STUDENT DAYS

THERE WAS NO TIME TO LOSE TO JOIN THE AERONAUTICAL Technology course at South Seattle College. So, the very next day, Tom took me to the college and met the Registrar and Dean of the Aviation program.
As the classes had started three weeks ago and given that I had no background whatsoever in the subject, the Dean and Tom started discussing whether I would be better off, joining the winter quarter. Eventually, it was decided that it was best for me if I could join the ongoing course, provided I could catch up with the class. Once that glitch was ironed out, Tom paid my fees, higher than what the local students had to pay, as unlike them, I came under the non-resident category. Then we drove to downtown Seattle in search of a place for me to stay.
Tom knew a person there who he thought could be of some help for me to find an apartment. It was Everett Samarpana Rao.

He was a converted Christian from Andhra Pradesh. Tom's father was a Pentecostal minister who had baptized and converted the whole family.
Making matters easier was the fact that I had met Everett at my native place Kumbanad a few years ago. I recalled that he was a good singer, it was nice to meet him again. Everett had already identified a place using his Christian ministry network. Within no time, he introduced us to the landlord Mr. Short who himself was a minister in a church.
Mr. Short and his wife were in their seventies, yet they ran a ministry, mainly catering to the poor folks in downtown Seattle. Every Saturday they met in the basement of one of the buildings on First Avenue which was one of the slum dwellings of the town. There were lots of homeless people who came there because they served food to all.
I was an immediate beneficiary as I started helping them with serving food, thereby ensuring that I too had a decent meal. I enjoyed their ministry. I started with a one-bedroom apartment for a monthly rent of $55.00 but they agreed to give me a studio apartment when it became available for $35.00.
Mr. Short told me that I could use his phone. The other luxury for a student like me was a television. Everett who was staying in Mr. Short's house had one. I remember watching shows like "Hawaii-five-o" on black and white TV.
Everett introduced me to George Joseph, who was also studying the same program that I had enrolled for, at the South Seattle Community College. George was much older than me, having come to the US after serving in the Indian Air Force for seven years.
He was staying only less than a mile away from my apartment, in the basement of a church. As he was also the custodian of the church, George was not required to pay rent. We boarded the same bus to the college and on the first day, he paid my fare as I was not carrying the required change.
Though he had told me that I should have the necessary change henceforth, I promptly forgot it the next day too, which I realized on reaching my bus stop. As I was reluctant to borrow from George once again, I walked into a nearby tavern as nothing else was open at 7 a.m.
My cousin Tom had warned me not to go into a tavern which allowed entry only for those above 21, of which threshold I was still a few months short. Sure, I was not entering the tavern for a drink at seven in the morning. Nevertheless, I was afraid that I could be put in jail.
I had no option but to walk in and get the necessary change for daily bus travel. I walked in, got the change and walked out.
Luckily, there were no questions asked about my age.
Soon, it was the weekend and on my first Sunday in the US, Everett wanted to take me to a local church. I enjoyed the hour-long service, more than anything, as it was much shorter than the ones back home. Everett knew a lot of people in that church, and I got introduced to many of them.
What followed after the church service was a moment of dis-illusionment for Everett. I had no idea what was to follow when he said we would buy a chicken and make a Kerala-style curry.
Quickly, it became evident that I was expected to make the dish. He had this notion that I was skilled in such things whereas my experiments in my mother's kitchen never exceeded beyond brewing the occasional tea.
He was disenchanted and agreed to cook the chicken the way he had been doing all this while. It's another matter that over the next few months I got down to serious cooking in the kitchen. I started shopping for my daily nourishment at the nearby Lucky

