PERHAPS unusually, Aquila Singh can remember something that happened when she was just two years old. She and her mother were about to board a plane that would take them from their native Pakistan to Glasgow, her father already having made the journey to find them a place to live.

“It’s one of my earliest memories,” she says. “Going up the steps to the plane. My grandparents were there to see us off, and my grandfather always said to me: ‘You didn’t even turn around – you just walked up on to the plane.’ I don’t remember the journey, but I do remember that particular moment.”

Now 55, she has just become the Church of Scotland’s first Asian female minister, at Fernhill and Cathkin Parish Church in Rutherglen. It was a career move she made relatively recently, having worked in hotels and in a bank before deciding to train as a teacher.

Reverend Singh was brought up in the Christian faith from birth. Her father’s father was a minister at the American Mission Presbyterian Church in India; an uncle on her mother’s side had been a Christian minister in Lahore, Pakistan.

Christians currently make up an estimated 1.6 per cent of Pakistan’s population; a BBC report last March observed that Muslims and Christians mostly co-exist amiably enough but also reported an “escalating number” of attacks on Christians.

Like many Pakistani families before and since, the Singhs came here in search of a better life, settling in McCulloch Street, Pollokshields. Rev Singh has only been back home once – a family holiday when she was 21.

After school she worked in hotels. She was a waitress at the Diplomat Hotel (today the Millennium Hotel) on George Square when it was run by a Cairo-born entrepreneur, Emil Malak. It was sold in 1985 and renamed the Copthorne, and she became a trainee manager. She already had a BA in public administration (“not that I ever used it”).

She ended up in London but, homesick, returned north. She worked in catering in the Royal Concert Hall before being made redundant and switching to the stocks and shares unit at the Clydesdale Bank’s Glasgow head office.

“We used to have the Stock Exchange across the road and they would send one of us across with the cheques for them. One day I was asked to take a cheque for £7 million … I’ll remember until the day I die that I once had that much money in my hands.”

She had, however, a hankering to teach. “I always think that God had a plan. In all of the things I’ve done God had a plan for me,” she says. “My ministry is about hospitality and welcome, and I started that, way back then. In teaching, I learned how to be flexible, to communicate with people, to connect with them.”

She made a success of her new career and taught computing at Belmont House School, near Newton Mearns. What then happened to her in 2008 is a story best told in her own words.

“It was Christmas Day. We were all sitting around the dining table and I got up and said: ‘I can’t eat this,’ and went to my bed.

“They all thought it was appendicitis. I was off work for a year, until January or February 2010.” It turned out she was suffering from a fibroid. “In February 2009 I was taken into hospital. The doctors thought I was breathless. I remember waking up in August that year in the Southern General. The surgeon told me with glee that they had taken out from my stomach a fibroid the size of a small football. They had kept me off work. The doctors had thought I was breathless because the fibroid was pressing on my diaphragm but it was found to be causing clots, and a clot had got up to my lung.

“My dad used to go to an evangelical church. I would drive him there and sit in the church. When I was ill I couldn’t drive. I wondered, ‘Which church can I go to?’

“My home church in Pollokshields was just up the road, so I could walk up. And do you know what? I always say it felt like coming home when I walked into the place. Just going in was amazing. I have made so many friends there.

“It was lovely, going back to where my Christian foundations started, all those years ago.

“I did everything there, and I did it cheerfully. I knew I was doing it for God. I said to the minister, Reverend David Black, one day: ‘How can I become more involved in the church?’” His suggestion was that she attend the Kirk’s ministry candidate conference, known as an Enquirer’s Conference.

Thus it was that in June 2011 she missed her school’s prize-giving day to attend such a conference, in Dundee. “It was the most intense 24 hours of my life,” she says. It’s cutting her story rather short, but she went on to work at various churches: Govan and Linthouse, Langside, Paisley Abbey and, as a probationer, Shawlands; she also spent 10 weeks as a locum minister up in Bettyhill, Sutherland. She’s naturally delighted to have been ordained at her new post in Rutherglen.

“I feel very blessed to have been called by God to serve him,” she says. “When I was first discerning my call I would wonder why God had called me, although I grew up in the church, because I was just an ordinary person. But someone told me that God takes you as you are and tweaks you, and I believe this to be true.

“I am still me, but God has changed me in subtle ways and has been equipping me with the tools that I will need to serve Him. I’m excited to be working with Fernhill and Cathkin Parish Church and the local community.”

It also says much for Rev Singh that she did not even let a debilitating vision condition deter her. She has Meares-Irlen syndrome, which means she needs to wear special glasses when she reads. The condition was discovered while she was studying for her Bachelor of Divinity at Glasgow University.

Rev Dr Graham Blount, joint clerk at Glasgow Presbytery, says: “Aquila is well-known and liked in the presbytery and we’re delighted to see her begin her ministry in Fernhill and Cathkin. Each minister brings something unique to the life of the church.”

Rev Singh is reluctant to describe herself as a trailblazer but she does hope her appointment can dismantle misconceptions about who can become a minister.

“When I put on my clerical collar and go out and about, you always get a second take, because people can’t expect to see an Asian female with a dog-collar,” she says. “I think people see Asians as all being Muslim; that there is no other religion that a Muslim can be. Now, Asians are Sikhs, they’re Hindus, they’re Muslims. We can also be Christian.

“Also, as an Asian woman, it has often been thought by others that you only cooked, things like that. When I was a child, it was always the men who were doing the preaching. The women were always working in the background.

“Someone once said to me, when I was wanting to do a visit: ‘So you’re Muslim, then?’ I said: ‘No, I’m working for the Church of Scotland.’ The idea that people seem to have is that I must have converted. But as a matter of fact my family has been Christian for generations. It’s not as if I’m a new convert.

“A lot has been said about immigrants and refugees coming here to somehow take advantage of this country,” she adds. “I look at my father’s generation, who were all immigrants. A lot of my father’s peers started on the buses, because that was a job they could get.

“But my father went on to become a draughtsman-engineer and worked as a translator. One of his friends became a councillor. Others had their own businesses. They were all productive in this country. Most immigrants come here for a better life, and they want to work.”

And now, thanks to her own hard work and determination, a woman who emigrated with her family from Pakistan at the age of two has achieved a special first all of her own, with the Church of Scotland.