We left Pakistan under the cover of darkness in November 1972. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was in power and according to the family lore, and as it’s documented in my father’s obituary,  my parents had learned of a plot by Bhutto to arrest and torture my father.

So on relatively short notice, passports were arranged,visas were obtained, and with just a few belongings, we all piled into our mustard orange-colored Volkswagen van and drove over the border to Afghanistan. We spent about five days there, in Kabul, and then carried on to Iran.

I had my fifth birthday in Tehran. It seems strange to say now, but  in 1972, Tehran was my first exposure to what I came to associate with the West. It was the first time I saw an escalator. The first time I experienced toy stores abundant with a variety of things with which to play, and the first time I experienced square slices of  cheese that were made to fit perfectly on sliced bread, also a novelty.

From Tehran, we flew to Madrid, where my parents left us with their friends, Mehru Aunty and Rahim Uncle, while they carried on to the US to search for a house for us. Rahim Uncle was the Pakistani Ambassador to Spain and they were busy with their diplomatic duties and their own two children and yet generous and kind enough to look after the six of us. By now we ranged in age from five to seventeen.

In Madrid I had strawberry yogurt for the first time and the dreaded liverwurst sandwiches that were packed for us to take to the park every day. I also learned to tie my shoes.

In early 1973, after a short stay in London, we arrived in West Hartford, Connecticut where we moved into a small house on 17 Wiltshire Lane.

In an interview with the local paper published in August 1973, my mother said that she felt “a little boxed in,” referring to the Wiltshire Lane house. Understandable.  The chicken business had done well and my parents had left behind several residences in Pakistan.

There was Dumlotti, the seven acre farm (where the dairy farm was located) near Karachi. And Rocky Ridge, a beautiful stone house in Mansehra in the North West Frontier Province which had become our main residence in the late 1960s. And Miranjani House, a rustic mountain retreat in Nathiagali which is a hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas, and our apartment at the Sindh Club, a sort of residential country club in the middle of Karachi which I adored.

My parents chose Connecticut because they had friends in the area and also because the West Hartford public schools, at the time, were among the top five systems in the country.

Ours was not the classic immigrant experience. My parents did not want to leave Pakistan. If anything, they wanted to stay and help build the new nation. I always thought we had to leave because my father’s older brother, Air Marshal (ret’d) Asghar Khan had run for Prime Minister against Bhutto. But then wouldn’t his family have been the one to flee the country?

One of my cousins once told me she thought Bhutto was targeting my father because of his association with Arbor Acres. That, because it was an American company, Bhutto thought my father was connected to the CIA, which I’m certain he wasn’t.

We stayed in the Wiltshire Lane house only about a year. And then in 1974 came 112 Stoner Drive.

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.

When I was eighteen, I fell off a horse and fractured my vertebrae in three places. The accident happened in Islamabad when I was visiting my family, after my first year of college. A few years earlier, when I went to middle school in Islamabad, my older sister Puchi and I used to ride horses regularly.

A few years had passed since I had been on a horse and I was feeling, well, not so confident in my  riding abilities. So when Puchi asked me if I wanted to go horseback riding, I reluctantly said, “Um, okay.”

When we got to the riding club, my insecurity was confirmed. “I’m not feeling comfortable on this horse,” I told my sister. So I suggested we just ride around the ring on this first day back in the saddle. At first Puchi seemed agreeable, but after a few minutes of going round and round the ring, she must have gotten bored and off she went. And my horse followed. We rode along the outskirts of the city on riding trails. My horse galloping at various moments trying to keep up with Puchi and her beast. I cursed her the entire ride. And tried to hang on to my horse for dear life.

We were just ending our ride, at a slow trot, about fifty or so yards away from the Club, when I lost my balance. In that second, I made the decision to let go and fall. I sort of remember thinking, lots of people fall off a horse at some point. It will be okay.

And thud. I hadn’t noticed that we were crossing over pavement and I hit the concrete with force. Screaming, all the way down.

After I fell,  Puchi got off her horse and walked over to where I was lying flat on my back on the concrete walkway. “Oh, get up,” she said, sounding a bit annoyed with me.

But I couldn’t. Eventually, I mustered the strength to roll over and pick myself up slowly, all the while in excruciating pain. I somehow managed to put myself in the backseat of a Suzuki that was smaller than the Chevrolet Chevette that we had at my parents house in Connecticut. I’m not really sure an ambulance was even an option let alone a simple call to 911. We were in Pakistan.

We drove to the hospital. I managed to get out of the car and made my way inside after climbing up a steep flight of steps, holding my lower back with my hand and staggering up slowly. Having lived in the US for most of my life, with the exception of junior highschool and these somewhat infrequent visits, I was having a hard time understanding why a hospital would have a flight of steps at its entrance. It was 1986, surely the Pakistani medical community had heard of handicap access ramps?

Then came the x-rays. I had to lift myself onto the x-ray table and while I was lying there, I noticed that the machine had wheels which were tied up. That was about when the medical staff asked me to move over a half of an inch. I think of myself as a generally polite person, but in that moment, I lost it. “Move over a half an inch? You want me to move over a half an inch? Do you know how difficult that is for me? Why don’t you untie the wheels and move the x-ray machine a half an inch. That’s why it has wheels.” All of this was said in English, because my Urdu was not very good. Certainly not good enough to express this kind of frustration. 

