true khanfessions

Identity Theft

/ Surina Khan / Leave a comment

Mimo was mad at me. “I can’t believe you stole my driver’s license!” she blurted when she found it amongst my things. She thought she had misplaced it which meant she had to go through the hassle of standing in line at DMV to replace her license.

“Sorry,” I offered. “I should have asked you.”

My own license had been suspended after some high school friends and I were shopping for alcohol. “Let’s try that liquor store,” one of my friends said as we were driving down Route 44 from Salisbury to West Hartford. One of us had a fake ID and we sent him in to make the purchase for our party weekend at my parent’s house while they were in Pakistan. He got a case of the nerves inside the store and returned with only a fifth of vodka. “That’s all you got?” the rest of us said in unison. “There’s six of us. That won’t even be enough for one drink a piece.”

So we stopped at the next liquor store and sent him back in with another friend for support. This time they came out with a case of beer and a large bottle of vodka. We put the unopened booze in the trunk of the car and continued on our way. We were on the road for less than a minute when we heard the sirens and noticed the flashing lights of the police car behind us.

I handed the officer my recently acquired license and registration. He asked to look in the trunk where he found our party supplies. We had to go to the police station where they detained our friends who had purchased the liquor, and allowed the rest of us to go.

I got a ticket for driving underage with alcohol in the car, albeit unopened and in the trunk where it was supposed to be. But I was sixteen and had no business driving with booze in the car.

Shortly after that I got a notice to appear in court. Puchi offered to come with me for moral support, and we agreed to keep this news from Ami and Aba who were still in Pakistan. The morning of the court date Puchi and I woke up and I said, “I’m scared. I don’t want to go to court.”

I had visions of a judge in a black robe. Admonishing me and judging me for my bad behavior. So we blew it off. Next came the notice that my license had been suspended for missing my court date and I was instructed to send it to DMV. “Driving in Connecticut is a privilege granted by the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles. And, like all privileges, it can be taken away―temporarily or permanently―if you prove yourself unable to follow the rules under which it was granted. Once your license is suspended or revoked, you can face serious criminal penalties if you continue to drive,” the notice said.

Mimo and I look a lot alike, so I thought I could use her license until my suspension was over. And since she was six years older than me, her license also had the added benefit of functioning as a fake ID should I ever want to purchase alcohol again. When she discovered I had stolen it from her she demanded it back.

“But you have another license,” I said. “You don’t need two. I’ll just use it until I get my license back.”

“No way,” Mimo said, not even considering it for a moment.

Mimo

When we went to Mimo’s graduation from Ithaca College a few months later, Mimo and Puchi wanted to stay on in Ithaca for the graduation parties, and asked me to drive Ami back to Connecticut. Ami hated driving.

“But I don’t have a license,” I said looking at Mimo. “I wouldn’t want to risk getting stopped without a license,” I added, giving her a bitchy smile. So there, I thought to myself.

“Give Foo your license,” my mother suggested to Mimo, not knowing that I had stolen it a few months earlier and had recently returned it to Mimo.

“You know she can use it for other things than driving,” Mimo said. This from the sister who took me to a bar on my sixteenth birthday. The hypocrisy was confusing me.

“If she wanted to do those other things, she wouldn’t need your license,” Ami said. “She looks old enough.”

Mimo reluctantly handed me her license. This time I got to keep it, thanks to Ami.

Escape to Wisconsin

/ Surina Khan / 1 Comment

I wasn’t keen on going back to Tulane after a short spring break at home in Connecticut. “I’m going to Beloit to visit Sly for a few days before I go back to school,” I told Mimo and Puchi who were managing the Connecticut house while my parents were in Pakistan.

I had only planned to stay in Wisconsin to visit my high school friend for a few days. But then I extended the visit one day at a time without really notifying anyone.

I called my roommate at school and told her I would be back soon. “In the meantime, if anyone calls for me, like my sisters, just tell them I’m in the library.” One day turned into the next, and into another, until a month had passed.

My friend Sly and his girlfriend Ellen, had gone out to get some lunch when there was a knock on the door of their apartment where I had been staying.

I opened the door and saw a police officer. “Are you Surina Khan?” he asked.

How did a police officer in Beloit know my name? “Why do you want to know?” I responded.

“How old are you?” he said, asking for my identification.

I had recently turned eighteen. “Eighteen,” I responded nervously as I handed him my license.

“The New Orleans Police Department has an APB out on you,” he said looking over my driver’s license and confirming my date of birth. “Who do you think is looking for you? Your parents?” he asked, returning the license to me. I didn’t know what an APB was, but it did not sound good. I later learned it stands for an All Points Bulletin.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s my parents. They’re out of the country. Maybe my sisters?”

“Can you give them a call?” he asked. “They’re probably worried about you. And since you’re eighteen, there’s nothing I can do.”

When I called Mimo and Puchi, they were not happy. “Where the hell are you?” Mimo berated me.

