Day: January 17, 2010

Chicks is Our Business

/ Surina Khan / Leave a comment

My father came from a long lineage of military men. They held distinguished titles like Air Marshall and Brigadier General. In the early 1960s, before I was born, my father retired from the Pakistani Navy and went into the chicken business. After that he was still known as Commander Afzal Khan or Commander Saab.

My father with his brothers and my grandfather. 
My grandfather is seated in the middle, the only one of the grown men not dressed in military attire and my father is standing directly behind him. The super-imposed photo on the upper left is another brother, Asif, who died in a plane crash while serving in the Air Force, before this photo was taken.

My parents were married in 1954. My mother, Sunnaiya, or Sunny as she was called affectionately by family and friends, was just eighteen years old, my father about nine years older. Shortly after their wedding, my father was posted to the UK. And my mother, who came from a wealthy family, had to adjust to living on a military salary. She wrote in a letter to a friend in November 1954, “Can you imagine I do all the sheets and towels by hand? I cook, clean, wash, iron, and in short am a drudge of all work and yet don’t seem to mind in the least as Afzal’s image is always in my mind and his love in my thoughts.”

The love between Sunny and Afzal was strong, but I’m sure living on a tight budget had its challenges,  especially for a woman who was used to every luxury. At one point while they were living in England, as my mother once recounted to me, she said to my father, “I wish we could have chicken for dinner just one night.” And he replied, “If you wanted chicken for dinner, you should have married someone else.”

Hearing this story growing up, I always thought it was romantic that my father chose to go into the chicken business. His business choice probably had more to do with the fact that Pakistan was a new nation, not even twenty years old, and there were many opportunities in building the agricultural infrastructure of the country, but I think it’s romantic that he chose chickens.

Here’s a photo of my parents as a young married couple. 
I think it was taken when they were living in the UK.

In any case, he purchased a subsidiary of Arbor Acres Inc., which was headquartered in Glastonbury, Connecticut and went on to become a very successful businessman until he became ill and passed away in the late 1980s. Now the family company is basically defunct, although  my eldest brother continues to benefit financially from my parents estate. He’s the only one among us who got anything from their estate, refusing to share it with his siblings, but that’s another story.

Here’s my father with Pakistani President Ayub Khan, touring the Arbor Acres farms. Ayub Khan was the first military ruler of Pakistan, from 1958-1969. 

In its heyday, the motto for Arbor Acres  was “Chicks is Our Business.” I wonder if I took this very literally on  some kind of subconsious level. For one thing  there is this issue that I am a lesbian, and now I work in women’s philanthropy. Chicks is my business too.

I Hate Milk

/ Surina Khan / Leave a comment

Drinking milk makes me gag. I’m not lactose intolerant or anything since I love cheese and all things cream-based, especially soups and sauces, but for some reason, I hate milk. Maybe because I was made to drink it as a small child?

There’s a story in my family that my mother was the first person in Pakistan to pasteurize milk. She and my father had six children, so I gather a lot of milk was required for us. I think the milk in Pakistan in the 60s may not have been that good, so my mother started a dairy farm. I’ve never actually fact-checked this. I mean, I do remember the dairy farm, I just don’t know about the first-person-to-pasteurize-milk part. But I believe it to be true. My mother was smart, assertive, and if she wanted something, she made it happen.

By the time she had me, her sixth child, she had perfected the art of parenting. Instead of doing things for me, like making breakfast, or packing a lunch for school, or helping me with my homework, or telling me to go to bed at a reasonable hour, she had me doing things for her.

For example, it was my job every morning to bring her coffee in bed.  Or I’d have to search the house for her packet of Kent cigarettes when she asked me to. And sometimes I would get the dreaded task of rubbing her feet. I also hate feet. Since I was mostly left to my own devices when I was not fetching something for my mother, no one really noticed that I had stopped drinking milk.

When I was eight years old, by now living in Connecticut, I became concerned that I was not getting enough calcium. So I would go down to the kitchen, alone, and after making my mother her cup of coffee and bringing it to her in bed, I would make myself drink a cup of milk. No one made me do this, and no one was ever in the kitchen to watch me drink it since they were usually lounging around in bed while I got myself ready for school. I would shut my eyes, hold my nose and drink it as fast as I could, trying not to gag. I think this lasted about a week. Now I just take a calcium pill and avoid milk altogether.