Sadanand Singh. Maybe if he had better sized up the emergency exits that night in Bombay, he and his family could have sneaked out of one.

Photo by Craig Carlson

Enter for a while into the home of Sadanand Singh. At first you may think that this is one of the most serene abodes in the city. It’s not a fancy house, but it’s set right above the beach at La Jolla Shores, about midway between Scripps Pier and the glittering curve of the cove. Singh can sit in his living room and, like a god, watch over the great sweep of sky and sea and sand. A parade of bronzed beachgoers passes below him. The long bands of waves advance and collapse, advance and collapse, relentless as the thoughts that overtake Singh day and night. The thoughts tumble Singh, and batter him, and give him no rest; again and again he ponders: what could have been done differently last September 5?

Kala Singh was a member of the Brahmin caste, he was a Rajput. “The Brahmins were the original intellectual and spiritual leaders in India.”

Photo by Craig Carlson

When that day began ten months ago, Sadanand Singh’s life was about as perfect as any man’s can be. He had come from the ignorance and poverty of a far, feudal corner of India, and he had managed to earn doctorates both in India and in the United States. Here he had met a beautiful, cultivated Indian woman, whom he had married. They had had two lively, charming children (both born in America), then had started a business that had prospered beyond all expectations.

By 1963 Singh had obtained a doctorate in linguistics.

Photo by Craig Carlson

Last year they finally sold that business for several million dollars, and they eagerly confronted a life full of additional promise. Then on the night of September 5, while on vacation in India, they boarded a Pam Am flight back to the United States. A few hours later, terrorists took control of that aircraft. Singh's idyllic happiness ended, and the torturous questions began.

The Singhs published almost 200 books with names like Vocal Fold Physiology: Contemporary Research and Clinical Issues ($47.00), Language in a Black Community ($23.50), and Sexuality and the Mentally Retarded ($20.50).

Photo by Craig Carlson

Here’s an example: one recent day, Singh was sitting on his secluded patio. The sun was shining. Birds were singing. But Singh’s mind had traveled back to the stuffy darkness inside the Boeing 747. "It was hot. Smelly. We were all having breathing problems.” Throughout the sixteen-hour ordeal, the terrorists had brandished hand grenades, and they seemed on the verge of detonating them. Singh thought that when they did, the plane would explode into flames and the passengers trapped inside might have mere seconds to seek escape. So he whispered to his wife and children to stay alert and keep their heads up. "But that was the worst thing I could have done!” Singh cried out on his patio. "We should have had our heads down. We should have been under something!”

As their injuries healed, the children returned to their classes at Francis Parker School.

Photo by Craig Carlson

Remorse flickered across his features, then disappeared. Singh can talk about these events calmly, analytically, but the emotions well quickly to the surface, and they have made Singh thinner and much more tired looking than he was a year ago. He is fifty-three years old, and his hair is still charcoal, though it has thinned to a bristly veil on top of his head. His skin is the color of chocolate, and he still speaks with the lilting tones that hint of Hindi. After more than twenty years in the United States, he says he feels completely Americanized — until he flies back and steps once again onto Indian soil. Then he is totally Indian. It is like living two lives, he says, or being two people.

When he’s here, he’s not one to dwell on his Indian half, though he sketches out the details of a life so different as to be almost unimaginable to one who has not experienced it. He was born the eldest of five sons in the state of Bihar, in the northeast corner of India, in a farming village so small that Singh says it has no formal name. This is good farming country, flat country, though in the winter one can stand in the fields and see the peaks of the Himalayas to the north. From Singh’s village. Mount Everest is about as far away as Malibu is from San Diego — at least as the crow flies. Singh says even today the only way to reach his parents’ farm is to walk or travel by bullock cart or Jeep from the neighboring town. No phones have reached this part of the world, and people use the open fields as bathrooms. Here Singh was married for the first time at about the age of twelve and was set for life as a farmer.

