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.

 

Here’s a photo of Clare that I found in my box of old photos, also taken in 1979. She is the one with the camera on the right, and my mother is on the left. Muna is draped in the chaador. I’m not sure where this photo was taken, but I think it was in the Northern areas of Pakistan on a trip they took to the Yasin Valley, a high mountain valley in the Hindu Kush mountains in the northwest region of Gilgit. Mimo, Puchi and I stayed back in Islamabad because we had to go to school.

On the wall in our dining room, I have a photo that Clare took on that trip to Pakistan in 1979. She took the photo from our house in Abbottabad. The mud huts in the photo were in the valley below our house. She signed this photo and gave it to my parents and I have lovingly cared for it for many years. I had to re-frame it a few years ago because the frame started falling apart, but the photo has remained clear and beautiful. Not that you would know that from looking at the photo below. Something is wrong with our scanner.

I tried to take a photo with my iPhone, but it is not much better. You can sort of make out Clare’s signature on the bottom right.

When I emailed Clare the other day I wrote, “I am 42 years old now.” Almost as old as she would have been when I first met her.

I can’t remember exactly when these passport photos were taken, but probably shortly before we left Pakistan in November 1972. Here I am, four years old. Please notice the fly sitting on my headband. Couldn’t they have taken one more photo, or did they intentionally choose the one with the fly on my head?

Here’s Puchi, or Chanel No. 5. She changed the spelling of her nickname from Pouchi to Puchi many years ago. I think she got her nickname when she was the youngest child and my mother affectionately called her Puchra which I think means tail since she was on the tail end of the kids. As she got older she became Pouchi, now Puchi.  She’s four years older than me, born in August 1963 so she would have been nine years old when this photo was taken. Puchi and I were named by my mother. I think the rest of my siblings were named by my grandmother, my father’s mother. I was always grateful that my mother named us since our names seemed a bit more contemporary than those chosen for my other siblings. All of us share the same middle name, Afzal, to signify that we are our father’s children, a common practice in Pakistan.

And here’s Mimo, or Fazilet. Also known as Fizz or Fizzy, or Fizzy O’Flynn. She changed the spelling of her nickname from Memo to Mimo some years back. I think Mimo came from Mimra, probably some word of affection my mother made up when Mimo was the youngest child. Mimra turned into Memo, now Mimo (pronounced Meemo). She was born in October 1961 so she would have been 11 years old when this photo was taken.

Here’s Tito. His given name is Asad and he was born in August 1960. I have no idea  how he got his nickname. Although he was a bit of a sickly child, he went on to be a great athlete and had a successful career as an officer in the US Marine Corp, carrying on the military lineage.

Here’s Muna. My grandmother  named her Gulfiza which may be reason enough for the nickname. She was born in November 1958. Bookish from the start. And can we say eyebrow wax? I do like her outfit and the peace sign necklace.

And finally, Baba. He was named Samad, and his American friends shortened it to Sam when they had a hard time pronouncing it. He is the first born child which probably explains his nickname, Baba, which is a name usually reserved for elders, not necessarily first-born eldest children, but it stuck. Baba was a  new year’s baby born on January 1, 1956. He’s the greedy one among us, refusing to divide my parents’ estate after they died. (Note to Baba: If you are reading this, shame on you). None of us siblings is close to him anymore.

Shortly after we moved into the Stoner Drive house, I asked my mother why Aba (a version of “Dad” in Urdu) did not have a job.

“You think your father does not work?” my mother asked, lounging on a sofa in the Breakfast Room while motioning for me to pass her the packet of Kent cigarettes which were slightly out of her reach.

“All my friends’ fathers go to work every morning. To an office. And Aba doesn’t. I think he should get a job,” I said with disdain as I handed her the cigarettes. Too young to understand that the lifestyle to which I was becoming accustomed was thanks to my father’s work.

My father was blacklisted from Pakistan and was unable to travel back for a few years after we moved to Connecticut. His business was still in Pakistan and he was running it from our home in Connecticut. Nowadays we call this “working remotely,” but back then we didn’t have the kinds of technologies that make working at home seamless like email, instant messaging, mobile phones, Skype, or even answering machines for that matter.

We did have fancy phones in the Stoner house, though. They were office  phones, clunky by today’s standards but state of the art for 1974. They had lots of buttons that would light up and flash when the phone would ring or if you put someone on hold.

The phones also functioned as a sort of intercom system. Let’s say you were in the kitchen and picked up the phone when it rang, and the person on the other end asked for my sister Muna. There was a good chance Muna would be lazing around somewhere with her nose in a book. Your first guess might be that she was in the Sun Room, so you’d press the button marked Sun Room and say, “Muna, you have a call on line 1” without ever having to leave the kitchen. Since you wouldn’t have to go running all around the house trying to locate people, this saved quite a bit of time.

