‘People matter to me’
Meet businesswoman and leader Geeta Singh
When 18-year-old Geeta Singh arrived in Whanganui in 1990 there were few Indian families in town and curries were seen as exotic. Now there are four Indian restaurants and Indian families “around every corner”.
Laurel Stowell talks to the businesswoman about her deep involvement in the Whanganui community.
Geeta Singh has a fearsome work ethic and a head for business.
Since arriving in Whanganui she has picked strawberries, driven taxis, cooked curries and worked in mental health.
She is now her own boss in the kind of shop she always wanted, Geeta’s Spices and Veggies in Guyton St.
In 2016 she started a support group for Indian women. In 2020 she became a Justice of the Peace and she is involved in Whanganui District Council’s Welcoming Communities programme.
Geeta was one of five children brought up in the dusty agricultural town of Ba in western Fiji. Her father was a shopkeeper. She liked his business, even when she was so small she could only just get her chin over the counter. After leaving school she worked as a typist; at that time Fiji was a fantastic place to be.
The 1987 coup, led by Sitiveni Rabuka, changed everything.
“There was no security. You couldn’t plan your life. There was no safety for girls,” she said.
She left Fiji. Arriving in New Zealand on August 25, 1990, she thought Whanganui was paradise.
“For me it was just something ... Wow.”
We thought we should be doing something for Indians, and bring everyone together.
Her partner at the time encouraged her to find work. She worked at Windermere Gardens in Westmere, and at Frank and Joy Bristol’s Papaiti market garden.
She wanted to be her own boss and her next move was to start an Indian takeaway in 1997.
The Curry House was opposite KFC in Victoria Ave and served a full range of Indian food.
She loves cooking and was the sole cook, seven days a week, starting at 11am and working until late at weekends.
Whanganui people were not used to Indian food and most of her initial customers had lived in the United Kingdom.
Three years of that was enough. “I wanted to do something different and not be a cook all of my life,” she said. She took to driving taxis, which she loved.
Taxi work brought her into contact with people who had mental health issues. “It was very hard sometimes to understand why my customers were behaving,” she said.
So she studied for a certificate in mental health at Whanganui’s polytech during her spare time, and got part-time jobs at Pathways (a mental health, addiction and wellbeing service) and Idea Services. Then she got full-time work at what’s now Broadview Lifecare, in its mental health wing.
“I didn’t go there for money. I went there for the people. People matter to me.”
Leaving there in 2001 she worked for New Zealand Post in its stamps and coins division in Ridgway St, and in 2005 she opened her own dairy, takeaway and laundrette in Alma Rd.
She sold that in 2008 when she had health issues. She took a year off, and made a first visit to India, her “motherland”.
In 2014 Geeta married Sukhvinder Sandhu, but kept her Singh surname. She leased a former bookshop building in Guyton St and opened Geeta’s Spices and Veggies.
At that time it was the second shop of its kind in Whanganui.
At first she sold only Indian food, but branched out to include the Asian items that are now her best sellers.
Since her appointment as a JP, Geeta has had about one approach a day for those services.
In 2016 she started the Lotus Women’s Group.
“I thought: we don’t have any women’s support group if anything happens to our Indian women,” she said.
It now has a solid core of eight people, who put on Indian festivities for the public.
One is the Diwali Festival, in late October, which got $1000 funding from Whanganui Creative Communities last year. Another is the Festival of Colours, postponed on March 29 this year because the weather was so wet.
“We thought we should be doing something for Indians, and bring everyone together. That has been very successful. The community is just awesome.”
Until the Covid pandemic, she also made yearly visits back to Fiji. Comparing them, she found that Indian and Fijian Indian culture have diverged, and both are still changing and modernising.
Whanganui is her home now, but she’s saddened by the homelessness she sees here and hopes something can be done about it.
“I see more poverty here than Fiji these days. No one is sleeping in the street there,” she said.