Thirty-seven years in the IAS, from Sub-Divisional Magistrate to Chief Secretary of Himachal Pradesh. The memoir of Asha Swarup, 1973 batch.

“Without worrying about the little one I was carrying, I undertook the journey partly by horse and partly on foot.”

In the mid-1970s she was the Sub-Divisional Magistrate of Joginder Nagar, her first posting, and she was expecting her first child. The journey was to a village where poor families were being denied water from the well. The villagers agreed that day to let them draw water.

Who this book is for. UPSC and civil services aspirants who want to know what an IAS officer does, serving and retired officers, and readers of Indian memoir, biography and autobiography. Also for working women, Kashmiri Pandit and Himachali families, Indians living abroad, and anyone caring for someone with dementia.

She calls herself an ordinary girl from Karol Bagh. She was born in Delhi in 1951, in a two-room government quarter, went to school in Karol Bagh and Lodhi Road, and studied at Indraprastha College, Delhi University. Her father, Prem Nath Kaw, a Kashmiri Pandit who had left the valley with nothing, believed in her before anyone else did. When she was eleven, a garland thrown by Prime Minister Nehru landed on her, and her father told her Nehru had thrown it to a child of India.

The service, post by post

• The Academy in Mussoorie (LBSNAA), and her first posting at Joginder Nagar
• The Planning Commission, where Dr. Manmohan Singh, then Deputy Chairman, sent for her over a note
• A year in Canada
• Joint Secretary for Sports: the 1994 Asian Games and Leander Paes’s bronze at Atlanta in 1996
• Home, Health, Finance and the State Electricity Board in Himachal Pradesh
• Rural development and self-help groups at Krishi Bhawan, and Commerce and Textiles, in Delhi
• Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (2007–08)
• Chief Secretary of Himachal Pradesh (2008–10): the state’s share of power from the Bhakra-Beas projects, a regulator for private universities, and the start of IIT Mandi

She was transferred for a stand she took. When she disagreed, she recorded her dissent on the file. In her words, “a well-recorded dissent is never wasted”.

The family. In 1975 she married her batchmate Dev Swarup, who came from a family of temple priests in Chamba and had been an artillery officer in the 1971 war. They had two children. Her brothers were the civil servant and writer M.K. Kaw and the plasma physicist P.K. Kaw. She has lost her parents and both her brothers.

Years after she retired, her husband stopped in the middle of a sentence and could not find the next word. It was dementia. She cared for him to the end, through nights he could not tell from day, feeding him, praying with him and loving him through all of it.

“Service is what you do for the person in front of you.”

With 30 family photographs.