A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  As soon as I heard the jubilant shouting again, I ran.

  When I got home, no one was there, and I stepped out of my thin, ruined garment, which had sour spit and my blood spattered all over it. I went to the side of the house and found the buckets all full and wished hard for my Baba to come home, as though if I concentrated hard enough, that urgency might take flight and find him. Kneeling before the water, I saw on the surface the reflected ugliness of my pummeled cheek. The pain astonished me. As I stared down into the bucket, my sufferings coupled into a great sorrow that I knew would have no end. I had a new knowledge that, however I tried, I could never erase.

  Bending over the water, I dunked my entire head into the bucket, the sudden rush of cold taming my bruises. While under the surface, in that pure dark silence, I released a single long wail.

  An hour later, when my parents found me, I was lying on my side next to the upended buckets, all the river water gone. My father carried me into the house and wrapped my body in white sheets. Then he placed me shivering and whimpering into the warmth between himself and my mother. Bringing his face close to my right ear, he whispered my three names over and over again until I fell asleep. “Maria. Gulgatai. Toorpakai.” But all I heard was “Dirty Girl.”

  3. An Unlikely Bride

  If my mother hadn’t married my father, she’d be dead. It was my father who would save her, but when my mother first met him— on their wedding day—she feared him. Waking for the last time in her father’s large house, she opened her tear-swollen eyelids to the caramel-colored walls of her bedroom, limbs stretched across the bed on which she was born and she slowly let her lungs fill and held her breath. At barely twenty, and the daughter of an affluent elder, she was already an old maid. But she couldn’t outwit a thousand years of tribal code any longer. From the moment of her swaddling, when women gathered around her hammock and tore up bits of white cloth in which to bind her small limbs, destiny stalked her.

  Turning in her hot sheets to see the morning star through thin curtains, Aami cursed the star and the earth. The scent of lamb’s blood still sweetened the air after three days of feasting in preparation for the wedding, and my mother often said that she thought, then, it might as well have been her own throat they’d slit and drained over the hot stones in the yard. There were stories of girls who doused themselves in kerosene and lit a match. The ones who ran away didn’t get very far and, once caught, wouldn’t live very long. My mother murmured the name of her betrothed—a young man whose bloodlines could be traced back to ancient kings—rolling the sound around in her mouth like a stone. Shams. Sight unseen, she told me, she hated him.

  In a corner of her room, Aami’s bridal slippers sat side by side; clusters of beads adorned the tips like frozen flowers sewn onto cream satin. Sometimes, to show me, my mother pulled out those shoes, wrapped in reams of tissue, from a battered leather trunk in her room where she tucked her precious things. How useless I found her pretty mementos, until I crossed oceans and needed my own: my gold birth coin, a lock of my sister’s hair, my baby brother’s handprint captured in faded blue ink, a smooth pebble plucked from the village stream minutes before we left our tribal home. Every now and then, my mother liked to spread her touchable memories out over the floor: photographs, gold bangles, a silk bag embroidered with orchids, tarnished silver coins, a sack full of rings, smooth river stones collected from her father’s house, an old jean jacket patched at the elbows, and the bridal slippers. How tiny those slippers were; I could barely fit a hand inside.

  On her wedding day, after the morning meal, my mother’s blue-blooded future in-laws would arrive with her jora, the traditional bridal dress—a beautiful thing, heavy with pink pearls, bright swirls of embroidery, and a Milky Way of crystals embedded into thick layers of ironed silks. Even bodiless, the dress could almost stand up like another woman. Covered head to toe, my mother would hide all day within the garment’s chamber as though she wasn’t there at all, as though none of it was actually happening. From her bed, she could see the row of metal hooks where they planned to hang the dress. She’d held the tools and watched her father hammer in each hook.

  She hadn’t slept long, and when she did fall asleep, she slipped out of consciousness as though falling through floors to the center of the earth; when she woke, breathless, she set to memorizing every blemish on the walls that had greeted her for her entire childhood and would be a memory by next sundown. Alone with her thoughts, a quiet state that within hours would be a lost luxury, my mother calculated any number of ways to escape what she already knew she could not.

