Nathiagali

Zero Balance

/ Surina Khan / 4 Comments

I was shellacking pine cones. “What in the world are you doing?” my mother asked me, looking a bit bewildered. She was sick again with the cancer. I was visiting her in Pakistan and we were staying at Mimo’s house.

“I’m shellacking pine cones from Nathiagali,” I responded. “It’s probably the only piece of Nathiagali I’ll ever get to keep.”

I had picked up the pine cones the previous weekend when Puchi, her boys, Akber and Abbas, and I went up to the Nathiagali house for a few days.

“What are you doing?” I asked the boys as they played in the garden.

“We’re collecting pine cones,” they said in unison.

“Well that sounds like a good idea,” I said. “I’m going to collect some pine cones too.”

Because of the debt that my father left behind when he died, Baba convinced Ami to put the Nathiagali house in his wife’s name when she was in the last stages of her cancer diagnosis,  after the final payment on the house was made.

“I have the power of attorney on the house,” my mother told me. “I’ll make sure it reverts back to all you kids.” She died before that happened and since then Baba has insisted that the house belongs to his wife.

The Nathiagali house, named Miranjani House because it looks onto Miranjani Mountain in the foothills of the Himalayas, was my favorite house. An old, rustic place that my parents purchased in the 1960s from a man named Sheikh Iqbal. He was a tender old man who indulged me when I was a young girl with laddu’s, my favorite sweet. The final payment on the house was made in the early 1990s, after my father’s death.

After Aba died, the rest of us asked for financial statements for the real estate holdings and the companies. In September of 1993 Baba sent me, and I presume the others, financial statements for 1993.

The curious thing about these financial statements is that the revenue coming in and the expenses going out balance out exactly. In the income and expenditure statement for 1993 Rs. 2,823,584 is listed as revenue. And exactly Rs. 2,823,584 is listed in expenses. I’m not a trained financial analyst, though I have run a small business and I do oversee the programmatic budget for the Women’s Foundation of California so I know a thing or two about financial statements.

You don’t have to be a financial analyst to figure out that revenue coming in does not exactly match expenses going out. Anyone who has a bank account can tell you that. Or if you’ve managed a household budget you can probably attest to the fact that you don’t spend exactly what you bring home to the penny or paisa. There’s usually money left over, or you might overspend in any given month. But things don’t balance out exactly. This was my first indication that Baba was cooking the books.

Sweeping the Clouds

/ Surina Khan / 2 Comments

My father asked me to get each of us a broom. “Look,” he said in Urdu pointing to the sky. “The clouds are coming in.”

We were in Nathiagali, probably in 1970 or 1971 when I was about three or four years old. My parents had purchased the Nathiagali house in the 1960s as a summer home. Nathiagali is a mountain resort town, one of many hill stations in the foothills of the Himalayas. Our house, named Miranjani House because it looks out on Miranjani Mountain, was among my favorite places in the world.

Miranjani Mountain, standing at almost 10,000 feet is the highest peak in the Abbottabad District of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Our house was a large rustic cabin with a blue tin roof, wood floors and a square fireplace in the living room, which we would all gather around in the evenings. The bedrooms were full of bunk beds, and in the summer the house was teeming with kids. The dining room table was long and easily sat thirty or forty people.

Mimo reading in the livingroom of the Nathiagali house. The square fireplace is in the background on the right.

In the summer when the house would be full of kids, my father craved peace and quiet. We would tumble out of bed in search of breakfast which would usually be laid out on the kids dining table. “Breakfast is up there this morning,” my father said on more than one occasion, pointing to Miranjani Mountain. Picnic baskets were packed in advance and we kids would go off hiking up the mountain munching on fruit and snacks until we got to the top, a beautiful open meadow where we would have our picnic.

Miranjani Mountain

When they purchased the house, my mother did not like the layout. “The kitchen had the best views,” she would say. So she hired a carpenter, and the two of them went about remodeling the house so that the living room had the view of Miranjani Mountain. “Architects always marvel,” my mother would say, “that the house is standing on three beams.”

Miranjani House

The house was about seven or eight thousand feet high. We would be short of breath when we first arrived, needing to adjust to the altitude. We would sit in the garden looking out on the forests of cedar and pine trees. In July and August the fog would roll in. “Come,” my father would beckon me. “It’s time to sweep the clouds out of the house.” We would each take our broom and sweep at the fog that would make its way into the house. It was our own little magical ritual.

Sweeping the clouds in Nathiagali