"That marriage didn’t mean anything,” Singh says today with some repugnance. "It was simply that the two families got together and they said, ‘My son and your daughter are getting married.’ ” Young Sadanand’s wife continued to live with her family some thirty or forty or fifty miles away. Singh isn’t sure of the distance; he says it could have been a thousand miles, transportation in that part of the world was so primitive. "Then after I graduated from high school, she was brought in by my family to our house, but I went away to college. So it was kind of a sporadic relationship of a very weird kind.” The couple did have children. But Singh nonetheless left India in 1963. “I boarded a Swissair plane in Calcutta to come to Columbus, Ohio, and I clearly remember saying to myself, ‘It looks like I finally have freed myself from this bond.’ ”

Books were the instruments that enabled him to cut those chains. From childhood, Singh had loved reading, and his parents had encouraged his intellectual growth. Though they were far from wealthy, their farm produced jute, a crop valuable enough to enable them to educate their children. Singh says for many years his father’s highest dream was that his eldest son would finish high school and become, not a farmer, but a police officer in the local town. Sadanand surpassed that goal by winning admission to college, earning a bachelor’s degree, and receiving word that he had been accepted in a master’s program. At that same time, however, his next oldest brother was graduated from high school, and Sadanand's father sadly informed his eldest son that he could only afford one university tuition at a time, and now it was the brother’s turn. At that point an uncle stepped in and agreed to sell his land if necessary to shoulder the cost of Sadanand’s graduate education. ‘‘I was the first person to come out of that village to get a master’s degree,” Singh says. But all his brothers followed him; the second eldest one in fact went on to receive a Ph.D. from Georgetown University and just chartered a bank in Washington, D.C. Sadanand says hundreds of other young people from the area followed the example set by his family. Other parents realized, ‘If Sadanand can do it, our son or daughter can do it.' ”

By 1963 Singh had obtained a doctorate in linguistics and was publishing short stories in Hindi in the most prestigious magazines in the country. But he sought still more education in the United States. He was to study at Ohio State University, and he soon became fascinated by the speech-science research being done there. So Singh left behind his literary pursuits and within two years had obtained a second doctorate in speech science. He was heading a department in that field at Howard University in Washington, D.C. when he met his future wife, Kala.

Singh says Indian women classically have been divided into three genetic groups, and the Padmini group described in Sanskrit poetry typifies his picture of Kala: thin and tall, she had an oval face with sharp features, high cheekbones, and large, doe-like eyes. She came from a higher-class Indian family, one headed by a Bombay film editor who strived to send his six children to the best private schools; Kala, in fact, had been among the first students to graduate from the first program in speech pathology and audiology ever established in India (at a time when some 250 such programs existed in the United States). She had come to Ithaca College in New York with the goal of getting a master’s degree in audiology. Her introduction to Singh came at an annual meeting of the American Speech and Hearing Association.

While she and Singh shared both a nationality and a professional interest, an equal number of things divided them. She was a shy graduate student fourteen years younger than the ambitious professor from Bihar. She was a member of the Brahmin caste, he was a Rajput. “The Brahmins were the original intellectual and spiritual leaders of various communities in India,” Singh explains. “The Rajputs ruled over the country. Almost all the rajahs and territorial leaders were the Rajputs. The Rajputs were the supporters of the Brahmins. They kept the Brahmins to provide the leadership, to be in the temple, to be their prime ministers. Rajputs were traditionally the kings, while Brahmins were the teachers, the writers, the astronomers, the medicine men.” Though they were historically interdependent, the two castes emphatically were not supposed to intermarry. But despite that prohibition, Sadanand and Kala soon began seeing each other and contemplating marriage, though more than a year passed before they actually wed. Sadanand first had to obtain a divorce from his wife back in India; Kala had to win her father’s formal permission. Although Brahmins are at the top of the hierarchy of Indian castes (with Rajputs second), Kala’s family ironically proved more open to the match than Sadanand’s. His family, several members of which had settled in the Washington area, did gather for a traditional Hindu wedding ceremony held in the home of one brother. But pressures from the Singh family soon drove the young couple to relocate in a small campus of Ohio University, where Singh taught speech science.

There Kala and Sadanand had their first child, a girl, and Kala completed an internship as an audiologist. It also didn’t take the couple long to collaborate on a professional project. Singh then was teaching an introductory phonetics course, and he decided to tape his classroom presentations, figuring that his transcribed lectures would constitute the first draft of an introductory textbook. Instead, however, he found that the transcription “was frightening to listen to. None of the sentences were complete. As written English, it actually stunk. You couldn’t make sense out of it.” This unexpected turn caused the couple to return to India and Kala’s family in Bombay, where for a month relatives cared for the Singhs’ toddler daughter. Kala by then had mastered idiomatic English, and “she virtually rewrote the book,” Singh says. “She had a very strong background in basic sciences. So she knew the anatomy, the physiology, the physics of sounds, and she completely rewrote those fundamental chapters.” Working intensively for four weeks, the Singhs produced a good first draft that was published in 1976.

