Engineering a Life

by Krishan K. Bedi

  I leaned over to the student sitting next to me. “What is a pop quiz?” I asked.

  “Mr. Bedi, do not talk while you’re taking this pop quiz,” the professor scolded. “If I see it again, I will throw you out of the classroom and give you an F on the quiz.”

  I’d come to Tennessee thinking I would study for final exams only, and that is what I did. It’s what I’d done in India, and I did well there. So the night before my calculus exam, I studied Indian style, the way my friend Jasbir Singh Mann and I studied at Vishvakarma Institute. I laid my bedding, the bistra bandh, on the floor and studied my notes. I stayed awake the entire night and went to class the next day for the exam. Studying did not help me. Instead of learning the math formulas, I tried to memorize the practice problems in the book. I studied those problems so hard and was sure I would pass the exams. When the teachers posted grades on their classroom doors, I had received an F in Differential Integer Calculus, an incomplete in English for Foreigners because I was sick and missed the exam, and an X in Electricity and Magnetism for skipping the final. UT was tougher than I’d imagined.

  Each week I mailed my parents a letter on aerogram paper for eleven cents. When an aerogram did not provide enough space for all I wanted to say, I used onion sheets, extremely thin sheets of paper that allowed me to write as much as I wanted for a cheap price. Several sheets of onion paper weighed the same amount as one aerogram, allowing me to write several extra pages for the same cost. I told my parents that school was tough and I had made many friends, but I did not tell them I was failing my classes or that I was dating American girls. I knew they would only worry about me, and there was nothing they could do, thousands of miles away in a tiny village.

  Early in the spring quarter of 1962, the president of UT invited the foreign students to his home for snacks and soft drinks. He lived in a large brick mansion a few miles from campus. We all ate in a spacious dining room around a large polished table set with fancy china plates and shiny silverware. The president’s daughter, an attractive high school girl, ate with us. My Indian friends and I spent the afternoon flirting with her, hoping it would be our lucky day and at least one of us would score a date. I was determined, but the daughter politely ignored my overtures and those of the other students. After the evening snacks, we all stood outside on the front lawn, wearing our best suits. People gawked at us as they drove by, and we smiled and waved. Being an Indian in Tennessee was much like being a celebrity. No one had seen the likes of us before, and they’d slow down to get a good look at the brown-skinned foreigners smiling at them in their nice clothes.

  Weeks earlier, I had taken part in a downtown fair with a friend I had met in Punjab shortly before traveling to the US. His name was Jagtar Singh Dhesi, and he arrived in Knoxville a few months after me. Meeting him in Punjab seemed like a good omen because he was planning to attend UT as well, and once he arrived, we rented a house together. At the fair, Dhesi and I, along with other foreign students, were asked to wear traditional Indian clothing and stand outside a booth so people could look at us, take pictures, and ask questions. We wore turbans and kurta pajamas, enjoying all the attention we received. The foreign student advisor, Nelson Nee, liked putting us on display because we made the university look even more prestigious.

  As the year passed, my grades continued to suffer, especially in math. One day, Mohinder Sood’s brother, Ravinder, took me to a restaurant to help me study. He was in his late twenties and had received his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from UT in 1959. Currently, he worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority and was completing his master’s in mechanical engineering at UT. We sat down at a table with my book and pages of notes, which might as well have been chicken scratches for all I understood. Ravi picked up the top page of notes and began explaining the formulas. When he looked up at me and saw the blank look on my face, he stopped talking.

  “Do you know calculus, Bedi?” he asked.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  Ravi’s mouth dropped open. “You are taking junior-level courses and you don’t know what calculus is? Bedi, you need to drop this class as soon as possible.”

  I dropped the math course with no penalty and tried to focus on the remaining three courses. However, my grades did not improve, and my social life slowed down as well. I wrote to my cousin Ved for help and began applying to different schools. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be going anywhere else. UT was an easy school compared to the universities in the East, such as NYU, Columbia, and Yale, or the engineering schools, such as MIT and Virginia Tech. By the end of second quarter, I had received an Incomplete in Material of Engineering, a C in Highway Design, and an F in Fluid Mechanics.