Store. There, I became friends with many Indians. One of them was Arul Daniel, a Tamil settled in Malaysia, with whom I kept a friendship for many years.
The locality that I was staying at was called Capitol Hill, which was on the east side of Seattle. It was certainly not a classy locality but the rent was reasonable. After all, I did not have a job. Foreign students were not allowed to work until permission was granted by the Immigration Office, which was never forthcoming till one completed six months of stay in the locality.
During this period, I was supported by Tom and his brother John who lived in Canada. Every month Tom sent me $100. Out of this, $55 went for rent, $22 for bus fare to college. The remaining $23 was supposed to take care of all my needs. Invariably, by the 25th of each month, I ran out of money.
Helping out Mr. Short was not limited to Saturdays as I realized that I would get some food if did some odd jobs in their apartment. Mrs. Short always made sure I was well-fed. She was a piano teacher and insisted that I should take up lessons with her.
So, every day after school I was supposed to go to her apartment and she would teach me. I remember I took eleven lessons before I started working. I could not keep up after that and soon lost touch. Except for my daily trips to the college and back, I walked everywhere as I could not afford bus fare.
A few days later, Mr. Short introduced me to a young man from Kerala, George Enoch. Naturally, I was thrilled to meet someone who could speak my mother tongue Malayalam. He told me about his friend and roommate George Mathew.
I could barely wait to meet one more Keralite. Soon, we formed our little Malayali community as the two Georges stayed barely one mile away from my place.

George Mathew was a pastor studying Theology in a local Bible college. He was a family man, with a wife and two children. Having applied for their visa, he was eagerly waiting for them to join him, which they did after a few months.
Pastor George had a night job at The Bon Marche store while Enoch worked at the Roosevelt Hotel. They introduced me to Pastor P.J Titus, his wife and children. They were living in the parsonage of the church where he was the assistant pastor and more importantly, custodian of the church. There was a basketball court there.
For me, it was only three blocks away. After school, I began hanging around there and shooting hoops. A year later they moved to Dallas, Texas and started an Indian Church.
There was a pattern emerging from the Kerala Christian immi-grants. Many of them were coming over to the US to study Christi-anity but also using this route to immigrate with family to the US.
By the end of the first quarter in college, to everybody's surprise, I wound up with good grades. I completed the quarter in the top 5 bracket. I was once again studying Physics and Mathematics, the two subjects I had fared well in class 10.
It was natural that I assumed I would continue to top the class in the subsequent quarters as well. But that was not the case from the second quarter onwards.
In the next quarter, the course moved on from fundamental Physics and Mathematics to the study of the power plant which is the engine, the other option being the airframe. I decided to choose power plant as my elective subject.
Soon, I was sent to the shop with others to disassemble a Lycom-ing engine. I stood next to this engine thinking somebody was going to come and help me disassemble this engine.
The instructor accompanied me to the storeroom and introduced me to Brian, who was a storekeeper. He gave me 10 tool chips and

told me that I could check out any tools as per my requirement, in exchange for the chips that were given to me.
I realized that I was faced with a bigger problem. I was not familiar with any tools, nor did I know their names. My familiarity with some of them did not go beyond having casually seen them at my father's hardware store back home.
I had never bothered to learn anything about them because my aim in life was different then. Not even in my wildest dreams did it occur to me that I would once be disassembling an aircraft engine. With the help of some classmates, I completed my project with
a grade of 52 per cent, which was a serious climb down from the 95 per cent I had scored in the first quarter. I was shaken up and I suddenly began entertaining doubts about my ability to complete Aeronautical Technology successfully.
It was not that I was found to be academically challenged. My disadvantage lay in the fact that many of my classmates had come with prior experience in working on these engines, either in high school or professionally for a brief period. Like my friend who had worked in the military.
On the flip side, the school system in India encouraged us to study theory which I was good at but it was not the case when it came to practical studies. My struggle with laboratory studies resulted in my losing one year during my pre-degree course.
I told my cousin Tom that I was finding the going very tough with Aeronautical Technology and asked if there was some way I could shift to a course in Economics.
He was quick to dissuade me from taking any such abrupt decision. On the contrary, convinced me that I should stay put in the same course for one year. He said I could consider moving out if 1 still found it difficult at the year's end.

