On How this All Came About

“Children, we are leaving to Pakistan,” mother informed us, “you will be going to an international school and speaking English there. Are you excited?!” Still in that tender age of unquestioning acceptance for everything mother said, we were wildly excited indeed. “We will live together with Umit, whom you are to call Dad,” she added. My little brother dissolved in a smile at the prospect of a new father. We had only met Umit twice before, so this sudden leap to intimacy was hard for me to swallow. A big bulging lump rolled up my dried-out throat while mustering up the courage for “Dad,” through which my voice squeaked like a mouse. Soon enough the lump went away, and Dad became a habit explained only when curious people inquired about my different last name.

Mother’s quiet elopement proved all those naysayers wrong, who opposed her divorce and fight for our custody on grounds that no one would marry her with that tail of two kids. No one knew about this marriage. My grandmother, who disapproved of the first one, and perhaps with reason, didn’t learn about it until months later. Perhaps there was a wedding, but we weren’t in it. Of course we didn’t tell anyone where we were going. For friends and family alike Mother concocted a story about moving to Moscow. And thus it was that we were plucked out of our Bishkek habitat and transported to the dusty jungles of Islamabad. While my playmates back in Bishkek witnessed the slow toppling of communism, our quiet Soviet life was suddenly turned upside-down by full-blown colonialism. An ever-changing parade of cooks, drivers and maids bustled through our new enormous house as mother hired and fired them in succession. The most impressive feature of this grandiose edifice, were its stairs previously seen only in popular Indian soaps, when mom and grandma sobbed into their kerchiefs at the sentimental sight of some sappy heroine rolling down beautiful marble steps to Bollywood’s cacophonous trills.

“To learn proper English, you must read this,” mother gave me a thick tome of Pride and Prejudice. Soon enough I discovered I wasn’t the only sixth-grader reading Austen as quite a few of my new Pakistani and Iranian friends were learning “proper” English through her social intrigues. The un-cool, nerdy Americans had also followed suit, noses deep in dog-eared copies of Emma on the bus, while overly developed, pimply cool girls snoozed in the back with cool boys. The next four years whirled by in a succession of UN days, cultural fairs and embassy compounds. Hungrily feasting on MTV and VH1, I forgot all about Russian, offending our visiting grandma who disapprovingly shook her head every time she shuffled past my room in her wooly slippers, “Look at you, such Americans you became now, always speaking English with each other. When was the last time you read anything in your own language? Your brother doesn’t read, or even speak Russian anymore.”

And so it was that the family’s colonial life continued in Kazakhstan and Kenya while I was sent to boarding school in the States. A sunny two hour drive through blazing foliage of Indian summer and I was in front of my dorm at Northfield Mount Hermon School, NMH, my nurturing, character-building cradle of independence – cleaning being the first, and thereafter most serious autonomous rite. Thankfully, grandma’s resisted tutelage of daily floor-washing exercises in Bishkek had not been entirely forgotten, and even though my long French nails were chipped to pieces after the first routine, the smell of fresh wood that I had mopped all by myself without sans maid, was wonderfully rewarding. Of course the trade-off – family separation – took time to muster, the first year a teary blur of home yearning that pressed against my breast with a ticklish nag – what Kafka called “tears that cannot be wept” in a pining letter to his wife. But the tears subsided and the pressing was muted as life churned and new relationships formed.

Soon enough NMH’s rural idyll gave way to the urban intoxication of New York, where I arrived a tough Barnard fresh-woman who no longer pined for home or puked out mixes of drugs, cigarettes and booze. The great Big Apple was pure exhilaration of museums, theaters and morning bar-top boogies in grungy Columbia bars. A drug bust in our favorite such establishment prompted the grudging upgrade to a downtown lounge with a catwalk for the exhibitionists, but soon enough all these amusements began to fade in the reclusion of investment banking. All the rough and tumble of New York nights with its bar and club queues, hour-long restaurant waits and rude taxi drivers simply overwhelmed my nerves, already worn-out from days of rude screaming bankers. Meeting the sunrise with a post-work cigarette atop the “2 Gold” banker dorm was the only respite – a tiny pleasure of inhaling the adulterous city that never slept twice in its fragile moment of slumber. Back in the office after many such sunrises it finally dawned that my poorer student days were happier, and perhaps it didn’t take money to be rich. An existential dilemma at that, what next?

June 30th: the heavy chains of investment banking were finally shed, my miserable corporate existence ceased, and life began. In a tongue-and-cheek cliché the world was my oyster and I leisurely sloshed inside its shell, sliding along sinewy mollusk muscles. The new quest - banker to the poor; the new passion - an old affair with art history.
I stuffed my trunks and left my job, my boss and my city for microfinance in Russia, hoping to discover some dissident artists and maybe even a part of my soul on the way.