  Instead of registering for summer classes, I began looking for a job. Thinking it would be a good idea to find a civil engineering-related job, I responded to many ads on the bulletin board. To my surprise, a man in Atlanta called, asking if I could fly there for the interview.

  “Come as quickly as possible,” he said. “I will reimburse you for all the expenses incurred for the interview.”

  I purchased a round-trip air ticket for $120 and left the next day. The flight went through with no problems, and the man met me at the airport. While riding to his office, he asked me if I had brought sufficient clothes to stay in Atlanta. His question gave me the impression that I would get the job. When we arrived at the construction site, he ordered food, and we ate while he explained the job responsibilities. The position involved making interpretations from the blueprints and communicating them to the construction manager.

  The man spoke quickly, running through a number of details and pulling blueprints out of his desk drawer to show me examples and ask questions to determine my experience level. I kept saying, “Yeah, yeah,” through the whole interview, having no clue what he was talking about. As I ate my meal, I began to panic, hoping he wouldn’t notice my lack of knowledge. By the end, he realized I had not understood anything he said, nor did I know how to read blueprints. He immediately drove me back to the airport and gave me airfare money to fly back to Knoxville—$130, including $10 for dinner.

  With $130 in my pocket, an idea hit me. A few months earlier, some friends had told me about hitchhiking. Since I did not get the job, I decided to hitchhike back to Knoxville to save money on the return ticket. I spent four dollars on food and passed the night in a bus station near the airport. At around 6:30 a.m., I drank a cup of hot tea and washed up in the washroom. Still wearing my dark gray, baggy suit, I stood near the main road with my thumb out, hoping someone would give me a ride if I looked educated.

  I spent hours on the side of the road trying to hitchhike from Atlanta to Knoxville, Tennessee. Most of the time, no one even bothered to slow down. If someone did stop, they were able to take me only twenty or thirty miles at a time. At 7:00 p.m., I reached Maryville, Tennessee, and after another hour and a half wait, a man driving a small truck agreed to take me the remaining twenty three miles to Knoxville. The entire ride, I struggled to stay awake. I was exhausted from standing for hours, my clothes were sweaty, and I was famished. I couldn’t wait to reach my house, take a shower, and change into clean clothes. Then I would sit with a cold beer and ask Dhesi to fix some good food for me.

  The truck pulled into Knoxville and dropped me off on my street at around 9:00 p.m. I walked to where my house should have been, but in the dark, I could not find it. That’s strange, I thought. Maybe I’m on the wrong street. I walked a little farther. Even though I was tired and could not think as clearly as usual, I recognized the other houses, so I could not be on the wrong street. Then I came to where my house should have been. At first I thought it was an illusion. In the dark beneath the moon and scattered streetlights, all that remained were blackened foundation and ash. My house had burned nearly to the ground.

  Slumping to the curb with tears in my eyes, the awful reality crashed down on me. I had nowhere to go, and I could not take a hot bath, drink a cold beer, or eat good Indian food. The fire
had consumed my belongings, and most importantly, I did not know what happened to my housemate, Jagtar Singh Dhesi.

  Half an hour passed while I sat on the curb in despair. After a while, three Indian students approached me coming from the library.

  “Are you the guy who lived in that house?” one student asked.

  I nodded miserably.

  “That fire was a big one. The fire department put it out sometime between ten and eleven last night, but at three o’clock this morning, the fire started again.”

  “Do you know where my housemate, Jagtar Singh Dhesi, is?” I asked. “Is he okay?”

  “I am sorry. We have not seen him,” they said. “Do you have a place to stay? If not, you can come to our house for tonight. In the morning, you can find your friend and figure out what to do.”