I started dispassionately observing what was happening in my class. Most of my classmates were less qualified than me in aca-demics. Yet, they were faring well. I decided I had to pull myself together and make a serious effort. I took it as a challenge and decided to complete the school.
Not only complete but make an all-out effort to improve my performance on the practical applications side. Soon it became apparent that my challenge was my mindset. By the time I completed my power plant and airframe courses, I managed to score 95 per cent for both. I was encouraged and motivated by my instructor Andy Andrews, an immigrant from Norway.
He was a retired teacher who came to the US quite early in his life. Here, he worked with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for a short term before returning to teaching again.
He once told me "John, this country is made out of immigrants like us. You should stay here". Here I was, planning to go back to India and start a school to teach Aeronautical Technology. It was his advice that first planted a seed in my mind about the advantages of staying back in the US.
By the time I graduated, I found that I needed to put in more hours if I were to be allowed to take the FAA license test. That meant I had to put in an additional quarter in college. Since I had finished my program as a student, Andy offered to take me on as a student instructor.
Thus, I started helping Andy in his class. He also gave me a lot of practical projects which helped me later in life. When I got my FAA licenses he even called up his friends in the aviation circle to procure a job for me.
Slowly, but surely I was getting acquainted with the American way of life in real-time. Some of those experiences would stay fresh in my mind for years to come. My first exposure to snow came in November 1971, only two months after 1 first stepped on US soil.
I had lived all my life exposed to the tropical climate, where there was no winter. What we had was a harsh summer, moderate summer and mild summer, with the rains providing the only break from the routine. It came unannounced. One day I woke up and there was snow everywhere. White powdery stuff. Very soothing. It was a weekday and I still had to go to college. Buses were running late. I was not prepared in any way to take on the snow.
I was wearing India's famed Bata shoes which were not designed to walk on snow. There was no extra grip or tread on the shoe sole. I slipped and fell several times.
The bus took me to a point which was about two miles away from the college campus. Thereafter, the bus service was cancelled due to the slippery slope. I decided to walk. It was an uphill battle.
Two hours is what it took me to reach the college, I was wet, cold and gasping for breath. My hands and face felt so numb, it took me several hours to get the blood circulation going.
I would go on to face this ordeal a couple of times more before I could afford to buy my first car. That is another story, driving in snow, when I up skidding all over the road before ending up in the ditch several times. My car was a rear wheel drive which was not friendly to driving in snow.
High up on the list of memorable experiences was my first Thanksgiving. I had no clue what was on the cards. The only thing I knew was that my college was closed for a few days. I had not bothered to find out anything about the tradition.
Two days before the big day, Mrs. Short asked me to join them for Thanksgiving lunch at her son's place in Bremerton, a beautiful city nestled in the valley of the Olympic mountain range.

I promptly said yes. She asked me to be ready by 9 a.m. I was ready even earlier as I was keen to meet the rest of the Short family. I sat in the back of the Buick as we took a ferry from Seattle.
This was my first experience with the multi-decked vessel which ferried multiple cars and people. We had to wait in line for about an hour to board the boat.
By 11 am we were at their son's house. I had never seen a farm that big. Short Junior was a professional farmer who kept scores of cows and horses. I had never ridden a horse before and the young ones were keen to see me mount a horse. I soon realized horse riding was one hobby that was not to be mine.
After a few hours outdoors, everyone trooped into the house to partake in the Thanksgiving lunch. Mr. Short sat at the head of the table and after a brief prayer, the thanksgiving feast started. This was the first time I was eating turkey. Most of the dishes were new to me.
I relished the massive meal and would remember it for a long time. I got to learn all about the Thanksgiving tradition and how the Americans were determined to get together as a family that one day.
Of course, back home, we had no such tradition. Still, we man-aged to get together many times a year. The reason would vary sometimes it was a marriage, on other occasions, a funeral. Even baptisms could be an excuse to meet each other. There was no particular plan. But families in India got together multiple times. There was order in disorder.

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