It all happened in a flash!
It was a very hot Friday in the summer of 1970. We, that is Shashi, my wife, and me, had just moved to Sacramento in August of 1969 so that I could join the California State University System as an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Sacramento. That was going to be my first full time job after having completed the “course-work” and the “qualifying exams” in the four subjects for my doctorate, Management, Quantitative Business Analysis, Finance and Business Economics.
I had married Shashi (also a Bhatia) in August 1966 and returned back to the USA in January 1967. Shashi followed me to the USA in April 1967. I had already been admitted to the doctoral program at USC before I left for India after completion of my MBA in February 1966. I was lucky to find a teaching job at a technical school, National Technical School (NTS), as a Electronic and Math instructor while I pursued my doctoral coursework at USC in the Spring 1967 Semester. All the doctoral classes and seminars at USC were from 3:00 to 6:00 PM and 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM and my technical schoolwork was from 8:00 AM to 2:30 PM, so it was a perfect fit for me.
I was very happy in the job and the pay was not bad, $650.00 PM, pretty good in those days when gasoline was 39.9 cents per gallon, eggs were about 29 to 39 cents per dozen and rents were $90 to $120 per month for a 1 bedroom apartment or a two bedroom house, in the neighborhood of the University.
But the lure of a full time job in my own field, at nearly twice what I was making at NTS, was too great a temptation, and I accepted the full time job, despite the fact that Sacramento was 450 miles from Los Angeles, where USC was located, and I had yet to complete my Doctoral dissertation and defend it at the final oral defense! So, by the end of August 1969, I packed up most of our meager belongings in my relatively new red 1967 Volkswagen and left for Sacramento!
We were lucky to find a furnished 2-bedroom house in Sacramento, not too far from the University, that we rented at $150 PM, and we were happy! Shashi insisted that she get admission in the School of Education towards a M. Ed., as she had been pretty bored staying at home from April 1967 to August 1969. She also got pregnant and was expecting our first child by the last week of August 1970.
As I have said, it was a very hot Friday afternoon, that fateful 22nd of May 1970. I had returned at about 4 PM from the University after teaching 3 sections of my class, Production Planning and Control. On my way back from the University I had got the Volkswagen filled. In those days of cheap gas, there were no self-service gas stations. A gas station attendant filled the gas tank and one did not have to even get out of the car as the attendant filled the gas tank and cleaned your windshield for you and you paid the bill right from your seat.
The 1967 Volkswagen (VW) had a gas tank in the front of the car (as did all Volkswagens of old) and opening the front “trunk” one could fill the gas as the opening to the gas-tank was inside the trunk. As usual, that particular day too, I just popped open the trunk lock from my seat, the gas station attendant filled the gas tank, and banged the front trunk “hood” down to lock the trunk. I paid him the amount of the sale (it must have been under $5) and drove home. I did not realize that the gas attendant had spilled some gasoline into the trunk of the car and hurriedly banged the trunk shut WITHOUT PUTTING BACK THE GAS TANK CAP. (This analysis is in retrospect only. I did not realize it at the time it happened). I parked the car straight into the one-car garage, locked the garage door from the inside after I got out of the car, and went into the house from the garage only. I locked the garage door from the inside (it had a mechanical locking device on the garage door). I came into the house through the “office” as it had a door on its side leading into the main house through the kitchen-cum-dining area.
This house was so built that there was a small room behind the garage (an extension of the garage only) with a door to the back yard and a side door to the kitchen of the main house. I had made that into my “home-office” and had all my books and study-table in that room. The garage had some storage cabinets on the left side besides the car and on the right of the car were the gas water-heater, next a box-type freezer, then the electric washing machine.
Shashi was busy in the kitchen doing some cooking as we had invited a whole bunch of co-workers from the University for dinner the next evening. She insisted that I mow the big back yard so that it looked good the next day and that she would throw in a load of wash in the washing machine while I mowed the lawn.
I had an electric lawn mower that needed a long heavy-duty electric cord, which I usually plugged into an outlet in the garage back room “office”. That day too I plugged the long electric cord and started mowing the back yard. I had just mowed a small patch of the lawn and had shut off the mower (to empty the bag) when I heard Shashi shouting something from the garage. I ran to the back door of the garage, and saw that there was fire under the VW; Shashi was at the washing machine (with the top open), and screaming like crazy!
The fire was increasing very rapidly as the heat from the fire below the car was making the gasoline in the car tank boil, and it was evidently flowing out and burning more and more. I yelled for Shashi to run to the main garage door, open the latch and raise the door and run out. But Shashi was getting more and more hysterical as the fire was spreading from the sides and there was not much space between the sides of the car and the sidewalls! She would not run to the back of the car and wanted to come towards the front of the car (which was now burning like crazy) and the flames were all the way to the water-heater! I knew that Shashi was too hysterical to follow my directions to open the big garage door and would just keep crying and screaming. The flames were getting more and more intense and I HAD TO DO SOMETHING!!!!