“I’m still in Wisconsin,” I said sheepishly.

“What are you still doing in Wisconsin? We thought you went back to school weeks ago.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well the school is looking for you. They called us asking where you were and we said you were back at school. Your roommate said you were in the library every time we called. Your professors thought you were dead in a gutter somewhere when you didn’t show up to your classes,” Mimo continued.

“I’m sorry,” I offered.

“Ami and Aba are going to be really upset,” she said.

“Maybe we don’t need to tell them,” I said. “No need to worry them,” I suggested.

Mimo did not agree. “They need to know what you’ve done,” she said. “And you should be the one to tell them. If you don’t, I will.”

“Okay,” I groaned. ‘You’re right.”

When I got back to school, I had to go see the Dean. “Do you have any idea what is going to happen to you?” he said.

“Actually, I was hoping you could tell me,” I replied.

“If you’re lucky you’ll get incompletes, but you’re likely to fail all your classes and will have to make-up your coursework in summer school.”

The thought of staying in New Orleans over the summer was unbearable. The heat and humidity in the spring was bad enough. It was ten days before final exams, but I decided to try and make-up the work.

I went to each of my professors and explained my situation. “I don’t feel comfortable talking to you about where I was or the reasons for my absence,” I said. “It’s personal. But before you make a decision about what to do with me, let me make-up the work and take the final, and then decide if you want to give me an incomplete, fail me or give me a grade,” I suggested. They each decided this was a fair request. And then I really did spend every waking hour in the library doing my best to make-up the work I had missed. In the end I did well, getting mostly A’s and B’s. My professors all decided to give me grades, and I successfully avoided summer school.

When my mother called I told her I needed to tell her something. “I went to visit Sly in Wisconsin and stayed longer than I planned,” I explained. “I missed almost a month of school, but I’ve made up the work and my grades are good. I’m not sure why I stayed away so long, but I think I was just trying to work some things out,” I said.

“Well good for you,” my mother responded.

“Good for me?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“You recognized you needed to take some time for yourself and you had the courage to do it. Good for you.”

My mother never ceased to surprise me. I called Mimo and Puchi. “Ami thinks I did the right thing by taking some time for myself,” I said feeling vindicated. “She wasn’t upset at all,” I added.

“Time for yourself?” Mimo said. “That’s really rich. I’m sure she doesn’t know the half of it.”

Anger Management

/ Surina Khan / 1 Comment

I needed more Valium. “Three boxes of Valium, please,” I said to the clerk behind the counter.

“5 or 10 milligrams?” he asked.

“10 please,” I responded.

After my back injury, the doctor said I should take Valium “as needed.” In Pakistan you didn’t need a prescription for most drugs so I purchased the Valium over the counter at the local drug store. More than anything, it was a muscle relaxer which helped with the back pain I was experiencing after my cast came off. The three vertebrae I had fractured had healed well, but the doctor said I might experience muscle spasms which the Valium would help with. I noticed the Valium was also good for my mood. Things just didn’t seem to bother me as much. I was calm, and generally content.

My mother, on the other hand seemed to be easily agitated. “Why don’t they listen?” she said upset with the house servants. “I told the bloody fools to set the table for the food on that end of the garden,” she hissed. Muna was hosting an afternoon luncheon and fashion show at the Islamabad house for the high school students from the school where she was teaching.

The house servant walked onto the veranda where we were sitting and offered my mother the fresh lime and water she had asked for. She took one sip and slammed it back down on the silver tray, spitting it out. “Saccharin, not sugar.”

“I’ll fix it,” I said, taking the tray and the fresh lime and water into the kitchen. I’m not sure whose idea it was, maybe Puchi and I thought about it at the same time.

“Let’s put half a Valium in her fresh lime,” one of us said. The label inside the box noted that Valium can also be used for the “treatment of anxiety, panic attacks, and states of agitation.”

“She seems really agitated,” I said. “Maybe this will help her relax,” I said, crushing half the blue pill along with the saccharin tablet and putting it into the fresh lime and water.

I walked back out to the veranda with the new fresh lime and water on a clean tray. “Here we are,” I said to my mother. “Just the way you like it.”

She sipped it slowly. By the time the party started, she was calm and relaxed.

The following week, when we noticed the rage coming on again, I asked my mother, “Can I get you a fresh lime and water?”

Christmas Condolences

/ Surina Khan / 1 Comment

My mother called me from Pakistan to wish me a happy Thanksgiving. “Hello Foosie,” she said when I picked up the phone. “Happy Thanksgiving. We’re all here about to eat our turkey and we’re thinking of you.”

“You’re having Thanksgiving dinner in Islamabad?” I asked, a bit surprised that they would be celebrating Thanksgiving in Pakistan. “Do they even have turkeys there?”