  I have asked my mother many times why she never ran.

  “Maria, I had no one to catch me at the bottom of that cliff. Besides, it wasn’t written that way. Allah had other plans. One of them was you.”

  From the open window, Aami could hear rifle shots signal from a neighboring village miles away. His village, she was certain. Naksha Wishtal—the ritual target shooting that set every tribal wedding day in motion was about to take place. She knew that her father would start out with the bow and arrow handed down to the firstborn son of each generation; his great-great-grandfather had used it to kill, one by one, whole ranks of British invaders from the caves of Tora Bora.

  The night before my grandfather had prepared his ceremonial weapon while my mother watched silently from the kitchen threshold. Sitting on a silk mat, he pulled an imaginary arrow from his quiver, held it tight between his fingers, and steadied himself. My mother stepped in closer as he drew back the cord, closed her eyes. It could all be over in a millisecond. No pain. How she wished he had a quiver full of sharpened arrows at the ready, though she knew he’d require but one. Catching sight of his daughter, her father set aside his weapon, leaned an elbow against his knee, and they exchanged a long, peculiar glance. The moment contained a whole continent of unspoken things, as though they were passing a sealed letter between them. Theirs was a bottomless sadness that neither dared speak of—in a day, according to their own laws, he wouldn’t be her father any longer.

  Jirga meetings held between elders from both clans had set out the parameters of my parents’ blind betrothal: how much the groom’s family would have to pay in walwar as compensation for the provision of household goods she’d bring to her new home, to repay the bride’s father for the misfortune of having to clothe and feed a female from her birth to her marriage. In Waziristan, the greater the wealth and status of the girl’s family, the higher the walwar, or “bride price” she garners. The more money the groom’s family pays for the acquisition of a bride the higher their esteem for her, and the better she is likely to be treated. Once the walwar is given and the marriage takes place, the girl becomes the full possession of her husband and his family. However they treat her, she forfeits the right to complain or to seek protection from her father ever again. Local jirgas took place outdoors in a flat-terraced field behind the village, where the men assembled in a semicircle under the canopy of a white tent. My mother had watched from her father’s window as a group of young men erected the tent, spreading the tarpaulin over a huge skeleton of poles. Aami saw dozens of men, as quiet and sober as pallbearers, enter single file through a slit in the side. Then a young boy discharged a single round from his rifle and scrambled down the hill toward his home.

  The first day, many hours passed without a break. Sometimes the women would hear shouting and make out a few words here and there like flares, and then the cacophony died down again. A gunshot signaled the opening, closing, and recesses of each meeting, and several times each day, the men would all come down the hill to eat and pray. “It will be over soon, Yasrab, you will see,” they told her—but it wasn’t. One week passed, then another, and still the men shouted back and forth like barking dogs.

  Intermarriages between tribes were uncommon, and my mother was not a common bride of South Waziristan. Most Pashtun girls married cousins—first, second, or third—or at least a known man from the village, if there were any suitable grooms to
be had. Most Pashtun brides were also younger than twenty. Barely one in ten thousand women had earned what she had—an official high school diploma—walking miles through mud-tracts and maize fields to school, and taking classes by mail. Her gold-crested certificate, with its swirls of black calligraphy, sat in a frame for all to see as they entered the house. My mother knew from her studies that she’d lived as few Wazir girls had: in the top 10 percent of her gender simply by virtue of being born into a household that encouraged her to attend school at all; the top 3 percent the moment she learned to spell her name; one in a million the day her father said, “Keep going, see what you learn next.” What happened next was Shams, my father.

  When at last the jirga came to an end, the elders rose and the gathering poured from the tent opening in an avalanche of excitement, arms entwined like brothers, rifles booming, drumbeats shaking the earth beneath my mother’s feet. Ten days—that’s what it took to bind two foreign fates together for eternity. Already my mother heard their two names uttered together as though they were one, and she knew she’d lost part of herself.