Their publisher was a small company called University Park Press, which had grown by specializing in speech-science materials. Happy with the phonetics book, the Singhs began acting as consultants to the firm. The year before their book came out, the family had moved to Houston, where Sadanand had accepted a job with the Texas Health Science Center. There his career flourished, but Kala ran into a form of discrimination that her husband says has long plagued speech-science practitioners. Singh says such professionals — speech pathologists, special education teachers — have mostly been women who have suffered both low professional status and depressed pay scales. But at the time, the only job Kala could find in Houston was working for a medical doctor, on call, for less than four dollars an hour. She rejected that.

Instead, she opened a little boutique selling Indian clothing, rugs, and other items. That enterprise proved several things, among them that the slender Indian woman had an iron capacity for long, hard work and the ability to buy and sell shrewdly. The shop prospered, and the Singhs invested the profits in real estate. But within a few years, Kala began to grow bored with the routine demands of the boutique business. Instead another idea beckoned to the couple — that of starting an academic publishing house.

In the intervening years, University Park Press had been acquired by a larger publisher and had radically changed editorial course. “They were not listening to us anymore,” Singh says. He says the new owners had become ambivalent to maintaining the company’s sharp focus, a change that left virtually no one to print and market very specialized books about developments in the speech-science disciplines. Singh says the large medical publishing firms were only doing a few speech-science books per year, typically lower-level undergraduate textbooks guaranteed to reach a large audience and generate a predictable flow of cash. And yet research in the speech-science disciplines was leaping ahead. Professors were publishing their research only in such highly technical periodicals as the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. “Say you’re a clinician working in El Centro,” Singh posits. “How are you going to get the Journal of Scandinavian Audiology?” Even if you managed to do so, the information would likely seem too terse to relate to your every-day problems. Yet lacking such information, the profession could never hope to gain status and financial clout. Singh says it was a crusading desire to effect such a change that finally pushed him and his wife into taking the financial leap.

They also had found an appealing book in need of a publisher, one written by a speech pathologist working at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital here in San Diego, where Sadanand came yearly to serve as a consultant. Called Coping with Stroke, the book was aimed at speech and language pathologists as well as families of stroke victims. “We didn’t know the first thing about publishing. We didn’t have any idea of what it required to get a book out,” Singh recalls. In August of 1979, he and his wife nonetheless published the stroke book as the first product of the newly christened College Hill Press.

They funded that venture out of profits from Kala’s little shop, with Sadanand continuing both to teach and direct research at his academic post. The couple jointly ran College Hill out of the family’s home. “Our warehouse was in the garage. And we had one employee at first, who was a secretary. Then we added a production person and a marketing person.” Although it grew slowly, Singh says the little enterprise suddenly reached a point where it needed cash to survive, so the professor walked into one of Houston's banks. “I sat down and made a very emotional presentation saying that in two to three years the company would be billing close to a million dollars and asking for a line of credit. The man actually laughed at me,” Singh recalls. He said, ‘What are your sales now? What is your experience in book publishing? Have you ever done business before?’ Nothing made sense to him. And I don’t blame him, really; they’re very conservatively inclined." So instead of tapping bank funds, Singh says he and his wife sold twenty percent of the shares of the company to about fourteen friends and family members who each paid something like $2500 to $5000. After that infusion of funding, “Money was never a deterrent to the growth of College Hill Press,” Sadanand asserts. “We always were able to manage. Kala was extremely frugal," and she had become quite adept at haggling for favorable credit terms from the artists and printers who served the little operation. Singh says over the years his wife lost many accountants who disagreed with what they saw as Kala’s failure to pay her bills. But she did pay her bills, Singh insists. He says she merely waited until the very last day to do so and then deducted for any deficiencies in service. That was her way of buying time for the fledgling company, her husband says.

