One late night, at around 2:30 a.m., Raj and I were awakened by a phone call. It was the security guard from the mall where our store was located.
“Mr. Bedi, there is some melting ice cream through the small opening of your main freezer, and it is running into the open drain,” he said.
Raj and I were stunned to hear this, and we didn’t know what to do at such a late hour.
“I just noticed it during my rounds and wanted to give you a call,” the security guard said.
“Thank you for calling,” I said, “We’ll be right there.”
Once we got there, we opened the freezer door, and to our surprise, there was an inch and a half of melted ice cream on the freezer floor. It was leaking from the heavy cardboard containers and flowing down the drain. Even though the situation seemed hopeless, we tried to salvage some of the ice cream containers, putting them in our showroom freezer and stacking them as much as we could. The rest continued flowing right in front of our eyes, and, as the saying goes, we were watching our money go down the drain.
The freezer’s compressor had simply conked out, so there was nothing to do but let the ice cream flow. Disappointed and tired, we returned home and slept until it was time to get up and start the routine for the next day—getting the kids ready and going to work. While I attended to my responsibilities at Providence Hospital, Raj found someone to fix the freezer compressor. It took three to four days to repair. Needing to order a new supply of ice cream was an additional setback. We had not foreseen such a disaster.
Even if we hadn’t suffered a setback, our business still might have struggled. The mall was fifteen years old at the time, and there was not as much traffic as before. Later, I learned this mall was in decline because a newer mall built elsewhere in Cincinnati was attracting more business. In the meantime, the economy was down, and people were not spending as much money on non-essentials like ice cream. All these factors contributed to a bleak outlook for our store. Not long after this incident, we sold the store to another couple. We could not afford to put any more money into a store which made no profit.
It was a sad day in our household when my parents chose to return to India after their eleven-month visit. I tried to persuade them to stay with us indefinitely, but my mother missed her daughters and other grandchildren and her friends from the village. My father missed having control over his properties, and he’d had news that my brother was not managing the cloth shop well.
As they boarded the plane, I almost cried, thinking how I was living comfortably while they must go back and live with my brother in terrible circumstances. He did not give them any respect, and along with the hot weather, no air conditioning, and no heater during the winter. I could not bear to think of it. But it was their wish, and they missed seeing their daughters as well as being in their own culture.
My sister Krishna told me later that when my parents reached New Delhi, she and her husband, Krishan, received them at the airport. Not only was my mother walking easily, but she was also wearing dark glasses and a nice sari. Even though the weather was warm, she wore her topcoat to show it off. She had also lost a little weight and looked entirely different and happy. As my sister told me, she could not even recognize her own mother.
Chapter 20
In October 1982, when Rajan was five years old, I had no idea my life would change, but it did, at first gradually, and then all at once. At the time, I had recently discovered, through a round of testing at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, that Rajan’s growth hormone levels were abnormally low, and he would need to be put on a waiting list for a trial of growth hormone therapy. With Rajan in my thoughts, I received a phone call from Satish. He had seen an ad from a large industrial group known as the Goels.
“The Goels are looking for an administrator for a new hospital to be built in New Delhi,” Satish said. “The requirements are an Indian national in a Western country experienced in hospital administration and willing to move to India to be head of this state-of-the-art, five-hundred-bed facility to be built in the suburbs of New Delhi.”
I laughed. “Satish, we are well-established here,” I said. “We have no thoughts of moving back to India. My kids are at a prestigious private school, and I have a good, secure job here.”
“I know, I know,” Satish said. “Why don’t you just apply and see what happens. Who knows? You may be qualified.”
Later, I discussed this job opportunity with Raj. She laughed also. “We are all set here. We don’t need to move.”
Those were my thoughts exactly, and we just laughed at how ridiculous it would be to move when we were comfortable as we were. However, that evening as I lay in bed, the thought crept into my mind—What if I did get the job offer? Wouldn’t it be great if I applied, just out of curiosity, and they wanted me to be the administrator? The words “newly built,” and “state-of-the-art” floated in my head. By the next morning, as I got ready for work, I had decided to apply just to see if anything happened. Not that I wanted to move—I really didn’t. But now that the idea settled into my mind, I wanted to see if I would be offered the job. It would boost my ego.
On a whim, I decided to mail a letter to New Delhi inquiring about the position. To my surprise, I received a phone call three weeks later
