Fauji Singh's stories and a phone call from him brought me out of depression: Deep Shergill
She says around 2016, when she was sinking into depression, Fauja Singh's stories and a phone call from him changed the trajectory of her life.
Deep, who would invariably call him "Bapu Ji" (a respectful address for a fatherly figure), said that she lost her 22-year-old brother, Karandeep Singh Shergill, in a hit-and-run case in Mohali in 2011. "When that deep wound was still fresh, due to some other personal reasons, I started sinking into depression due to a prolonged traumatic experience.
In 2016, my parents asked me to take up running, and I also read Bapu Fauja Singh's story about how he took to running to overcome grief and became an icon.
I wore running shoes for the first time in 2016," she said.
One day, her father, Mohanbir Singh Shergill, asked her to take a phone call without telling her who was on the other side. When she picked up the phone, the voice from the other side said: "Mein Bapu Fauja Singh bol rihan (this is Fauja Singh speaking)."
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"It was such a big surprise for me that I was speaking to the icon whom I adored. During the conversation, I requested him to come to Mohali to motivate people for running. He promised that whenever he next came to India, he would come straight to us.
A few weeks later, he landed at our family's school in Mohali. It did not seem to be a first-time meeting, and then started such a strong association that every year we would celebrate his birthday here in Mohali on April 1, and he would come to attend.
He stayed with us on some occasions," said Deep, who was accompanied by her father, uncle, and her 18-year-old niece, Ibadat Kaur, from the UK.
"His granddaughters and I were planning how we should organise his 115th birthday to make it a memorable affair," she said.
"As I am part of the running community, I know how much he was an inspiration for runners across the globe and how deeply they are grieving the loss, that too in an accident," she said.
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