A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  At fourteen, with nowhere to go and little to eat, the man told us he’d taken a job as a poppy picker in the crimson fields of Kunar, and was soon promoted for his nimble feet and innocent face to cross-border smuggler. They nicknamed him “Marathon” for his speed, and for a while he was a star—until he grew useless from “the curse” of addiction. Then they beat him senseless in the back of a jeep and dumped his used-up body on the barren route to Miranshah. Mother dead from an overdose, father long gone, his siblings who knows where—there wasn’t a living soul alive who gave a damn about him. By the time Marathon sat in our living room, he’d been to jail twice; a deflated creature, not really a man at all, open sores oozing along his arms, hands like claws, face pummeled from poison, we could not guess his age.

  “Seventeen.”

  My father held the boy up to us like a huge red flag—you live in the most heroin-addicted country in the entire world. We started to see versions of him all over town: shadows huddled around fires in the Tochi Valley, lying on benches by the playing fields, wandering alleys behind the mosque. Those were the future recruits of extremists, willing suicide bombers culled by the thousands from the streets, all of them only half alive and plied into complacency with dope.

  Not long after that visit, my father walked through the front gates with a red flower and held it out to us like a teacup sitting in his palm. Dark center, I could smell its ruby sweetness—the Red Sea, I thought, must be filled with poppies. My father pulled out a seed head, slit it open with his jackknife, and told us about the poison inside that had lured poor Marathon and his mother.

  “The worst suffering is born of the greatest beauty. Kiss this red bloom just once and she’ll suck out your soul.”

  All of us wondered if my father was able to do what he’d promised and deliver that drug-eaten man to a treatment center in one of the big cities, where they made such people whole again. But Marathon could not outrun what chased him. My father said he knew already from washing his infected limbs that the boy had AIDS.

  *

  The world beyond us had always seemed immaterial, until my father started to invite it in, bit by bit, person by person, story by story. There was evil out there, I already knew that much. In defiance, I made my body stronger, like reinforcing a building against an impending hurricane. Fifty chin-ups in the courtyard became two hundred. One hundred sit-ups, three. My father bought an old red Sohrab bike with a deep basket for me and Taimur to use to run errands. I cycled the streets sometimes for hours at a time. I lifted buckets filled with stones. Mostly, I ran, hard and fast, mile after mile.

  Then I discovered that from our flat rooftop, I could jump to the one next door, and the one after that, and soon I was hurdling from roof to roof for hours; there were so many houses in the colony. I grew so muscular and fast that it felt as though I’d grown another body altogether. At barely eight years old I looked well over ten. When my mother was home, I thought nothing of running the roofs all afternoon, even when I heard her call me back. My time was all mine, and I took it with me.

  My rooftop vantage gave a beautiful panorama: boys dancing over the gulley playing soccer, running with wild abandon, flying kites. One September day, I watched several figures in the distance hold a big yellow diamond of taut silk between them, silky tail dancing over the ground. The kite’s shining skin trembled in the wind, ready to go. One boy positioned himself as anchor while another continued in a wild sprint over the ground, holding the kite straight up over his head. I thought the running boy might take off, so powerful was the wind. Then, as though signaled by some instinctive cue, the child let go. The kite took off, taking my breath with it. The silk ship climbed high toward a sliver of pale day-moon. Then the boy with the spool ran with the kite, pulling down hard to maneuver it. The wind blew harder, and riding those gusts, the kite swirled. I left the rooftop and ran too, legs pounding cement, and I saw that he saw me. Soon we were running in unison, he across the Tochi Valley, me along the roofs, and all the boys behind us shouting.

  I was the only boy without a kite of my own. Somehow I knew better than to ask my father to pay for such an extravagance— though I hated the feeling of wanting what I could not have. It never occurred to me that my father was an engineer and knew everything about the physics of flight. A man who could build a car engine from bits of metal, or make a cannonball out of a mango, would have no difficulty fashioning a kite from scraps of silk and bamboo.

  The yellow kite continued to climb until it ran out of line. Then the boy stopped and began to reel it in as though he’d caught something from the sea of sky. I stood there panting, and watched all the other boys cluster around their pilot. I could hear their excited banter. For the first time, I thought I was poor.