College Hill thus managed to publish fourteen books between 1979 and 1981. “Those first few years, we didn’t even know how to figure profits,” Singh says. “And I’m sure we were not making any. But from 1981 on. College Hill was constantly in a good profit situation.” That year was a critical one for the company. Tired of Houston, Sadanand decided that San Diego would be a much more pleasant place to live and so accepted a post teaching in San Diego State's communicative disorders department. At the same time, Kala sold her boutique and devoted her full attention to running the publishing house, which first settled into a small office and warehouse on Alvarado Canyon Road and a year later moved into a 7000-square-foot building at Forty-first Street and El Cajon Boulevard that the Singhs purchased. In 1982 College Hill offered five new titles, followed by thirteen in 1983, twenty-nine in 1984, and fifty-four new titles in 1985.

Today the complete list of College Hill titles occupies four pages of small print, almost 200 books with names like Vocal Fold Physiology: Contemporary Research and Clinical Issues ($47.00), Language in a Black Community ($23.50), and Sexuality and the Mentally Retarded ($20.50). Among those titles have been a few disappointments, Singh admits cheerfully. “If there weren’t, we would be put in the Smithsonian Institute. But no.” He mentions as an example the one volume for which he brought together more than one hundred authors and nine editors to report on recent advances in speech, hearing, language, and “provide a foundation for the future of the profession. It was a very massive undertaking, and we thought it was going to be a gangbuster.” Instead the book fared poorly, though Singh eventually sold 10,000 copies to a book club and wound up making some money on it.

Among the company’s successes were experiences like the time Singh approached a Northwestern University expert in the field of speech production. “I needed a book in articulation,” Singh says. This person, however, had just completed a book on swallowing disorders. “I said, ‘Who wants to buy a book on swallowing disorders?’ Singh recalls. “But she said she wouldn’t do the articulation book otherwise.” So the Singhs resigned themselves to losing money on the swallowing book, and they printed only 1000 copies of it. To their astonishment, orders for the book poured in, and “it became one of the most popular books College Hill ever printed.” The book actually helped birth a profession, Singh contends. “Now the author’s giving workshops to plastic surgeons, dentists, oral surgeons, and all sorts of other people.”

On another occasion. College Hill released a book on brain stem audiometry (a highly sophisticated method, of testing hearing by reading brain waves). “It covered only a hundredth of what goes on in hearing testing,” Singh said. “And no other publisher would touch it. After all, there were only 200 people in the whole country working with brain stem audiometry. But the truth is that we’ve sold thousands of copies of it, at fifty dollars a shot.” All sorts of professionals took an unexpected interest in the subject — not just the people conducting such tests, but also neurologists, auditory physiologists, psychologists. “So many peripheral people were interested in the behavior of disordered conditions,” Singh says. “And as we went deeper and deeper into specialization, we gained enormous prestige among our constituency.”

As the company evolved under Sadanand’s broad direction, he continued his research and teaching duties at San Diego State. Kala, on the other hand, ran the daily operations of the business. She dickered with printers, she cosseted writers. She poured over the balance sheets. Despite devoting sixty hours a week to this work, Sadanand says she also accepted the traditional responsibilities of a Hindu wife and mother. Returning home at night, she would remove her business clothes and don an Indian sari, then supervise the children’s homework and prepare traditional Indian meals (their second child, a son, was born in Texas). Kala made her own bread, mixed her own spices in the grinder.

When, in late October of 1985, Sadanand suffered a heart attack and had to undergo bypass surgery, Kala was vehement; her husband must reduce the stress in his life, she declared. They should sell the publishing company. So it happened that Sadanand telephoned Little, Brown and Company of Boston, the oldest publishing house in the United States, and within a matter of days negotiated an agreement from Little, Brown to buy the San Diego firm for the price the Singhs had named.

The business changed hands on April 3, 1986, and the Indian family eagerly began planning what they would do with their new-found financial independence. Kala talked about lobbying for the improvement of public libraries in both India and the United States. Sadanand looked forward to having more time for quiet contemplation and for improving his health. But first the family decided to travel to India. They had returned many times over the years, but only for brief, frantic visits. Now Kala and Sadanand yearned to guide their youngsters on an exploration of their cultural, familial, and religious roots.

