Grad recalls traumatic arrival

Barbara Black

In 1992, 26-year-old Sriram Thottam was working for IBM in Madras, but he wanted to get his master’s degree in the West. He quit his job and was accepted at Concordia. Unfortunately, the train to Madras derailed on a bridge, spilling the mailbags, including Sriram’s passport, into the river.

Desperate to get a duplicate passport and a Canadian visa, he chased officials through India’s legendary red tape and watched the days tick by. Mid-September came, and with it, the start of classes at Concordia.

By mid-October he finally had his documents. He rushed for his first airplane flight with no thought of what would happen when he arrived.
The cold Montreal air hit him like a fist. Sriram thought if he could just get to the campus he could curl up in a corner for the night, as he would have been able to do in India, and figure out what to do in the morning.

“I arrived at around 7 o’clock at night. It was like a refrigerator,” he remembers. “A taxi driver wanted to charge me $70 to take me from the airport to Concordia, and I thought it was way too much. I got on a bus and it left me with all my bags at Bonaventure [metro]. I couldn’t believe this was a train station; it was like a palace. I kept asking people, ‘Is this the train, really?’”

A Montrealer approached him and asked him if he was Indian. Instead of directing him to the university, the kindly stranger, who was also from India, took him home and put him up for four days.

Sriram started his studies a month late and found an apartment, but he was lonely and depressed. He found the International Students Office and counsellor Pat Hardt, who listened to his story over and over again for about 10 weeks.

“Three times a day I came to see her,” Sriram recalled. “She was very comforting, very patient, like my mom. I needed a lot of reassurance. I would go out of her office and then what she said would stop making sense, and I had to go back and hear it again.”

Slowly, his new life came together. He made close friends with his roommates. He called his girlfriend Mahima and his parents to keep in touch, and he began to enjoy his studies. He graduated in 1998.

Now Sriram works for Microsoft at its headquarters in Seattle, where he lives in a nice house with Mahima, who became his wife. They have two little girls, Megha, 2, and Nisha, 5.

When his employers asked for staff to go to career fairs in Toronto and Montreal, he said, “I volunteered right away to have a chance to come to Concordia and meet up with Pat.” He says he’s enormously grateful to the university for giving him a new life in North America.

Pat Hardt, a nurse by training, started working at Concordia in 1978 in Health Services, then switched to the International Students Office. She got her master’s degree in counselling at McGill in 1997, but she still draws on her own experiences as an international student when she came to Canada from Barbados. Hardt is officially retired, but still puts in two days a week, plus a day as a volunteer counsellor at a shelter for battered women.