My mother and I were getting out of a cab in New Orleans. “Where are we?” she asked as we arrived at the campus of Tulane University, noticing the palm trees and the tropical heat. “Are we even in America anymore?” She was not pleased with my choice of Tulane for college.  I started to cry. “I’ll go back to Connecticut if you think this is a bad idea,” I offered.

“No, you’ve made your choice, now better see it through,” she said, trying to lift my spirits. She had wanted me to stay close to home and attend Trinity College in Hartford. When I received notice from Trinity, it stated I was on the wait list, and to please respond about whether or not I wanted to remain on it.

My parents were beginning to have financial troubles and attending Trinity would have meant I could live at home which would save quite a lot of money. But I wanted the full college experience, to be “away” from home. So, without telling my mother, I responded to Trinity that I needed to stay on the wait list for personal reasons, but did not really want to attend the school. The next letter that arrived from Trinity, to my relief,  informed me that I had not been accepted. So I accepted admission to Tulane, packed my things, and my mother and I went to New Orleans.

We attended the parent student orientation activities. She helped me set up the tiny dorm room I shared with another student. And then she pulled out the phone book.

“There must be some Pakistani families in New Orleans,” she said flipping to the K’s.

“I guess so.” I said, not realizing what she was doing.

“Here we are,” she said pointing to the name Khan. She picked up the phone and started dialing the number.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Do you even know these people?”

“Hello,” she said into the phone. “My name is Sunny Afzal Khan, and my daughter is starting school at Tulane University this month. Are you from Pakistan?” she asked. “It would be nice to have some of our people to look after her.”

I was beginning to shrink into a state of embarrassment, thinking to myself, I can’t believe she’s calling random people from the phone book.

“That sounds lovely,” she said. “One O’ Clock? Okay then. In front of the main entrance.” They invited us for lunch the next day.

“But we don’t even know these people.” I protested.

“They’re from Pakistan,” my mother responded confidently. “You’re so far from home. It will be nice for you to have some of our people to look after you.” I was audibly groaning by this point.

The next day, a very nice middle-aged couple picked us up and took us to their home for lunch. He was a doctor and she was a housewife. The lunch was perfectly pleasant, as were they, but this is not what I had in mind for college.

“It’s important for our people to stick together,” my mother said to the doctor and his wife. “You’ll look after her wont you?”

They called me often after that, respecting my mother’s wishes, and inviting me over for dinner or lunch. I never returned the calls. I was too busy with college life to visit with my “people.”

In the end, it turned out my mother was right. Tulane was a not a good choice for me, for a number of reasons, and  I only stayed there one year. 

I sent Puchi a message on Facebook the other day. The message was titled “Memories,” and in it I wrote that I had been reading some of my old diaries. “Do you remember Johnny and Ronnie Afridi?” I asked her.

“You kept diaries?” she responded. “No wonder you remember all this stuff.” I think I made her nervous, because a few minutes later she wrote again, “I can’t believe you kept diaries all those years.”

The diary I was reading was written in late 1986 and early 1987 when I was back in Pakistan for an extended visit. Puchi and I used to go out to parties quite a lot back then, and I was struck by how all the same people, usually married, were carrying on affairs with each other.

At 19, I found myself hanging around a lot of middle-aged people. They would ask me what I did. “Are you a travel agent?” I gather they said this, because they considered it a respectable career for a young woman.

So I started answering, “No, I’m a writer.” And I began a novella (in my diary) titled the “The Young and the Eligible,” mostly about the dramas that were  unfolding all around me in the Islamabad social circles we were frequenting. For example, Johnny’s wife left him for Ronnie, his identical twin brother. Johnny shifted his affections to Puchi. Tina was taken by Johnny. Puchi had a thing for a man we called Beau. Beau was in love with a Sri Lankan woman.  And then there were a whole lot of Frenchmen who may have been gays.

The one story that may be in an earlier  diary that I would like to tell is when Puchi met David Bowie. I asked her, “Can I tell your David Bowie story? If so, please dilate on some details. I know you were fourteen, because I have my diaries.” But it is her story, so I feel I need permission to tell the full version.  She said she is thinking about it and will get back to me. I have not heard from her since.

I have an irrational fear of fish. I like eating fish, I just don’t like swimming with them. This means I am most comfortable in a swimming pool, and most uncomfortable in any kind of water that is home to living creatures. Ponds and lakes are the worst in my opinion, followed by rivers and oceans.