  The boy brought in his precious plane, and I watched the lazy descent. I could see the yellow shape coming down toward me, growing steadily bigger, shedding altitude in increments. Again I ran after it, the boy still anchored to the ground. The kite came down lower and lower, and the boy looked over and watched me running. He pulled down on his spool, every movement strong and deliberate. Then he shouted and let his kite swoop in like a seagull over me. On raw impulse alone, I jumped high, hands practically reaching the thin scythe moon. A satiny tail caressed my open palms, and I grabbed at it, pulling down the beautiful thing that I suddenly hated. The boys called out, shrieking. I snapped the thin bamboo scaffolding and threw it to the ground, stomping at it as though it were a living thing. I ripped the yellow silk to shreds. All motion in the field ceased; for a moment, there was only the gusting wind and my fury. Then the boys looked to one another and began to run. I watched their approach and counted fast—thirteen of them, racing toward me in a collective rage. Panicked, I took off. And never looked back. Not once.

  I ran for more than an hour—up and down drainpipes, across town, I just kept going. Fight or flight—if they caught me, I was finished. Out of breath and panting, I knew I’d finally lost them. No one was faster than I was. Palms pressed against my knees, the sweat dripping off my forehead and spattering the concrete, I stood up on a high roof in another unfamiliar neighborhood; parched beyond pain, my brain crackling from heat.

  A line of unmistakable blue caught my eye. I knew it was still too far to reach before the sun receded, but the next morning I packed a small sack with fruit and headed out. I didn’t even think about the kite—I thought I would touch the Arabian Sea by high noon. Mountains were my markers on the long hike, and sometimes I ran. Dusty gusts blew into me with the sound of crashing waves. I made myself believe the air was salty, and imagined how the water would foam over my toes.

  But it wasn’t to be so—I could see a hard line cutting along the landscape before I ever reached the place where my shoreline should have been. Sprinting, I ran straight into a wall rising from the ground, more than twice my height. I could not see past it. Plumes of black smoke from the other side billowed over the top of the barrier. There was the smell of scorched meat and an ominous perfume of filth and squalor. A voice inside my brain shrieked out a warning, but the blue vision from the day before haunted me.

  I walked the base of the long wall, listening to the low human din that came from the other side. There were people over there, lots of them, maybe a whole town I’d never heard of. Maybe someone in there would know how to find the ocean. I’d seen maps of the valley, checked one just the night before, and there was no town, no village—and no ocean, though I still wanted to believe in it.

  Along one section of the barricade I found a breach. The wall was made from old cinder block, and someone had pushed out several bricks to form a small way in. Or out—I could not tell. Examining the opening awhile, I made grim calculations. Strange how the body foretells danger. Against every instinct, I knelt down in the dirt.

  Snippets of Dari and Pashto, wails of babies, and a strange human clamor grew in intensity. Smoke filled the air and my eyes stung. I held my breath and pushed all the way through the wall, tearing a small hole in
my shalwar kameez. I’d worn that white shirt reserved for feast days especially to greet the ocean, as though it wasn’t an elemental body at all, but a king. Standing up as I stepped out, I gazed a long time at the scene—and knew I’d made a mistake.

  The blue I dreamed of was not the ocean, wasn’t water at all, wasn’t even real. What I found was a series of man-made tarps, patched together one after the other for at least a half mile, blue and billowing, like sails filling with wind hanging above makeshift sets of scaffolding. The tents ran a hundred feet from the wall and parallel to it in a long row that seemed to have no end. The camp was huge, and housed hundreds, if not thousands.

  Children sat bone thin and listless in the dirt, or wandered like half-dead creatures. By appearance, the women were all one and the same, caged in the fabric of their burqas, every face obscured behind a patch of mesh. The few men walked the lines of dilapidated tents in small groups, some with sticks in their hands like police batons. Aimless. Every now and then, one would reach out and hit a woman. No reason.

