PebHmong Discussion Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: theking on July 26, 2022, 12:04:57 AM
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Ukraine's Lady Gaga and her billionaire husband on fighting Putin from their Hampstead mansion
Their Kyiv life was all about Bentleys, private jets and Kardashian-style reality shows. So what happened to the Zahoors after war began?
(https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2022/07/21/Telegraph_0607225291_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqD6iOtyqrjCv72RJB14QuNeR02onCnLnCOzyrYJZwEpU.jpg?imwidth=960)
On 24 February, at about four in the morning, the Ukrainian actor and pop star Kamaliya Zahoor didn’t know if she was dreaming, or if the windows of her bedroom really were rattling.
She had been woken by an explosion. Another followed. The walls of her Kyiv mansion began to shake. Then the phone calls started.
Her friends were telling her the city was under attack. She hadn’t thought it was possible. It was supposed to be a bluff. Her husband had been right to play it safe. He’d flown away with their eight-year-old twins a couple of days earlier, just in case all their friends had been wrong to laugh at the idea of a Russian invasion.
He had felt a bit silly doing it, as if people might think him a coward, someone prone to overreaction, but they had a house in London, and children to protect. As she took the first of many video calls that morning and watched live as missiles rained down on Ukraine – missiles she could hear for herself as she fled to the basement – Kamaliya had no idea what to do.
So do you ever worry you’ll run out of chairs?’ I ask Kamaliya’s husband, Mohammad, the gently spoken British-Pakistani steel billionaire everyone just calls Zahoor. ‘Do you ever worry there’ll suddenly be nowhere to sit?’
‘No?’ he says, confused. ‘No, no.’
Five months on, we’re standing in one of the living rooms of the Zahoors’ palatial house in Hampstead, north London, absolutely surrounded by chairs. There are chairs everywhere. Golden chairs with leopards on. Big round velvet chairs. Small sofas, long sofas. Chaises longues. So far I’ve also counted 56 cushions in this room alone.
There are other rooms with chairs, too. Anterooms, side rooms, vestibules, bathrooms, each with very many cushions of their own. The dining room with 16 chairs. The downstairs toilet with just the two, though it’s rare you’d invite more than two guests into a downstairs toilet.
You get the feeling there are so many rooms here that at some point you’d have to give up coming up with ideas to fill them. ‘Just put some chairs in it,’ would become all you could suggest. Zahoor suddenly worries that this all looks a bit extravagant to outside eyes. He’s owned the house since 1996, he says, and he can’t change it now.