  They took me to their house and prepared a meal for me while I cleaned up. Once I ate, they showed me to a bed. Despite my exhaustion, I tossed and turned sleeplessly the entire night, thinking about my belongings and legal documents lost in the fire. Everything was gone. My bistra bandh, the quilt my mother made me, the trunk filled with dal and mango pickles, my hand-stitched suits, the slide rule, and my books. I was particularly concerned about my passport and the certificate of my diploma in civil engineering.

  The next morning, I walked past the ruins of my house and up the hill toward campus. In the distance, I saw Dhesi walking toward me. We saw each other at the same time and walked faster. He looked just as bad as I felt. He was still wearing his turban, but it was dirty, and his clothes were wrinkled. We embraced and sat on the sidewalk, unable to keep from crying. Crying felt good. We were still in shock, and although I did not know what would happen, I felt better with Dhesi next to me. After several minutes, Dhesi dried his tears with his shirtsleeve and explained what happened.

  “It was awful, Bedi. Two days ago, while I was at the library, the house caught fire. After the firemen put out the fire, they allowed me to enter the house and bring out our important documents. When the owners arrived, they said it was not advisable to sleep in the house, but it would be okay to leave our belongings there. That night, I slept at a friend’s house. At around three o’clock in the morning, the fire started again. Everyone was sleeping, so when someone finally noticed the smoke pouring out of the house and flames blowing out the windows, it was too late.”

  We decided to consult Nelson Nee, our foreign students advisor. Nelson told us to prepare a list of all the belongings lost in the fire, so we could get reimbursed. However, the owners of the house could not be found. They had left the city, and later on, we were told an investigation was going on. Police suspected that the owner of the house might have started the fire, because he didn’t make enough money from renting it out to students. As a result, Dhesi and I did not recover any money for our lost belongings.

  In the meantime, Ravi Sood arranged for us to stay in a house he owned six blocks from campus. It needed renovation work, but he said we could stay in one room on the ground floor for thirty dollars a month.

  I was still wearing the same grimy suit from the interview two days before. Dhesi and I desperately needed clean clothes. Once Nelson Nee contacted several churches and told them about our situation, a Baptist church near campus organized a collection and gave us clothes.

  The clothes were huge on us. Dhesi and I, of small stature, knew nothing about sizes because all our clothes were hand-stitched in India. We held up our pants so they wouldn’t fall off our hips. The shirts were like small tents, and we looked ridiculous. All summer, we wore sleeveless undershirts instead, the coolest option and the best-fitting of all the donations. Still, the undershirts were so long they came to our knees, nearly covering the long underwear we wore in place of pants. It looked like we were wearing some kind of dress or nightgown, and people laughed when they saw us walking around the house or on the street.

  The meager savings left from the money my father sent for spring quarter had burned in the pillow case. I needed money to pay for rent and tuition in the fall, but I could not tell my parents what happened. It would only worry them, and being so far away, they could not help me. My father was in no financial position to send me more money.

  Desperate for a job, I contacted Mr. Regis, hoping he could hire me at his restaurant or knew of other opportunities. Mr. Regis lined up an interview for me with the owner of McDonald’s. He told me that if I wanted to work there I could start Monday, and my hours would be 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. with a pay rate of eighty-five cents per hour.

  “Go to the McDonald’s on Chapman Highway,” he said. “Talk to Bill. He’s the manager. He’ll get you started.”

  The next day, I walked a mile across the river and met Bill. After asking me several basic questions, he said, “Well, let’s get ya started. Basically, your main job is to keep the place clean. You’ll sweep and mop the floor, pick up trash, those sorts of things.” He handed me a broom. “You can start right over there. Customer made a mess just now.”

  On the fourth day of the job, Bill told me to pick up the lot.

  I looked at him, confused, and he pointed to the parking lot. “Cigarette butts, cups, wrappers, whatever customers throw out of their car windows. Throw it in the dumpster in the corner,” he said.

