It was a good arrangement because Larisa and I could see each other more often. She started showing a lot of love and affection and would say that she loved me very much. When she came by in the evenings, we would drink tea and cook dinner. I didn’t have a TV, so we spent most of our evenings listening to the radio and talking.
In the later part of August 1966, I received a letter from UT offering me a teaching assistantship. This meant UT would cover my tuition fees and pay me close to $1000 for the academic year. I was overjoyed, thinking I had come to the US to learn, and now I would be teaching a course here. Larisa was happy for me, but at the same time, she felt sad. What would we do about our relationship?
In a way, we felt like the couple in Fiddler on the Roof, a play Larisa and I watched together. Larisa and I broke many traditions with our relationship. I knew my parents would want to arrange my marriage, and Larisa’s parents would be angry if they found out she was not dating a Jew, but instead was going steady with a Hindu. In Fiddler on the Roof, Perchik breaks tradition by crossing the barrier between the men and women to dance with Tevye’s daughter, Hodel. Later on, he breaks another tradition by asking Hodel to marry him. The father is appalled that they would ignore tradition and make their own match.
Hoping these problems would resolve themselves in the future, Larisa and I decided to continue our relationship. We would stay together and write to each other during the school year.
Larisa gave me a necklace with a centerpiece made of silver and her words engraved on one side, cleverly using the math symbols for more than and less than. “I love you > yesterday, < tomorrow.” On the other side, she had her name engraved. Before leaving for Knoxville in September, I spent as much time with Larisa as I could. She spoke often of her plans to attend the University of Chicago to major in art that year. “I will write to you every day,” she promised. “And here is my class ring to wear as a promise that we will not see anybody else.”
When it came time to leave, I felt a physical pain I never experienced before. I missed Larisa so much, but I needed to focus on school. I arrived in Knoxville two days before the quarter started.
While looking for an apartment, I met Sewa Singh, a student who had just come from Punjab to work toward a PhD in UT’s Agriculture Department. He lived in a house on the street farthest from campus with two other guys. He said I could stay in the room on the second floor. Sewa Singh lived on the first floor next to an Iranian student working on his bachelor’s in civil engineering.
With four students sharing the kitchen, someone was always waiting to use the stove in the evening, and once there was a commotion in the kitchen over missing sugar. “Someone used my sugar!” the Iranian guy yelled. “Who used my sugar?” This went on for a few minutes, and Sewa and I only laughed. Why would someone use his sugar? The Iranian was upset, but we all kept our groceries separate, so we didn’t see how someone could have gotten into his sugar.
That fall, I registered for three grad courses: Materials Handling in the Industrial Engineering Department and two math courses. On top of that, I would be teaching a course in math. I posted my school schedule and office hours so students would know when they could see me for help.
At the beginning of the fall quarter of 1966, I wrote to my father, saying, “Baiji, you would be very happy to know I am teaching at UT. Your son who came to US as a student to earn a degree is now teaching at the university.”
My father wrote back to say how happy he was for me. He shared the news with everybody, and my maternal uncle, a qualified teacher who was running a business at the time, wrote to me in Urdu. “I am proud of you,” he wrote. “A few people go out diving into an ocean. Some come back empty-handed and some come back with seaweed and shells. But some come up with diamonds in their hands. You, Krishan, have dived into the ocean and come up with diamonds.” My uncle’s words inspired me to continue trying my hardest at school.
As the semester passed, Sewa Singh and I became good friends. More than six feet tall and weighing close to two hundred pounds with a big chest and small waist, he was quite a ladies’ man. He always wore a turban, a stylishly trimmed beard and mustache, and a big smile. All the girls were attracted to him, but since he didn’t have a car, he needed me to pick up the girls and drop them off for him. Since I had lived in the US for five years, Sewa looked up to me as a mentor, someone to teach him about the American way of life. Not only that, our cultures were similar—both of us were from small Punjabi villages, and we both liked to party. When there was no party to be found, we started our own. Many nights, one could find us sitting on the street corner outside our house, drinking beer.
Every day at the house, Sewa lifted dumbbells for half an hour. He taught me how to lift weights too, but I would never be as strong as he was. On one of