I like to swim, and I like the ocean but swimming in the ocean can stress me out. For years I tried to hide this fact from most people. “Let’s go swimming!” my friends would say running into the ocean.

“I’m right behind you!” I’d yell. “I just want to get a little more sun.” This would buy me some time and if I was lucky, they’d be back before I would have to go in.  Otherwise, I would reluctantly go into the ocean, but I was always twitching and turning. “Was that a fish that just brushed up against my leg?”

With my family, I was more transparent about my fear of swimming in the ocean. We would often take our winter holidays near the beach. In early December of 1983 I wrote my father a letter from boarding school in Connecticut. He was in Pakistan. “I think we’re going to Panama for Christmas break. I’m not too keen on it, but it will be okay.”

One of our cousins was living in Panama City with her husband and children, and my mother arranged a trip for us to visit them and other parts of Panama over the winter holiday. Puchi, Mimo, and I packed our bathing suits and beachwear and left for Panama with our mother in late December. Our friends Peter and Joel joined us for parts of the trip.

Earlier that year, in August of 1983,  Manuel Noriega had assumed power of Panama,  promoting himself to General and becoming the military dictator until 1989 when the US invaded Panama, removed him from power, and tried him for drug trafficking, racketeering, and money-laundering.

While he was in power, Noriega was on the CIA payroll, and for much of the 1980s, he extended new rights to the US. Despite the canal treaties, he allowed the US government to set up listening posts in Panama which allowed the US to monitor sensitive communications in all of Central America and beyond. Noriega also aided the US-backed guerrillas in Nicaragua by acting as a conduit for US money, and according to some accounts, weapons. Noriega had been on the CIA’s payroll off and on since the 1950s, but towards the late 1980s, the US viewed him as a double agent believing that he was providing information not only to the US and its allies Taiwan and Israel, but also to communist Cuba.

The 1988 Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations concluded that “the saga of Panama’s General Manuel Antonio Noriega represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures for the United States. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, Noriega was able to manipulate US policy toward his country, while skillfully accumulating near-absolute power in Panama. It is clear that each US government agency which had a relationship with Noriega turned a blind eye to his corruption and drug dealing, even as he was emerging as a key player on behalf of the Medellin Cartel.”

“Didn’t you say one of your classmates lives in Panama City?” my mother said after we arrived. “Ring her up.” My mother loved meeting new people and she’d rather have a local perspective than a tourist one. I didn’t want to impose on my friend’s winter holiday, but it was impossible to say no to my mother, so I reluctantly called my friend.

As it turned out, my friend’s mother was Noriega’s personal secretary and my cousin’s husband was a branch officer for BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, providing personal banking services for Noriega. He later became embroiled in the BCCI scandal and would later be convicted for the money-laundering services he provided for Noriega. I wasn’t aware of the nuances of these political connections back then, I just remember we had a pretty good vacation, later realizing these ties to Noriega probably were partly the reason for the decadence we experienced.

For instance, in passing, we mentioned we might like to visit the San Blas Islands, an archipelago of 365 islands off the north coast of the Isthmus, the narrow strip of land that lies between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean linking North and South America, east of the Panama Canal. The next thing we knew, a private plane was arranged. When we got to the small airport, there were seven of us and only six seats on the plane. Within moments, a new plane that could accommodate our party of seven arrived on the tarmac.

The San Blas islands were beautiful. For lunch we ordered fish, and the restaurant staff asked us to select one to our liking, pointing to a netted part of the sea where the fish identified for the restaurant kitchen were swimming in isolation. I was glad not to be swimming with the fish, especially since I was about to eat one of them.

 

We also went to Taboga, a small beach resort, as well as the Panama Canal,  and after Joel and Peter left, the four of us went to Conta Dora. My friend’s mother said they would be visiting the same resort and invited us to lunch. We arrived at the hotel restaurant and thought we must have the wrong day or the wrong restaurant. “The restaurant is reserved for a private party,” the Maitre D’ informed us. There was one long, elaborate, U-shaped table set up in the middle of the outdoor veranda.

“We must have the days mixed up,” one of us said. “There must be some important people coming for this luncheon,” we predicted. It turned out, we were the guests of honor.  My friend’s mother had arranged the luncheon for us.

 

When we arrived at the resort a day or two earlier, I went to the room I shared with my mother, changed into my bathing suit, and announced that I was going to be spending the rest of  the day by the pool.

“Have you seen the water?” one of my sister’s said. “It’s beautiful. Clear and blue. Why would you want to go to the pool?”

“She doesn’t like to swim with the fish,” my mother reminded them.