I spent several weeks in the hospital after my horseback riding accident, and when I was finally able to come home, my mother thought it would be a good idea to put my bed in the drawing room (known to most people as the formal living room). I protested this idea, but she didn’t think I could manage the stairs.

I came home in a plaster cast that made me look rather buxom. It seemed to function as a bustier in the way it pushed my breasts up closer to my chin. The cast started below my waist and went all the way up to my chest. I tried my best to hide my now voluminous bosom with various shawls, which would have been much easier to do in the privacy of my own bedroom. But no, there I was in the middle of the drawing room, propped up with several pillows, to greet all the guests who would invariably stop by for lunch or afternoon tea.

We lived in a four-bedroom A-frame house on Street No. 1 in F 6/3 in Islamabad. The house was modernist but the interior decorations were antique reproductions. My mother had all the furniture custom made out of walnut wood in a style that resembled the Louis VI period.

We went to F. Shumacher and Co. in Manhattan to purchase fabrics in ornate classic styles and designs for the Islamabad house, which we moved into in 1979. We bought  fine silks, printed fabrics and European-influenced wovens for the draperies and the upholstery.

My single bed was placed, quite literally, in the center of the drawing room in the middle of all the household activity. The tea trolley would be rolled out at four o’clock every day, and more often than not people would drop by for afternoon tea. I did my best to smile gracefully and respond to questions and observations about my injury.

“Darling, you look positively sickly,” some Aunty would say. “Quite like an invalid, really.” Or, “My, that cast makes you look rather robust.” This last comment made me decline the offers of cakes and cookies from the tea trolley and I lost about fifteen pounds or so. Normally, I would have been happy to drop a few pounds, but the cast became loose and didn’t offer much in the way of support for my cracked vertebrae and I had to be fitted for a new cast.

I hadn’t spent that much time in Pakistan, so I didn’t know most of the people who dropped by. I found this picture as I was going through old family photos. It reminded me of the kinds of ladies who would drop by for tea.

I have no idea who they are, and I don’t know if they actually dropped by for tea when I was convalescing, but they may have. And if they did, I’m sure I didn’t know who they were back then either.

Ami must have told Aba that I didn’t think he had a job (See Hold the Phone, posted on January 27, 2010). Shortly after our conversation, Puchi and I became Aba’s personal secretaries, and we became painfully aware of the details of the poultry breeding business. The daily fluctuations in the price per chick, for instance, or the production levels for each of the hatcheries.

Aba had an office set up in the basement with two desks and a typewriter. Why the basement when there were 23 rooms in the main house, I have yet to figure out. Maybe because he did not really spend much time in the office, his secretarial staff did. He would say, “Take dictation, I have a letter I need typed.” And I’d have to be sure to type it on a carbon copy and then file the copy.

The secretarial task I dreaded most was being asked to “get such and such person on the phone.” I was basically a shy kid, so the typing I could handle since it was a solitary task, but calling someone on the phone was nerve-racking. For one thing, my nickname in the family is Foo. So when I would place a phone call, I’d have to identify myself. “Hello, may I speak to such and such person?”

“Who’s calling?”

“This is Foo, calling for my father.” The response would almost always be, “Who?”

“Foo.”

“Sue? Sue who?” And it would go on and on like this.

Often he’d hand me a piece of paper with his poor penmanship, which I struggled to read, and would say, “Send this message over the Telex machine.” We got Telex machines for instant communication between Connecticut and Pakistan in the late seventies. In the Stoner house the Telex machine was in the TV room, and in the Islamabad house it was under the staircase on the first floor. My father was always using the latest technology. The Telex is a communications system consisting of teletypewriters connected to a telephonic network to send and receive signals.

I don’t have a picture of our Telex machine, but I found a similar one on the internet.

A major advantage of the Telex is that the receipt of the message by the recipient could be confirmed with a high degree of certainty by the “answerback.” At the beginning of the message, we would transmit a WRU (Who aRe yoU) code, and the recipient machine would automatically initiate a response which was usually encoded in a rotating drum with pegs, much like a music box. The WRU code would also be sent at the end of the message, so a correct response would confirm that the connection had remained unbroken during the message transmission. This gave Telex a major advantage over less verifiable forms of communications such as telephone and fax. In order to send a Telex, we would have to prepare the message off-line, using a yellow paper tape. All common Telex machines incorporated a 5-hole paper-tape punch and reader. Once the paper tape had been prepared, the message could be transmitted quickly. Telex billing was always by connected duration, so minimizing the connected time saved us money. But, it was also possible to connect in “real time,” where I could type something standing at the Telex machine in Connecticut and the person standing in front of the Telex machine in the Islamabad house would immediately see my message. Now we call this instant messaging.

This early secretarial training has served me well. I have good phone etiquette and initiating phone conversations became so much easier when I started using my given name, Surina, instead of Foo. This early training also taught me to be more assertive, self-confident, and outgoing. Now, I have no problem calling people on the phone. And my typing skills have improved a little, too. I type faster now, but still with two fingers like I did back then. I never did learn the QWERTY way.