KAPURTHALA, AND BEYOND

She was the first girl in Home Science in the state of Punjab to have earned a B.Sc with a B.Ed. It immediately helped her walk into a teaching job at the Randhir College in Kapurthala. But the journey to college was anything but a walk in the park. She had learnt to bicycle, and this she did for five kilometers to the bus-stop, before boarding the bus that would take her to Kapurthala. The return leg was similar. When one day she expressed a desire to study further, her encouraging father immediately let her know how proud he was of her. He had promised me that he would let me study as long as I wanted to. “‘What you earn through studies are like jewellery, but no one can ever steal them from you,’ my father would say,” Mrs Singh says nostalgically, recalling how it meant moving away from home once more. By then she was helping her father handle all his accounts, because his vision had deteriorated sharply. When she asked her father how he would manage on his own, his reply was that of a hugely self-respecting, self-reliant man, “that is not your problem. You must go and study.”

LIFE IN GUJARAT

So, off Deepi Singh went to Baroda to get a Masters in Food and Nutrition. When she was leaving for Baroda, one of her relatives asked her whether she would ask her father for money for her higher studies, since he was sick and ailing. It was a huge moment in Mrs Singh’s life. She decided there and then that she would not ask for any further financial help from her father. At the MS University Baroda she met with the dean and said she needed a job to sustain her studies. She got one, as a social worker in Gujarat—working for someone who was doing a doctorate on the dietary impact of lactating mothers’ milk. In order to break through the wall of skepticism about the subject, she learnt to speak Gujarati, wore Gujarati outfits and “became one of them.” Life was tough. Sleeping in a dorm with its noisy environs wasn’t easy. Deepi Singh would wake up at 1 in the morning, and study till 5—those were the quietest hours she could find. Hard work paid handsomely, she topped the university. She found a job in Chandigarh, and almost immediately lost her father. “He was living to see me become successful. He left a happy man,” she says, eyes moistening up.

BACK IN PUNJAB

At age 25, and married to Mr Inder Singh, she became a gazetted officer, and quickly made chairperson of the food and nutrition department at the Home Science College in Chandigarh. No student failed during the 7 years she taught there. She started teaching “Homemakers’ Classes”, attended in the evenings by daughters of the affluent and influential. One of her students was the daughter in law of the then Governor of Punjab. So impressed was she by Mrs Singh’s teachings that she convinced her father in law to throw a dinner in honour of the frail young nutritionist. When Mrs Singh and her husband arrived in a red scooter at the gates of the Governor’s bungalow, they were stopped. This was no place for the hoi polloi they were told by the guards, but only for the limousine classes. But the uniformed sentinels quickly realized their grave error, it was Mrs Singh who was the guest of honour that day!