Sadanand says one minor cloud was his wife’s concerns about the family’s safety during the flight to and from Asia. He says Kala had never feared flying until 1985, when an Air India plane had exploded in midair, killing 329 people, the apparent victims of a terrorist bombing. From that day on, the Singhs had shunned Air India, and Kala had given increasing attention to the risks of air travel. “Kala was a very analytical person,” Sadanand says. One of her decisions was that her immediate family, and even College Hill employees, should try to avoid flying in large groups.

Sadanand recalls one family trip to San Francisco, for example, when he and his daughter took one flight while Kala and his son flew separately. Kala for a while considered similarly splitting up the family for the trip to and from India. Against that the Singhs weighed the allure of having the lengthy flight to unwind and talk at leisure. Throughout last summer, as Americans (who were worried about Libyan terrorism) rejected flying en masse, Kala researched the various travel options. Pan Am finally appealed to her the most. It was offering extremely low fares to India, and despite her new wealth, Kala remained an ardent bargain-hunter. Pan Am furthermore was advertising the implementation of a special antiterrerist security system at all of its destinations, a service for which the carrier was charging an additional five-dollar tariff per person. “Kala said, ‘It looks like Pan Am is really taking the bull by the horns. Maybe we’re safe with them,’ ” Singh recalls. So the family made reservations to travel together.

Today Sadanand recalls the family’s vacation on the Asian subcontinent as an interlude of unsullied bliss. They made a pilgrimage to the Goa region, which was Kala’s ancestral home. They played tourist at the Alora Caves and the Taj Mahal. They journeyed to the north and spent a week in the heat and humidity of Sadanand’s remote native village, where the villagers greeted them as visiting celebrities; Sadanand says a thousand people followed them on foot for two miles when they finally departed. The Indian part of the family’s vacation was supposed to end on August 24, whereupon they were to spend a few days in Europe, but Kala changed her mind, swayed by the pleasures of her homeland. They would enjoy Bombay for the extra days and fly from there directly home on the twenty-ninth. Sadanand says Pan Am assured the family that such a switch would be feasible, so the four of them accordingly went to the airport on the later date.

Today Sadanand sits staring at the ocean and thinks about the pandemonium that greeted them at the airport. He thinks, “She should have pushed her way to the front of the ticket line! I should have done it!” But instead, Kala waited politely to claim the family’s tickets. “There were people who pushed her aside at the counter,” Sadanand says. “If you have ever been to India, you know there is no queue. People are pushing everybody. The stronger one gets there. The people who are wealthy send their peons and secretaries and servants to do the pushing. We, on the other hand, had become so Americanized that even if we could afford these people, we would go ourselves. We would stand in line ourselves. Even if we had wanted to bribe someone, we wouldn’t have known how to do it." So Kala waited and seemed to succeed when the Pan Am representatives checked in the family’s luggage and issued them boarding passes. But a while later, a Pan Am representative took those same passes and ripped them up. The Singhs were told that, after all, no seats were available, and the next available connection would be Flight 73, bound for New York via Karachi, Pakistan and Frankfurt, Germany, and departing Bombay on September 5.

The Singhs resigned themselves to the delay and returned to the airport a week later at the appointed time, hours before dawn. This time they boarded the jumbo jet and took off without incident, and Sadanand says they all fell asleep before the plane had climbed to its cruising altitude. They didn’t awaken as they landed in Pakistan. They didn’t awaken until the sound of machine guns ripped through the air, the first forewarning of the hell that was to follow.

There were men, several I uniformed men, screaming, waving guns, ordering everyone to freeze. Somehow they had managed to sneak onto the airfield driving a Suzuki van painted to resemble one of the airport’s own security vehicles, then had leaped out and clambered up the entry ramp, weapons blasting. The Singh family, in the first few seats of the economy class, sat petrified, afraid to twitch. This was Kala Singh’s worst nightmare, brought to life, and no help was in sight.

In those first few moments, as the terrorists sought to consolidate their control of the airline, one source of authority instead was slipping away. Unbeknownst to either the passengers or their captors, the cockpit crew, realizing what was happening, had opened an emergency hatch and let themselves down a cable to the ground. Today Sadanand Singh can’t talk about that action in terms other than scorn. Singh has seen published statements praising the captain and his flight assistants for their swift action. He has heard the argument that, by escaping, the cockpit crew effectively immobilized the terrorists and gave Pakistani authorities much more control over the subsequent negotiations. He’s heard it said that allowing the plane to fly might have resulted in the terrorists taking their hostages to some stronghold like Beirut and dispersing them to avert any possibility of a unified rescue effort. Singh rejects such reasoning. “If that airplane crew had been there, we would all be alive today,’’ he believes. “The primary responsibility of the captain and the cockpit crew is the protection and safety of the passengers. But the captain and his crew abandoned ship. So no one was in charge in that plane. No one could be in charge. There was chaos.”

