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.

 

 

My mother and I were in my parent’s bedroom surveying her closet. She was selecting a sari to wear to Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981.

“Will you take one of those tours of the White House?” I asked.

“I’ll only go to the White House if I’m invited,” she replied. “I’m not going on any public tours,” she said haughtily, her nose up in the air.

She selected a red and gold brocade sari, a pair of black evening shoes, and a matching hand bag. “Fold the sari nicely and put it in the suitcase with the other things,” she directed me.

My parents voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, the first US presidential election in which they could vote. They had been naturalized as US citizens the year before in 1979, the same year as the Iranian Revolution which deposed the Shah. Later that same year, 53 Americans were taken hostage for 444 days, from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, symbolically released the same day Reagan was inaugurated into office.

When the hostages were taken, Puchi and I were living in Pakistan, attending the International School of Islamabad. The superintendent of our school, a man by the name of William Keough, had previously been the superintendent of the American School in Tehran. After the Iranian Revolution, he was posted to the International School in Islamabad. That November, Mr. Keough returned to Tehran to finish up business and pack the last of his things, and was taken hostage with the other Americans on November 4.

Anti-Americanism was spreading through Central and South Asia, and the American embassy in Islamabad was also attacked later that November, the same day that Puchi and I were to fly to Karachi on our way to Connecticut for the Thanksgiving holiday. The previous month, in October, we received a telex, to my great joy, “You are cordially invited to 112 Stoner Drive for Thanksgiving Dinner.” I thought my parents were responding to the misery I often expressed about having to live in Pakistan during my junior high school years, but in actuality, our names had come up for US citizenship and we returned to Connecticut for the Naturalization Oath Ceremony just as the Americans were being evacuated from Pakistan.

Before Reagan won the Republican presidential primary, my mother was keen on George H. W. Bush. She supported the elder Bush in the primaries and even hosted a fundraiser for him at our home in Connecticut. She was active in the West Hartford Republican Women’s Club.

I wasn’t home the day George Bush came over for the fundraiser, but I remember a photo of Mimo, dressed in a blue shalwar kameez, shaking his hand.

My mother never received a formal invitation to the White House, but I know she enjoyed the inauguration.

Eight years later in 1988, I cast my ballot for George H. W. Bush in the first presidential election in which I could vote. My family was Republican and I was comfortably following in their foot steps. I was towing the party line. As I became more politicized in later years, I changed my party affiliation, but I always like to tell people that I voted for Bush in 1988. It just goes to show you, a person really can change.

Typically there are seven days and nights of functions involving custom-made ornate outfits, hair and make-up, jewelry, and a myriad of other details including outdoor tents, catering  and seating for hundreds of guests as well as several gifts for the new bride including multiple sets of jewels. There’s the Mehndi, which takes place the day before the actual wedding, a ceremony of mostly women who apply Mehndi, or Henna as it is known in the West, to the bride’s hands and feet, and then all the ladies sing, dance, and bless the bride as they hop around her.

There’s also usually a musical evening, and for Baba’s wedding this included a private concert by the Sabri Brothers, a well-known musical group trained  in Qawwali and North Indian classical music. There’s the Nikah, a small private ceremony for the bride and groom to sign their marriage contract. And then the actual wedding celebration which is typically hosted by the bride’s family. On the final night of festivities is the Walima, or reception for the bride and groom as their first full public event together.

 

At the time, the Pakistani wedding custom was new to me. For the several years prior to the wedding, we had been mostly living in Connecticut. I was becoming increasingly Americanized and I thought these Pakistani wedding traditions were too elaborate. I think my parents may have thought so too. Towards the end of the week of festivities they did not look very festive.

This picture is among my favorite photos of my parents. They are both scowling in a way that is so authentic and unfiltered. It wasn’t the first time I had seen these expressions on their faces, nor was it the last. It’s clearly a look that got passed down to their children. Here I am trying it out early.