A wonderful thing is happening with this blog. An old friend of my parents, Clare Smith found me on the internet the other day. Clare is a photographer and is completing a book. She was doing some research, trying to collect information for the photos she took when she and her husband, Burgess, traveled to Pakistan with my family in 1979.
When she emailed me the other day, she said she found this blog by searching for Arbor Acres. If I hadn’t written the Chicks is Our Business post, we may never have found each other.
Clare is now 82 years old, still living in Farmington, Connecticut, in a house that resembles the Stoner mansion. She reports that she is “still very alive and alert and healthy.” And apparently, quite skilled with the computer.
We’ve been corresponding by email for the last few days. Today, she emailed me this photo. I’ve never seen it before. It’s a photo of my sisters, Puchi (on the left) and Mimo (on the right) holding eggs and markers in their hands. In 1973 Clare and Burgess invited us to their home for Easter. I remember this day. It was my first Easter. Coloring hard boiled eggs seemed like a strange American custom to me, but it was fun.
In this photo, Puchi looks a lot like her oldest son, Akber. And Mimo looks bossy.
Here’s a photo of Clare that I found in my box of old photos, also taken in 1979. She is the one with the camera on the right, and my mother is on the left. Muna is draped in the chaador. I’m not sure where this photo was taken, but I think it was in the Northern areas of Pakistan on a trip they took to the Yasin Valley, a high mountain valley in the Hindu Kush mountains in the northwest region of Gilgit. Mimo, Puchi and I stayed back in Islamabad because we had to go to school.
Our scanner is ten years old and made a strange noise when Jenny scanned this photo. The colors came out a bit strange.
On the wall in our dining room, I have a photo that Clare took on that trip to Pakistan in 1979. She took the photo from our house in Abbottabad. The mud huts in the photo were in the valley below our house. She signed this photo and gave it to my parents and I have lovingly cared for it for many years. I had to re-frame it a few years ago because the frame started falling apart, but the photo has remained clear and beautiful. Not that you would know that from looking at the photo below. Something is wrong with our scanner.
I tried to take a photo with my iPhone, but it is not much better. You can sort of make out Clare’s signature on the bottom right.
When I emailed Clare the other day I wrote, “I am 42 years old now.” Almost as old as she would have been when I first met her.
Leaving Pakistan 
I am son of your father Cdr Afzal Khan’s friend Cdr Subzwari, Have seen the wonderful times of late 60s in Dumloti, regards Khusro Subzwari