  Then, as though someone had flicked a switch, all at once I heard every sound, smelled the overpowering foulness, and felt it hit me hard like a punch to the gut. A filthy needle was at my foot; I’d nearly stepped on it. Standing there, immobilized, a wave of nausea went through me. That was when I heard the boys calling out, and at first I wondered how they’d found me—one day later and miles away. By the time I turned around, I was surrounded. But these weren’t the colony boys I knew, looking for an explanation and a replacement kite. They weren’t like any boys I’d ever seen.

  For the first time ever in a gang of males, I felt physically weak. Not because my strength was less, but because my horror reduced me to a coward. Somehow, I knew just by looking at them that I would never defeat their hatred. I simply stood there in my clean shirt, that small tear suddenly a mockery.

  It didn’t last long. Maybe two blows straight into my abdomen. Maybe three. Then I was on the ground, on all fours and vomiting. One kicked me in the ribs and I went all the way down, flat on my stomach. Then they tore at my clothes in a frenzy. I thought they might be so hungry they were going to peel away my skin, eat me alive. One small boy already had my satchel and was digging in. His mouth tore away chunks of my half-eaten apple. I watched him rip into the fruit before anyone could take it from him. Wounds like bite marks covered his forearms. The others were still on me. I wished they’d just slit my throat and get it over with. I could feel their sour breath on my face, which was now wet with blood and spit that mixed with the dirt from the ground until I was coated in a thick, ugly paste.

  My clean shirt was the crime. The breakfast of naan and dried apricot I’d had before leaving. My satchel full of food, however meager. The house I lived in. Clean water—so much of it. My third-hand sandals, which they snatched from my feet. My squeaky-clean Pashtun blood. Those boys were united in rage, dragging themselves down the food chain straight to the bottom. I made up my mind not to move as they kicked and slapped— not so much as a muscle in response. I made no sound. Eyes closed, I just lay there taking it until they were done. None of this would have happened, I thought over and over again, if I hadn’t snapped the yellow kite.

  When at last they tired, which didn’t take long, they simply slowed their pummeling to a few pathetic pushes, a final kick, and they wandered off. Not a word was spoken; no one so much as glanced back. I never saw a single face that I would remember. And I lay there in the dirt a long time, until I thought it was safe to crawl back out through the hole in the wall.

  Later, my father taught me the word “refugee” the way he taught me everything else, but without bringing treasure home. I had walked right into it myself.

  “They lost their humanity when they lost their homes. The Russians chased the Afghans out, then the Americans promised them a way back with free weapons. They used to give them food and clothes. So did the Saudis. But once the mujahideen got rid of the Russians, everyone stopped sending anything. Just abandoned them to those camps for Pakistan to feed.”

  For years afterward, those faceless boys chased me across the plains in nightmares like a pack of coyotes. I would wake up panting and terrified. Just once, I stopped to face my predators. Standing in the ocean of sand, I turned in my dream and beheld not that gang of wild things but just one boy, who stood behind me in the dirt. He looked right into me with sallow eyes and was so vivid in his filthy clothes that I thought he was real. I bolted straight up, straight out of sleep, practically out of my own skin, his name passing over my lips from illusion into the waking world in a breathless cry: Marathon. I stared into the night, my heart pounding, and saw no one. At that moment, I somehow knew my father hadn’t saved him.

  7. The City of Guns

  By the time I was barely ten years old, we must have relocated all around FATA four or five times. This time, it was a long ride north, 150 miles on the curving Indus Highway, which ran parallel to the great river like an asphalt twin, to Darra Adam Khel, where every man walked with a weapon and a swagger, and where my family moved after living in the relative tranquility of Miranshah. Just as Miranshah is known for matchsticks, Darra is famous for guns—one thousand a day, made in the bazaar running right through the center of town. I saw the perimeter first as though from an airplane way up along the teetering pass, the city scattered over a ledge of flat terrain at the base of sandstone hills. My first thought: Switzerland, but more beautiful. (Not long before, my father had brought home postcards of Europe from the market.) The truck descended fast, so that I had to hold on tight to the rails, and for a while I lost that view to looming cliffs and shadow. As we drew closer, dust clogged the air. There was a steady tick in my throat, and I reached again and again for the silver canteen of water wedged at my feet.

