Big quake hits family in Bangor

The Bahaar Pakistani Restaurant in downtown Bangor was open for lunch on Wednesday, but it was definitely not business as usual for the Khan family as they awaited their first customers of the day.

The massive earthquake that devastated the northern region of their native Pakistan just four days earlier, the biggest to hit the country in a century, continues to reverberate through the family, which now grieves for their loved ones lost to the disaster and worries about those many other relatives whose fates are still unknown.

“We are trying to work, yes, but our hearts and our souls are not here today,” said Noor Khan, an American citizen who opened the small restaurant in 1993 with his wife, Farzana. “Our thoughts keep wandering back to Pakistan, to our families there. We don’t know how to deal with this tragedy right now.”

The magnitude 7.6 earthquake, as measured by the U.S. Geological Survey, has so far claimed at least 35,000 lives, with many thousands of victims still unaccounted for. By Wednesday, rescuers still had not been able to reach hundreds of villages because of heavily damaged roads and inoperable communication systems. The quake’s epicenter was roughly 60 miles north of the Pakistani

capital of Islamabad, where many of Khan’s family members live.

“I have no contact with them at all since the earthquake,” he said in a weary voice choked with emotion as his young daughter sat quietly nearby. “My aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces – I’ve heard nothing from any of them.”

Khan was speaking early Saturday with his brother-in-law, who lives in Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province, when the earthquake began.

“As we spoke he said he could feel the ground was shaking,” Khan said. “He said he thought it was an earthquake. I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was joking. Then we got disconnected.”

When Khan finally did hear from his wife’s family again, three days later, he learned that two of Farzana’s close cousins from the Pakistani side of Kashmir, one a young woman who had been married just five months ago, had been found dead beneath the rubble.

Meanwhile, Khan has no choice but to follow the grim news each day and to continue trying to reach his own Pakistani family by phone, which he has been doing throughout the last few nights and well into the early morning hours.

“Redial, redial, redial,” he said. “There’s nothing else I can do. We’ve also called the neighbors of my family members to see if they’ve heard anything but the lines are all dead.”

Many of Khan’s American friends have been calling him at his home and his restaurant since the disaster struck, asking about the fate of his family and offering kind words. They urge him to remain hopeful, of course, but hope is harder to come by as each day passes without a word.

“It’s taking a lot of willpower,” he said. “I just tell people who call that we’re still waiting for news, and that they could send donations to an international relief agency if they want to help. But late at night, after work, I can’t help thinking of all those bodies lying everywhere over there, all the suffering and death. We have no idea what we will do, but I feel that I should go back to Pakistan if I can. Until I’m there, I won’t know if any of my family is alive.”