  The McDonald’s contained only one small room for making hamburgers, french fries, milkshakes, and soft drinks, with a basement below for storing raw food. The building did not have seating, so people ate in their cars parked in the lot, and then threw their trash into bins placed around the lot. The smaller pieces of garbage did not always make it into the bins, so I spent a majority of my time picking up trash and emptying bins into the dumpster.

  I felt ashamed. I came to the US to earn a civil engineering degree and become an SDO, yet here I was, performing menial work only an untouchable would do in India. In India there are four primary castes: Brahmin, the priests; Kshatriya, warriors and nobility; Vaisya, farmers, traders and artisans; and Shudra, tenant farmers and servants. My family and I were in the Kshatriya caste. Not even included in the system were the Harijans, in other words “outcasts.” We referred to them as untouchables, because they were only allowed to perform jobs such as sweeping streets, cleaning up cow dung, collecting garbage, and cleaning the open sewer drains. Not allowed to touch anyone from the four castes, they could not even drink at the same well lest their shadow fall on us.

  Bending over to pick up a dirty napkin and trudging over to the garbage can to throw it away, I thought about my Harijan friend from India, Neela, who attended primary school with me. Too little to hold prejudices, we became close friends. Another untouchable, Nachattar Singh, became a close friend in high school, and I always shared my lunch with him. Sometimes after school, I went to his hut, built of straw and mud, surrounded by other huts of the same material and children running around half naked. My mother did not mind that I was friends with an untouchable, although my father and brother looked down on the friendship. My mother’s heart softened toward Nachattar Singh’s mother, and she too visited the hut of straw and mud to bring food and kindness.

  Even though two of my friends were untouchables, it didn’t mean I wanted to be one too. I was trying to make my way upward in society. As I picked up garbage, I felt so low I would sit behind the dumpster and cry. After a few minutes, I would dry my eyes. There was no one to encourage me but myself. Many Americans worked lowly jobs so they could attend college.

  McDonald’s employees took a half hour lunch break and ate a free meal, consisting of a cheeseburger, french fries, and a milkshake. Eating cow’s meat is against the Hindu religion, so I picked off the hamburger and ate only the cheese and bun. Although several thousand cows wander freely on country roads and city streets, no one eats beef in India. If a cow lies down at a busy intersection, the cars don’t stop and honk. They back up and drive around her.

  The buns and cheese did not fill me up. I still felt hungry and tired, but it was ingrained in me that I should not eat beef, so I
persisted. On the fourth day, I prayed to God and asked for forgiveness. I am sorry, God, but I am in this environment, and it is not in my hand. There is no other alternative, and I don’t want to feel tired and hungry at work anymore.

  Then I picked up the cheeseburger and took a big bite. It was my first time eating cow meat, but I hardly paid attention to the taste, because I was only trying to satisfy my hunger. Later on, I became accustomed to American food and regularly enjoyed cheeseburgers and Coke.

  Two and a half weeks later, I received my first paycheck for thirty-four dollars, which amounted to thirty-one dollars after taxes and social security were taken out. Deciding to buy gifts, I went straight to a store and bought fifteen dollars’ worth of gifts for my brother and sisters’ children and my parents. I shipped the package by sea, including a note saying, “These gifts are from my first earnings. Please enjoy them.” Later that week, I donated five dollars of my check to a charity recommended by Ravi Sood. I also gave ten dollars to Mrs. Pruett, a kind-hearted woman who ran a guest house called “Little UN” where she bought groceries and cooked meals for Indian students living there. In some cases, the Indians either did not make payments or they procrastinated, saying they would pay later. I learned she couldn’t afford to run the guest house anymore and planned to move to Washington, DC. In a conversation, she mentioned she did not have enough money to cover the bus ride. I was more than happy to give her the remainder of my check.

  To this day, I teach a similar philosophy regarding money to my sons, nieces, and nephews. They should donate a portion of their first earnings to their favorite charity. With another portion, they should buy a gift for their parents. Last of all, they should reward themselves. If any money remains from their first paycheck, they should use it to celebrate with family members.