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.

I have a watercolor of a Bloody Mary that used to hang in the bar of the Stoner house. It’s one of many items that Louis and Clara Stoner left behind when they vacated the house. A box of old family photos, a safe with hundreds of canceled checks. A cedar closet full of mink fur coats. An oil portrait of the Stoner’s granddaughter and her yellow Labrador Retriever posing on the front lawn.  My parents requested in the bond for deed that the oil painting remain with the house, but the other things the Stoner’s just left behind. They did ask for the mink fur coats, which I gather they left behind accidentally, but they didn’t seem to care about the other stuff. The Bloody Mary watercolor now hangs in our kitchen in Long Beach.

In the glass is a recipe for a Bloody Mary:

This popular drink is most refreshing as a “pick me up,” especially the morning after the night before. If you can find your way to the kitchen, here is how it’s done. One jigger vodka, 2 jiggers tomato juice, 1/3 jigger lemon juice, a dash of Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper. Shake with cracked ice. Sip it slowly…

It’s signed by “pati” in 1964.

I prefer my Bloody Mary with a little horseradish, a few dashes of hot sauce, a celery stalk and some olives. The best Bloody Mary I ever had was at El Rio in San Francisco. They top it off with a little Guinness. Yum.

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 46. It was the beginning of 1982 and I was in my first year of high school at the Ethel Walker School, an all-girls boarding school in Simsbury, Connecticut.

They found the cancer sort of by accident when she went to the hospital to have her gallbladder removed. Mimo was the one who told me. I think they were trying to keep the news from me. Maybe thinking I was too young.

It was a regular night around the Stoner house. I was home for the weekend from school. Dinner was being prepared and I was watching Mash reruns in the television room. Mimo came in and told me to set the table. Not an unusual request since this was one of my regular responsibilities. But something about her bossy attitude really rubbed me the wrong way and I said, “No.”

“What do you mean, no?” she said. “Go set the table.”

“I’m watching TV.”

“Ami has cancer. Go set the table.”

I was really taken aback by this news, but I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t know so I said, “I know that.” And then I went and set the table for dinner.

My mother was prone to the dramatic, and that night there was drama. She began to talk about how she was going to die and that my father would get remarried and we kids better watch out about the new wife and make sure she didn’t take everything. It was bad. My father sat there stoically while Ami accused him of remarrying some woman who did not exist.

For the first few weeks she continued with the “I’m dying and I can’t get up” kind of talk. We all tried to be understanding. After all, she did have cancer.

We also begged her to stop smoking and she almost agreed, but then her doctor said, “As much as I want you to stop smoking too, this probably isn’t the best time to do it.” He said her body was already under so much stress that quitting smoking would be too major of a change and would be too much for her to handle. Wow, really? Do they still tell cancer patients not to quit smoking?

She went through chemotherapy and radiation and responded quite well. Puchi was with her most of this time since I think the rest of us were away at college, or in my case boarding school. And my father, probably tired of being accused of getting remarried, decided he better go to Pakistan and look after the chickens.

Eventually she changed her attitude and decided, “This cancer is not going to get me, not yet anyway. I’ll beat it.” And things started looking up. She ended her treatment six months early, and to celebrate, she took my sisters and me to Barbados.

She was in remission for many years. When the cancer came back, she was in her late fifties and living in Pakistan again. I think it was around 1994 and I was about 27. We had sold the Stoner Drive house in 1989 and I was living with some friends in the West End of Hartford on Fern Street. My mother and I had recently reconciled after two years of not talking to each other. She had “disowned” me because I came out as a lesbian. She had a really hard time with the lesbian stuff, but that’s another, much longer, story.

We were speaking on the phone, one of our regular calls. I asked her if she needed anything from the US. Ami had recently had a mastectomy which she refused to do the first time around. “Well,” she said. “I’m having a hard time finding a prosthetic bra here, so if you could send one of those that would be good. And a wig. I’m losing my hair.”

Trying to make her feel hopeful, I responded.  “I’ll send the wig, but I think you would look much more glamorous in one of those head wraps Elizabeth Taylor wears. I’ll send both. And the prosthetic bra, well, those are easy to find here. You know there are a lot of breast cancer awareness efforts and the government is putting more resources into breast cancer research so I’m sure it will be easy enough to find a prosthetic bra.”

And her response? “I know you’re a lesbian, but don’t become a feminist on me now.” First of all, the fact that she thought I might not already be a feminist was a bit of a surprise, but even more astonishing was  the fact that she, a woman with cancer, and only one breast, was frowning upon the “feminist” position that more money for breast cancer research is a good thing. Wow.