a girl who had grown up moving through its sectors — sitting in the principal’s chair.

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Dr. Jasbinder Kaur completed her MBBS from MGIMS Sevagram and holds a DGO and an MD in Biochemistry. She served as Director-Principal of Government Medical College, Chandigarh — the first woman to hold that post. She lives in Chandigarh.