But what could I do???? I was at the garage back door, with a burning VW in front of me, a pregnant wife on the side of the car with the fire nearly touching her, and she was screaming and not listening to a word of what I was saying to her!!! There was no time to think. All this was happening in less time than what it takes to even write about it! I am sure I did not even think about it. I just ran on to the side that Shashi was standing, caught hold of her left arm and ran towards the back of the car. I fumbled at the latch that locked the garage door from the inside while I could now feel and see the flames really burning the top of my feet and somehow did manage to open the latch and push the door up.
I nearly dragged Shashi outside the garage and no sooner had we run a couple of steps, there was a large explosion as the car gas tank burst and the flames were all over the garage. There were two or three other explosions thereafter and both of us were sitting on the front lawn while the house garage was now all in flames and the house was really on fire.
Our next door neighbors took us into their front patio and it seemed that almost immediately the fire-truck was there and the paramedics were in charge and both Shashi and I were nearly passing out with the pain from the burns.
We were lucky that the fire truck was just minutes away from our house just as somebody reported the fire to them and they were at the scene within a few minutes of the start of the fire. They saved the main structure of the house but the garage, “office” and kitchen and dining area were completely destroyed.
We were rushed to the Kaiser hospital where I stayed for 3 months with 2nd and third degree burns to both my feet and legs and Shashi stayed about 15 days with 2nd degree burns only to her feet. This happened as I was wearing tennis shorts while mowing the lawn and she had on Capri pants that covered most of her legs. Neither of us had any shoes on as I had discarded my open sandals (chappals) when I ran through the fire to get to Shashi and Shashi had just gone only a few steps from her cooking to put in a load of washing in the washing machine and so was wearing no shoes! Neither of us was burnt above the knees.
The recovery took a long, long time and the greatest loss was not the material things I lost, but all my books and notes and preliminary research materials. I was laid up in bed for so long that I had to re-learn how to walk, but the greatest loss was that I had to miss my mandatory continuous registration at USC. This caused the University (USC) to drop me from the 1967 catalogue rules and consider me under the spring 1971 catalogue rules (when I re-registered). This change meant that now I was to have a MAJOR field for my doctorate and TWO MINOR fields. One would think that this would be easier, but this meant TWO EXTRA doctoral seminar in all the three fields! And I was working at Sacramento and all the seminars would have to be at USC in Los Angeles, a distance of 450 miles!!!! I petitioned the University that this was very unfair and with great backing from my dissertation chairman, Dr. Gutenberg (my Guru and my savior), the University agreed to waive any requirement for taking the qualifying exams in the three subjects (I had already completed them), but INSISTED ON MY TAKING SIX EXTRA SEMINARS (doctoral classes) AT LOS ANGELES!!!
Well, I nearly gave up any hopes of doing my doctorate, but lo and behold, my teaching schedule for spring 1971 was on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and there were 2 doctoral seminars scheduled at USC on Tuesdays from 3 to 6 PM and 6 to 9 PM, that Semester. If I could only attend the 2 Seminars in the spring quarter, I could take 3 in the summer and somehow manage one more in the fall quarter, I could complete the 6 Seminars! Could I do it? There were many questions and a million reasons why it could not be done, but the “fire was within me” and I had to complete the Doctorate!
So, to make a long story short, I FLEW every Tuesday morning from Sacramento to Los Angeles that Spring 1971 Quarter. I went from Los Angeles airport (LAX) to USC by bus, took the 2 seminars and returned home to Sacramento by the last flight to be back home by midnight, with a lot of help from my sister, Choti Jiji (who lived in Los Angeles), who would drop me off to LAX many-a-times at night. I stayed at Los Angeles (in a exchange professor’s furnished house) during Summer 1971 and took 3 other seminars and took a final seminar in Fall 1971 by flying a few times to Los Angeles and the professor was kind enough to allow me to study at “home” and only take the exams in Los Angeles. Now the question remained on doing my “research” and writing my dissertation. How was I going to do all that at Sacramento with my dissertation committee in Los Angeles and me at Sacramento?
Again, I got lucky and a new campus of the California State University System had opened at San Bernardino (about 60 miles from USC) only in 1968 and I was able to transfer my services there from fall 1972. I completed my doctorate, along with working full-time, after doing all my research, writing my dissertation, etc., etc., and successfully defended my dissertation to get my Doctorate in Business Administration on January 16, 1975.
Shashi too completed all her course work for her M. Ed. at Sacramento and submitted her Master’s thesis after moving to Los Angeles in summer 1972. It was no mean achievement as she delivered our son, Dev Anand, right after the fire.
Thinking about it now in retrospect, it all looks like a movie, but it was not a movie, it was REAL LIFE! But then, truth is stranger than fiction. One has so much enthusiasm, energy and desires when one is young that s/he is able to accomplish so much.
And that is the story of “The Fire”, the biggest events in our lives.
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