“Well not exactly, but you know Mimo. She’s arranged the whole thing.” Mimo had moved back to Pakistan in the mid 1990s. “She found us a wild turkey and had it plucked and prepared to go in the oven. She’s even made stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and cranberry sauce!” my mother said happily. I couldn’t see her, but I could tell she was smiling.

My sister Mimo is trained in hotel and restaurant management. She loves cooking, planning, and all things entertaining. She will throw a party for just about any reason. In college she had monthly full moon parties. It was probably her enthusiasm that made my family embrace Thanksgiving as our favorite American holiday.

Mimo knows how to throw a good party.

When my mother died several years later in December of 1999, I immediately made arrangements to fly back to Islamabad from Boston where I was living. Ami had been sick for a while with another recurrence of cancer, so her death was not a surprise to any of us, even though she was a young sixty-four years old.

When she died, Mimo was in the middle of planning a Christmas celebration at her house. She put the planning on hold and we attended all the funeral services, which like Pakistani weddings, last several days. Men and women were segregated in different parts of the house. Women, dressed in white, were clutching prayer beads as they prayed and wailed in grief. I didn’t know who many of them were and took the greatest comfort when we would go back to Mimo’s house with some of our cousins and sit around the kitchen table, ordering in Chinese food and remembering the joyful times in our mother’s life. We had many good laughs in those moments, tender and poignant. We were not filled with grief, but rather the memories of our mother and how fully she embraced life.

After the services were over, Mimo went back to planning Christmas. Although we celebrated many American holidays, Christmas was not one of them. We were Muslim after all.

“I’m having a tree cut down and we’ll trim it with ornaments and lights,” Mimo was explaining.

The guest list included us four sisters, our brother Tito who was also in town for Ami’s funeral, our close friends and their children as well as Puchi’s boys. Our oldest brother, Baba, was not included since by now the relationship between the rest of us and him was deeply strained.

Mimo had arranged toys for all the kids, but before they could open their Christmas gifts they distributed flour, lentils, and sugar to communities living in deep poverty on the outskirts of the city. “That way they’ll learn the value of giving and receiving gifts,” Mimo said.

Her living room was going to be rearranged to accommodate a long table for the Christmas dinner and she was going to put a bar in the corner for the Christmas cocktails. It all sounded great to me, especially since I had left behind a series of holiday parties in Boston.

Meanwhile family and friends continued to call on us daily to condole the loss of our mother.

“Don’t you think it’s inappropriate to be having a Christmas party?” I asked.

“No, why?” Mimo said.

Did I really need to enumerate the reasons? “For starters, Ami just died and people are coming to your house every day to condole. And we’re Muslim. We’re not supposed to be celebrating Christmas,” I explained looking at her like I couldn’t believe she had not already thought of these things. “What if someone drops by on Christmas day to condole with us and they’ll see a Christmas tree with us celebrating Christmas, drinking cocktails and wine and otherwise being merry when we should be grieving the loss of our mother? I don’t think that will look good.”

“Good point,” she said. “We’ll have to move the party to Mona’s house. No one will come there to condole with us.”

Conference Khanfessions

/ Surina Khan / Leave a comment

I’m just back from Connecting California 2010. The conference was fabulous and inspiring and moving. This despite the fact that it took place during the worst storm California has seen in a while. Flights were canceled, roads were closed because of mudslides. One plane carrying participants was diverted to Las Vegas from LA and another was hit by lightening. Our keynote was evacuated from her home in an area of LA that was experiencing mudslides so she did not make it. But most everyone else pressed on and managed to get to Santa Cruz.

The conference was full of all kinds of good sessions, and the participants were tweeting about this that and the other thing the whole two days. Even Judy, my techno-shy boss, tweeted a few times.  Judy only recently started watching television so this new tweeting thing of hers is kind of  a big deal.

Beth Kanter, the social media guru led a workshop on what else?  Social media. She let us know that #CalConnect, our twitter label or whatever you call it, was in the top five tweet slidedeck. I have no idea what this means but doesn’t it sound great?

When the conference ended on Friday, we went right into a board meeting. Really? A board meeting? After a big conference? Yep, that was my idea.

Anyway, so the board meeting went well too, but by then my brain cells were a bit diminished. At one point when Judy was going over the financials, I was checking my Facebook page. Beth Kanter says this is the way of the future, you have to keep up with social media, like practically all the time. Some people Facebook and twitter at the same time. So I thought, you know, nothing wrong with checking in on Facebook. You never know, someone might have posted a status update about the conference. And then wouldn’t I have looked good saying, “Hey look, so and so says the Women’s Foundation of California puts on the best conference.”

Then Judy said something like, “is that right, Surina, $200,000?” I really had no idea what she was talking about so I said, “I really don’t know, but I think so.” I mean, after all it was in the financial statements. I’m sure whatever she was referring to was accurate.

But I guess she was on to me because then she said, “Are you Facebooking over there?” Busted. This took me by surprise so I sheepishly said, “Umm, no.”

What I wish I had said was, “No, I’m live blogging the board meeting.”