An hour passed. Two. Singh recalls that a stewardess, directed by the Arabic-speaking hijackers, eventually used a megaphone to communicate with authorities outside the plane. In the noise and hysteria of those early hours, the miasma of fear onboard thickened and penetrated everything, dense as the cigarette smoke the hijackers exhaled endlessly as they paced up and down the narrow aisles. Suddenly, they seized an Indian-American businessman, shot him in the back of the head, and tossed his lifeless body out the plane. Singh says the terror that consumed all those aboard acted like a drug. It shredded thought, rendered all the victims passive and paralyzed. Singh's own recollections of those early hours are like the fragments of a dream. He remembers being denied permission to use the bathroom and urinating, shamefully, into his pants. He has no memory of hearing cries or whining from any of the babies or children on board; he thinks they knew, instinctively, that their survival depended on silence.

Singh says his wife decided at some point to try to communicate with her captors, three out of four of whom seemed boyish and obviously unsure of themselves. Kala told them not to smoke, that it was bad for their hearts. She began asking when the hostages would be freed, and they retorted that Pan Am first would have to supply the plane with another pilot. At some point, radio contact between the hijackers and the authorities was established; Singh doesn’t know how. But as the hours dragged by, the captors began to relax, and Kala even won permission to move with her family into the empty, forward “Clipper” section by convincing the men that confinement in the hot, smoky economy section was aggravating her husband’s cardiovascular problems.

The family was in the Clipper section around 9:00 p.m. when the lights aboard the jet began to dim, a sign that the onboard generator was running out of fuel. Desperate, the hijackers called the Singhs back and herded all the passengers, some 390 people, into the middle third of the fuselage. The lights went out, yet for an eternity the terrorists did nothing but mutter and confer with one another. Then they seemed to make a decision; one Pakistani passenger later told reporters he heard one of the hijackers declare, “The moment for the last jihad (holy war] has arrived” and that death would bring them all a glorious martyrdom.

First the men lobbed their hand grenades. Enormous explosions rocked the plane and hurled fragments of shrapnel in all directions. But when the dust settled, the Singh family was still alive. Then the machine guns bucked into life, spewing bullets in deadly indiscriminate assault. Amidst the terrifying noise, the San Diego professor remembers the hijackers’ leader laughing loudly as he fired.

When the crossfire began, Sadanand says his wife was erect, her hands pressed together in panicked prayer. Then he saw a bullet enter her head, felt the spray of her blood upon his shoulder. Her head tilted to one side and the husband saw a flicker of light play upon her face. She looked peaceful. Then suddenly he felt his own arm twist; a bullet had ripped into it. He felt numb, unable even to try to speak to his wife, to check on the children. Then they were screaming at him, begging him to follow them out the emergency exit that a passenger had opened at last. Singh thinks only a moment or so had passed since the shooting began.

He followed the children like a robot, and once through the exit, he began to slide toward the edge of the wing. His thirteen-year-old daughter realized that a leap from such a height might kill him, however, and managed to call him back. As coolly practical as her mother, she had spotted another emergency exit being opened on the other side of the plane, and she shepherded her father and brother back into the reeking interior of the fuselage, out the opposite exit, and down the escape chute that had inflated there.

Singh says they had to stumble on foot through chaotic darkness to reach the terminal building. He wonders today why emergency vehicles didn’t rush out to meet the wounded the moment the shooting stopped. In the terminal, a handful of miserable looking ambulances, sirens wailing, did await them, and the daughter screamed at one of them to transport the family to medical help. First they were taken to an infirmary bereft of equipment but quickly filled with other wounded passengers. Half naked, Singh lay on the cold cement and added his voice to the cries for water, but the infirmary had none. Amidst the disorganized confusion, Singh’s daughter somehow managed to bully an official into transporting her father to a better hospital. So off they went again, but their destination, this time a hospital, proved to be another squalid dump. Once again Singh lay on the floor and desperately awaited a drink — only to be told that the only water available was unpurified. Singh would have grabbed for it anyway, but his daughter wouldn’t let him touch the treacherous liquid. Her tenacious appeals to one young doctor finally persuaded the man to bicycle to his home and return with a thermos full of cold, clean water and a handful of apples. Singh lacked the strength to chew the fruit, but he says his children began chewing slices then taking the juicy, softened pieces out of their mouths and putting them into his.