They ignored me. Then came the stretcher to take me up to my hospital room. It was about an inch higher than the x-ray table so they asked me if I could please get up on the stretcher. ” You mean, it’s not collapsible?” I cried, incredulous. “Stretchers are meant to be collapsible. That’s the whole point!” They continued to ignore me.

The hospital room was another disaster, as far as I was concerned. For starters, the room was carpeted. Sure it made for a cozier space, “But what about the germs? How can you keep this room sterile if it’s carpeted?” I asked the nurse. She smiled at me, not answering my question. Then she left the room.

That was when I saw a wasp buzzing around my room. I have an irrational fear of wasps, so I started desperately looking for the call button and realized it was behind my head on the wall. I couldn’t reach it. Another flaw. I covered myself in the bed sheet from head to toe to protect myself from the wasp. Fuming. X-ray machines with wheels that don’t move. Carpeted rooms. A call button I can’t reach. And surely the wasp didn’t come from out of nowhere. Was there a wasps nest outside the window?

By now, my mother had been phoned and arrived around the same time the doctor came to pay me a visit. He confirmed that I had fractured my vertebrae and would need to be hospitalized for a few weeks until the swelling went down enough so that they could put on a cast.

“If all I can do is lie here, can’t I just go home and lie in bed?” By now I had complained so much, that finally, exasperated, the doctor, said, “Fine. Go.”

That’s when I realized I could not get out of bed, much less walk. And so I resigned myself to the fact that I would be bed-ridden in the carpeted hospital room. Full of germs. “And if I have to stay here, so do you,” I told Puchi. “You’re the one that made me get on that horse.”

The nurse brought a bed pan so they could take a urine sample. And then I heard some commotion in the hallway. “There’s blood in her urine,” the doctor said to my mother in a hushed tone. “She may be paralyzed for the rest of her life.”

And my mother’s response? “That’s no way to live. Put her down.” As if I were a horse. Fortunately Puchi overheard this conversation and said, “She has blood in her urine because she has her period.” You’d think the nurses would have communicated this when they saw the “sanitary napkin” I was forced to wear. My mother disapproved of tampons.

I have often wondered what was going through my mother’s mind when she said “put her down.” We had a good relationship. I was the studious, responsible, youngest child with good manners who had learned not to give her too much trouble. I’m sure she did not want me dead. Did she think she was sparing me the pain of living with a disability? Did she think they would actually carry out that kind of request?

Puchi spent the night with me, and every night that followed. Rather happily too. I think she was being considerate… and I think she was motivated by the handsome doctor who supplied her (and me) with valium. And that because my mother refused a stronger pain killer. “She’ll get addicted.”

My sister Mimo (pronounced Meemo) changed her name, too, when she got married. Mimo is her family nickname. Her given name (given to her by my grandmother) is Fazilet, and when we moved to the US from Pakistan in 1973 people had a hard time pronouncing it, so her friends shortened it to Fizz. Sometimes affectionately her friends would, and still do, call her Fizzy.

Mimo met Seamus sometime around 1999. And when they got married a few years later, she too said to me, “I’m thinking about changing my name. What do you think?”

Without hesitating, I said, “Do it.” Given my feminist politics, she seemed a bit surprised that I would advocate that she take on her new husband’s name. “Why? she asked skeptically.

“Because then your name will be Fizzy O’Flynn.” What a perfect name for that Pub she’s always wanted to open. And what other brown skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired South Asian woman do you know with a name like  Fizzy O’Flynn? Very original. One of a kind really. Gives new meaning to the term Black Irish too, I thought.

Even better, I soon realized, were her new initials. Fazilet Khan O’Flynn or FKOF. Perfect for such a bossy older sister.

Here it is. Surina Khan Blog. Took me long enough. It’s 2010 after all, and everyone and their great grandmother already has a blog. But, the year is off to a good start, and I’ve got plenty to blahg blahg blahg about.

I have a multi-issue concept, thanks to my name.

Surina Khan Cook. Surina Khan Travel. Surina Khan Entertain. Surina Khan Party. Surina Khan Design. Surina Khan Garden (sort of). Surina Khan Do A Lot of Things. Surina Khan Blog. You get the picture.

The idea started when my sister Puchi called me several years ago after her second wedding. “I’m thinking about changing my name,” she said. She had recently married Colonel Terry Cook. Puchi is her nickname. Her “real” name is Chanel. My mother gave her this name because she is the fifth child in our family. Chanel No. 5. Seriously, I’m not making this up.

Puchi is the glamorous one in the family. Which means she looks good, she’s smart even. But not really the domestic type.

So when she told me she was thinking of changing her name, I said, “to what?”

“Chanel Khan Cook.”

To which I replied, “But Chanel caaan’t cook.” She really cannot even boil an egg without burning the pan. And so was born this idea. Chanel Khant Cook, but I can, I mean I Khan. Surina Khan Cook, and travel, and lots of other things that I hope to post on this blog. And eventually, maybe I’ll send people the link so they can read it. Surina Khan Blog. Here goes.