  I remember the air vibrated—I actually heard the town through the dirty haze. We rounded a turn, and a great uproar descended upon us from all sides. Hundreds of guns discharging one after the other: Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! The shots combined into one massive cannonade, like a storm charging forward, set upon destroying everything in sight. Shocks threw me to one side of the open flatbed, tossed us against one another, and we laughed together, not hearing our own laughter. My father had given us fair warning that we were moving to a rowdy munitions town. For a while we could not hear anything at all, though my whole family was talking a mile a minute.

  Soon the hellfire stopped, giving way to staccato bursts detonating in short, controlled patterns. The floor of the truck no longer shook, and we each took a breath. We only had about a minute of peace, then a massive roar cut open the heavens, so loud it might have been tearing apart the sky and splitting mountainsides. Then I saw it—a small white missile flew straight out over the plain. Faintly, we heard men shouting in its wake. After it was gone, I could still feel it rippling in my chest. My father slid open the back window, his hair wild in the wind.

  “Welcome to the Wild West of Waziristan! Don’t be afraid. No one is shooting at us. They are just testing the new weapons— that was a small rocket. Business must be good!”

  As we approached the limits, our truck slowed to join a creeping line of filthy vehicles—open jeeps, hatchbacks, vans and trucks, horse-drawn carts, boys riding donkeys, tribesmen on motorbikes, and a wandering white lamb. My father let his big hairy arm, the sleeves of his shalwar kameez rolled up, rest along the open window frame. His long fingers drummed to the distant crackle and beat of a car radio playing.

  At the sound of distant muezzin calls echoing from the town minarets, every human being within earshot stopped whatever they were doing and quietly found their mats; we knelt together in the dry dirt to pray, all of us facing Mecca. For those sacred minutes there was no uproar of weaponry; not even an engine idled . . . just the low chants of holy murmurs. The air was so dry it seemed to be raining dust over every bowed head. I felt it on my lips as I kissed my mat. Everything and everyone seemed to be coated in it.

  I don’t remember feeling anxious; I liked
the idea of new adventure, and all through my childhood our family had been on the move. We’d moved to the gun town where my mother ran her school for girls so that we could all finally live under one roof. At the time, I didn’t know what an act of bravery that was in a place like Darra, but I believe Aami chose that particular town for that very reason: if she could forge a girls’ school in a munitions hub in FATA, there was hope for the entire region. Without hesitation, my father supported the idea. From the beginning, he’d raised us with the understanding that we were from a noble Pashtun family—to him, being a blue-blooded Wazir didn’t mean living better; it meant making the world a better place. If I asked one thing of Allah that first day in Darra Adam Khel, it was that we would be safe.

  Dressed in dark gray uniforms members of the Frontier Constabulary (a paramilitary force deployed on the borders of Pakistan’s tribal regions and settlements) patrolled the road, big semi-automatic guns in slings strapped to their shoulders. They wore red berets, sunglasses, and black boots, scuffed from kicking around day after day in the dirt. They walked around half-grinning, a few smoking cigarettes, eyes roving the traffic as though they owned the road. Back in our pick up, we moved at a snail’s pace, having to stop again and again at paramilitary checkpoints, jump out of the flatbed, wait around, open our sacks, explain ourselves.

  There were many more guard posts stationed along the road going in the other direction. Tanks sat parked in the dirt off to the side, soldiers standing in the open hatches, holding up binoculars. The paramilitary was on the lookout for munitions smugglers, gun bandits, narcotics dealers, members of kidnapping gangs, all of whom my father told us slipped right through the lines daily by the dozens. I saw groups of men lumber out of big covered trucks, slap shoulders, and slip big wads of rupees like decks of cards into the sweaty hands of smiling soldiers. They were waved right on through. Before we moved, Shams explained that Darra Adam Khel was the biggest illegal weapons market in the world, and in the age of the burgeoning Taliban they were making a brisk business. Still, nothing he said could have prepared me: entering Darra was like driving straight into a movie—but it was all real. Everyone I saw on their way in and out wore a big smile. They smile here like Americans, I thought.