The Scalpel and the Pen

In the summer of 1951, in the city of Jammu, a Kashmiri Sikh family welcomed a son they named Harbhajan Singh Rissam. His parents had fled the violence of Poonch in 1947; the child grew up carrying both the memory of displacement and a quiet determination to build something lasting.

He studied at Central Basic School and Government Gandhi Memorial Science College in Jammu. Then came the gold-medal MBBS from Government Medical College, Amritsar, followed by specialised training in cardiology at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh. The young doctor’s path led him through the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences in Srinagar, a period of service in Saudi Arabia, and later to leading hospitals in Delhi—Apollo, Fortis, Batra, and finally Max Healthcare, where he became Director of Cardiac Clinical Services and a senior interventional cardiologist.

For more than three decades he worked with the precision of the scalpel and the patience of a teacher. He published over a hundred research papers, spoke at conferences across continents, and took a special interest in preventive cardiology. Colleagues remembered an affable man who moved easily between the operating theatre and the lecture hall. In 2006 the nation recognised his contributions with the Padma Shri.

Yet medicine was only one of his languages. From boyhood he had loved literature, editing school and college magazines, reading fiction and poetry. Late in his career he finally published the novel that had lived in him for years: The Scalpel – Game Beneath (2010), the first of a planned trilogy. It was a medical thriller that exposed the dark underbelly of the profession—organ trade, corruption, the misuse of the very instruments meant to heal. Peers welcomed the book; many told him its honesty mattered more than awards.

Dr. Harbhajan Singh Rissam was married to Dr. Balbir Kaur; they raised a son, Harbir, and a daughter, Harmeet. He remained close to his mother, Ranjeet Kaur, and to the wider family that had shared the journey from Poonch to Jammu and beyond.

On 17 October 2013, at the age of sixty-two, he passed away in Delhi. The Indian Heart Journal and the Cardiological Society of India mourned a colleague who had been both healer and storyteller. In the clinics where hearts are still mended, and in the pages of the novel that continues to be read, the dual legacy of the scalpel and the pen endures—steady, truthful, and full of quiet courage.