The young doctor also brought good news: he had stopped at the American consulate and alerted an authority to Singh’s presence. A consular official soon arrived and arranged transport to yet another facility. Around 1:00 a.m. — close to three hours after the shooting on the plane had erupted — the family arrived at the Aga Khan Hospital, a gleaming haven filled with modern equipment and solicitous medical professionals. They tended the family’s wounds, but for a day and a half, no one answered Singh’s piteous inquiries about his wife. Only when some of his relatives arrived from India were they able to extract from Pan Am officials confirmation that Kala had died.

She was cremated in Karachi the i next day; according to Hindu custom, her eight-year-old son Samir lighted her funeral pyre. A few days later, Singh took his children to Bombay, then on to Washington, D.C. Members of his family pleaded with him to stay there, close to their ministrations. But Singh was determined to get his children back to school in San Diego as soon as possible. “That was the only light I could see in the tunnel. As weak and confused as I was, I thought, ‘That’s where the schools are, and school seems to be the normal place, where they could have normal thoughts. Let’s see if we can start this up again.’ ”

All three had been injured, the father most seriously, with a major nerve in his arm damaged. But as their injuries healed, the children returned to their classes at the Francis Parker School and their father began to talk by phone with the College Hill office. (As one condition of the sale, he had promised to continue working for the company for three years.) Singh also began writing a memoir of his wife and the events that led up to her tragic death; the writing was one way of remaining close to her.

He finished the manuscript quickly, but he says it took him months to be able to face the commute to the College Hill offices in East San Diego on a regular basis. There many things have changed in the year since the local business was absorbed into the publishing giant’s organization. Singh’s role has been shaved in all directions, yet he is quick to say how generously Little Brown treated him after Kala’s death, and he says he’ll continue working with Little, Brown for the foreseeable future.

These days he’s reporting to the publishing offices almost daily. But a part of Singh’s soul remains frozen on the bloodstained Pakistani tarmac. Singh says he wants other people to protect themselves better than he did against being caught in such a horrifying ordeal. He wants to alert people to what happened. (In fact, few official details of the event have vet emerged.

The hijackers, believed to be Palestinians directed by the infamous Abu Nidal, have not yet been tried.) Singh insists that alerting the public is a major part of his motivation in filing a lawsuit against Pan Am, a proceeding which is still in its early stages. A part of that suit points out that the special “security service” that the airline advertised and for which it charged extra was a fiction. How could that happen? Singh cries out. Why don’t the airlines have marshals accompany selected flights? Maybe such a presence could have changed the course of events last September 5.

Maybe if he had better sized up the emergency exits that night in Bombay, he and his family could have sneaked out of one, Singh speculates. He now urges both friends and acquaintances to note all escape routes when they fly, just as he suggests they dress in thick shoes and socks and rugged clothes. “They should carry a small first-aid kit with a good supply of gauze, and when they're travelling in the Middle East or other volatile areas, I strongly recommend that they wear a bullet-proof vest and helmet.” They shouldn’t sleep or wear seat belts while on the ground, he says solemnly.

“There are times that I feel we are the most unlucky people in the world for losing Kala,” Singh said one day recently on his sunny patio. “Then there are other times when I think of what else could have happened. Instead of my hand, it could have been my brain, and I could have survived and been paralyzed. Or I could also have been killed. Or one of the kids could have been killed. Or both killed ” The permutations and combinations of Evil Avoided dizzy him; they make him want to have faith that there was some higher reason for his children to have survived.

And then he thinks that they’ve hardly survived at all. There are moments in the house by the ocean when Singh can feel his children drifting, when he can feel himself sinking into “the dungeon of psychological distress.” He says, “Evenings are the worst time. Nobody’s talking to anybody. Everybody’s walking around in this big house, vacant, looking for some answer.” And only the questions resound.