  Her betrothed was from a powerful family, and my mother believed that their union was part of a complicated agreement that would settle a long-running blood feud. For this alone, she supposed the elders expected her to show gratitude. The peace brokered using my mother and father as its instruments was not drawn in ink but with blood, her father explained to her. There might have been horrific violence of some kind; perhaps some brothers had killed the brothers of others, as sometimes happened. Such savagery, once provoked, she knew, could unleash endless waves of vengeance, until every stream ran red. Aami was never told the finer details, but those details mattered little. For all intents and purposes, she had been sold.

  As far as my mother knew from history books, treaties were flimsy things that fluttered away as paper to the winds. It was a treaty that ended the First World War and simultaneously sowed the seeds of the Second. In 1893, by agreement with Abdur Rahman Khan, the “Iron Emir” of Afghanistan, the British drew the Durand Line along the Hindu Kush, spanning the mountains that tumbled between Afghanistan and Waziristan, as a way to establish their dominion, only to find themselves facing the wrath of Pashtun warlords and the poison-tipped arrowheads of Aami’s great-great-grandfather. In spite of that agreement, for over a century the local tribes had swung freely back and forth over the boundary like a pendulum—Taliban leader Mullah Omar tiptoed right across it when the British returned to Afghanistan with their American allies after 9/11.

  My mother had no idea why they’d chosen her of all the village maidens. They say that one afternoon a local mullah spotted her veiled form stepping off a local bus and walking the long rutted mile the rest of the way to her school. Even though the traditional Pashtun covering obscured her face, he knew exactly who she was—the only girl from her village going to school. As he stood back watching, she crossed a cornfield with a satchel hoisted over one shoulder while reading out loud in a soft clear voice from the Quran; and he saw in her intelligent grace the perfect pawn. He also saw a threat. Before she knew it, my mother became a sacrificial lamb offered to the rival clan, in a peace offering called swara when girls, some of them very young, are given to right a wrong.

  And the opposing clan chose Shams, my father, a scion of an influential tribe, as an offering in kind. In marrying the two, the tribal leaders stitched a tight seam between the clans, one that would span generations. Pashtun elders always planned the future as though it was a slow game of chess started long before and continuing well past their own life spans, seeing themselves as extensions of the ancients, carving a path of dominion over their kin. All this meant but one thing to my mother—a sudden end to her education, all her university applications shredded into scrap to light the cooking pit out back, her plan to study for a degree in Lahore disintegrating in the curls of black smoke. Once the marital agreement was secure, it could not be undone.

  But neither clan knew that each faction chose the bride and groom with great care and in secret, not as an offering of peace but as a curse and a sentence. My father, though a scion from the bloodline of Pashtun kings, had twice found himself locked up in an insane asylum for wildly disrupting jirgas with speeches about the rights of women to seek an education, receive medical care, inherit or buy property, or to simply own and drive a car. When the elders banned him from the meetings, he simply took to the streets, spray-painting Pashto couplets demanding freedom in big, bleeding letters across mud walls, spattering them over huge valley stones.

  For her part, my mother had gone too far with her schooling. She simply knew more than was prudent, her quiet intelligence growing like an abscess on the face of the tribe. Ignorance secured a woman to the home, but my flighty Aami was rarely even indoors; several men had seen her hiding between rows of trees in the mango groves, a book open between her hands—not always the Quran. Many thought it wouldn’t be long before she ran off with her romantic ideals and sealed a fate worse than death. So rather than sentence the two heretics to stoning or crazy houses, they simply sentenced them to each other.

  The morning of the wedding, neither my mother’s father nor his future son-in-law would allow the other to lose at their target competition, and so the game took many more turns than was customary. In that cool blue morning hour, the men found in their quiet, jovial game a genuine and unexpected kinship. Later, the bride and groom would agree that it was a sign from Allah, and that the wise mullahs, who stood nearby watching, should have taken heed.