I always thought the fancy phones looked out of place since they were very clearly office phones, but the advanced intercom technology was worth it. As was the hold button which I noticed other people did not have in their homes. I know my father liked these phones as well since he seemed to use them a lot. Often at odd hours of the day and night. I later came to understand that this was because of the time difference between Pakistan and Connecticut.

At the time, it did not occur to me that talking on the phone was work. But now, I get it. I am in phone meetings or conference calls most of the day, often when I am working from home.

Is that a call coming in? Please hold.

I had quite a lot of chores to do when I was growing up. When we moved from 17 Wiltshire Lane to 112 Stoner Drive, my responsibilities grew in proportion to the size of the new house, which was huge.

Prior to this I was expected to fetch things for my mother, as well as my older brothers and sisters since I was the youngest, and my family likes the hierarchy structure. These requests were usually manageable because the Wiltshire Lane House was not that big– downstairs it had a living room, dining room, small family room and kitchen and upstairs we had three bedrooms, or four if you count the large closet that I think Mimo slept in. So when someone asked me to fetch them a glass of water or empty an ashtray, or answer the phone, or set the table for dinner, I could usually fulfill the request in good time.

In 1974 my parents sold the Dumlotti farm outside of Karachi, and the sale allowed them to purchase a larger home in Connecticut for the eight of us.

I remember them saying to us kids, “We can live in a nice house, bigger than Wiltshire Lane and have more money to spend, or we can live in a really big house with a swimming pool and not have that much money to spend. Which do you prefer?”

I think we said we needed to see the houses before we could advise them. So they took us to 112 Stoner Drive. We drove up a hill and pulled into a long driveway and slowly emerged a beautiful English Tudor home. It had a rose garden, a swimming pool, a “play house” which we called the Little House, a three room cabin with a small kitchen and a bathroom, that I’m sure many people would be glad to actually live in. There was a green house, and a carriage house which had eight garages and a 3-bedroom apartment. The grounds were also big, with large trees and a small stream in the back yard. We loved it. And we quickly advised my parents to purchase it, which they did.

The house had 11 bedrooms, more than one for each of us and then some. And another 12 rooms downstairs which included a kitchen and pantry, each of which are larger than some apartments I have since lived in. It had a breakfast room with hand-painted wallpaper, a formal living room and dining room, a billiard room, which we came to call the big room, because, well, it was big. The house had a sun room, a library, a television room, a laundry room and three staircases not counting the ones to the full attic and basement. It also had an elevator. I was particularly excited at the prospect of having a library which I assumed meant that we would all have to check books out, so I asked my parents if I could be the librarian.

The house was known as the Stoner mansion because the Stoner family built it. Later I came to understand the many meanings associated with the Stoner mansion. But more on that later.

112 Stoner Drive was fabulous and for many years it was a bustling place. We really enjoyed it, but the chores began to take on a life of their own.

For instance, the coffee that I had to bring my mother in bed every morning was a bit of a challenge. For one thing, she preferred it in a tea cup and saucer and it was quite a distance from the kitchen, which was on one end of the house, and my parents bedroom was on the opposite end of the house up a flight of stairs. Sometimes this trip could take up to five or more minutes. And I had to make sure not to spill the coffee from the dainty tea cup that would teeter dangerously on the saucer. I think my mother thought mugs were clunky and garrish. I worried that the coffee might get cold in the teacup by the time I got to my parents room, but my mother never complained about that.

It was also my job to water all the plants. We had many plants. My mother had a green thumb and a green house. One day I decided to count the plants and I counted more than one hundred, and that was just inside the house. So this task would take me a while. Or I’d have to empty all the trash bins in the house, one in each room and bathroom. I think that’s about thirty or so trash bins.

My sister Puchi and I also usually had to set and clear the table after dinner which we usually ate in the formal dining room. And then we’d have to load (and/or unload) the dishwashers, one in the pantry, and one in the kitchen. This early childhood training in all things entertaining has served me well. I’ve learned to be very particular (some would say fussy) about things like serving dishes and matching napkins and other things related to hosting a good party.

I still have an article from the local paper which ran a story about my family purchasing the house. “One of West Hartford’s largest houses–the 21 room Stoner Mansion at 112 Stoner Drive–rings once again with the sounds of an active family and will soon be the scene of international parties.” All true, but who do you think had to fetch drinks for the international jet set? I mean I didn’t actually start mixing cocktails until much later, but I did have to take drink orders and other such things that came with entertaining on a large scale. My mother is quoted in the paper, “This house embodies the way I like to live.” Well, if that isn’t the truth.

The younger you were in my family, the more you had to do. Once my mother asked me to pour a glass of lemonade and go outside to the driveway and wait for my brother Tito who was out for a run. Somehow, I knew to draw the line here. First of all, the image of standing out in the driveway with a glass of lemonade, waiting for my brother to return from a run, was too much for even me who was used to doing all kinds of things for people. For one thing, how did we know when he would return? Was he on a  two-mile run or an eight-mile run?  So I said simply, “No. He can get his own lemonade.”