My mother was very beautiful. Her job was to attract miners to the bar she worked in, and to get them to buy drinks. She also used to drink with them, and this resulted in three pregnancies, each one year apart, all with the same man – my dad, a French engineer in the...
My father met my mum at a party when she was 16 and he was 27. He had come from Lebanon on a scholarship to study Engineering in Communist Russia in the 1980s. They dated for a couple of years, got married, and conceived me. Then he had to return to Lebanon to pay...
When I was 10 months old, my parents bought tickets to escape Vietnam on an overcrowded fishing vessel with 363 people onboard. It was really scary for them because they had heard many stories of boats capsizing, and of pirates. They had got married just before the...
My dad was a Muslim and Mum was a Hindu. They had a love marriage, which was almost unheard of in India back in the seventies. Due to religious discrimination, it was a challenging marriage, not supported by either of their families, and they were quite cognizant of...
My father was a freedom fighter against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. When I was 3, he sent my mother and us kids to Pakistan to give us a better life. As a result, I grew up in Pakistan, but visited my father in Afghanistan every few months. In that time, he...