  Only when a shooter struck the bull’s-eye could the message go back to Aami’s tribe that the wedlock ceremonies should begin. Women were already assembled in my mother’s sitting room, surrounding her. Her cousins had adorned her hands and arms with henna, patterns of flowering vines and soaring birds. They placed gemstone rings on her slender, trembling fingers. Already she had slipped into the cocoon of her jora, her face and the full length of her body obscured right down to her slippers. Through the milkiness of her veil she would see only what she chose to see, which was nothing at all. Forms moved about like specters in the cloudy light. Entombed in so many satiny layers, she could feel her own trapped breath, the perfume from the oils on her skin and in her plaited hair overcoming her like a drug.

  The woman from her village with the most sons—seven in all—had braided her hair, threading ribbon through the thick strands. It seemed to my mother that as the morning hours passed, the women did not cease arriving to adorn her. She thought: How they try to disguise with beauty such an ugly thing. When my mother saw her bare self again, it would no longer be her own. Every inch of her, including her mind, would belong to her husband. In Aami’s foreboding, she had to resist the urge to simply rip the dress away and run.

  When word came that my father and my maternal grandfather had both hit the target dead center in an unprecedented tie, the gathered women looked from one to the other in astonishment.

  Someone said it was an auspicious sign—but of what, no one said. Then Aami heard a deep roll of drumbeats, the crackle of gunfire pulsing from the heavens, and she knew the men—in the grand procession known as janj—were coming like a storm of music to gather her up in her silks and take her. She felt the ground beneath her dainty slippers fall away, and they placed her on a cot garlanded with flowers.

  At the mosque, my mother saw his face at last. Standing before him, with the pesh imam murmuring holy passages, my mother peered at my father through the slit in her veil. Somehow reading her smallest movements, her groom looked over, and for a second their eyes held one another’s. His eyes seemed bottomless to her and so clear. He grinned—but she feared him. She looked past his face to the big square hands hanging at his sides, and she listened to his voice repeating the mullah’s prayers. His hard jawline might as well have been cut with a hunting knife. Then her turn came to speak. Breathless, Aami recited the name of her bridegroom’s father three times as her wedlock father. In turn, he promised to care for her as an equal to t
he other females in his household. With those pronouncements they fulfilled their marriage contract called Nikah, and a change took place in the very air my mother breathed. She was married. It was done.

  At dusk, they traveled as husband and wife in a lone car decorated with flowers and bells. Rifles boomed. The hum of song and beating of drums. My mother was veilless now. A full moon illuminated the world with a silver light, and as they set out into it, my father never spoke to my mother, not a word. The roar of the engine was all she heard. Night fell quickly, the hills went black, and she could see hordes of insects swarming like smoke in the glare of headlights. I asked my mother many times about that hour-long drive on the winding, muddy roads between the mountains.

  “I had no idea whether he was a devil or a god, but he held my very life in the palm of his big hand.”

  They crossed the border into my father’s village and veered past the mosque and onto a narrow side road. Around a bend, my mother saw her new home, the one in which I would be born, emerge from the night. High up on a hill crowned with blue firs, the house stood out like a fortress. My father had to stop the car to pry open the tall front gates, and my mother—still draped in her heavy jora—got out to help him. Together they pulled the iron bars back, and the rusty metal groaned. She saw a heavy padlock hooked to the gate, noticed that her husband kept a large ring of many keys in his pocket, and wondered if the locks were to keep people out—or in.

  The compound was very dark; only a few lamps lit the hallways as my father led his bride up a staircase. Her silken footfalls whispered over the pounded-clay floor. Still they said nothing, exchanged no pleasantry, even as she tripped once on a step. My mother pulled her hijab over her face. She told me that she concentrated hard on every movement, so as not to think too much, because, she said, to think too far ahead was to fall into panic. To panic was to flee, and to flee was to sentence my grandfather to lifelong shame and to face certain death.