A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  The intruder stood before me, handgun poised; he thumbed the safety. I heard it click. The only way to evade a bullet at pointblank range is to run—fast. I was at home with my siblings, and we all did just that—scattering through the house, our lungs exploding into screams. We raced out back and into the pounding spring rain. I had one boy in my arms, Ayesha had the other one. Taimur made sure we were all out and then chased after us. Somehow we scaled the back wall and hurtled along the slippery road, not stopping for careening cars or trucks or the Frontier Corps soldier who shouted out at us but never asked if we needed help. Not for anything. When my father found his children at last in an alley behind the gun shops, we were wide-eyed with terror and huddled into a single trembling form behind a dumpster—all of us encased in a thick sheen of mud.

  The next day, my father handed me a replica Makarov pistol bought at the market, perfect right down to the Soviet-era star stamped on the grip. Simple. Easy to shoot. Accurate. Then he taught me how to strip it piece by piece and clean the components. Cradling the weapon in my eight-and-a-half-year-old palms, I felt its primitive power as though it were a wild thing, barely tamed. Seeing my awe when I first held it, my father placed his hands over mine, which were wrapped around the pistol. When I looked at him, he closed his eyes a long time. I knew he’d given me a thing he hated—not the gun itself but the capacity that came with it: life or death in the matter of a nanosecond.

  When I had learned how, I removed the magazine, checked the breech for a glint of brass, and deftly withdrew the single round my father had left chambered as an initial test. He nodded, expelled a breath. Together we cleaned out the barrel with a long brush, alternating between a scrub patch and cloth, and then coating the inside with oil. He showed me how to wipe the action and lubricated its assembly. As I polished the full gun with the cloth, I let my fingers slide along the grip, felt the filed grooves, understanding with each touch every deadly mechanism. We filled the magazine to capacity. Nine bullets—eight in the magazine, one in the chamber.

  I became a good shot, practicing with empty Fanta cans on the rooftops in the public firing area. I adopted a bit of a swagger; when you had a pistol tucked at your side, you walked the streets like a god with a chip on his shoulder. Of course, every man I passed had a packed holster and years of practice. Instinctively, most of the kids in town knew not to mess with Genghis Khan; some of them called me “Levanai,” the Pashto word for insane, because of my temper. But there was one Afghan boy who just started following me. I’d heard rumors that his uncle was a big shot in the Taliban and assumed he’d been sent to spy on my family.

  Every day from the first day, it was always the same thing— me walking, the boy tailing a few paces behind, sometimes hurling insults that I never bothered to listen to. I was sure he was a peon of an extremist group that was trying to intimidate my family, and I made up my mind I would not let him get to me. One day, I saw him coming down the road and I could feel the blood in my veins go hot. I ran a hand through my damp hair, shorn to spikes just that morning when the traveling barber made his rounds.

  I slipped over a low railing into another alley and took off in a wild sprint. I tried to disappear into the labyrinth of the town and the mantle of dust blowing in from the dried-up flood plains. Usually I could outrun that boy, the way I could outrun anyone. Still, I wished I’d taken the bike.

  On foot and going at a good clip, I skirted along the arcades, past the mosque, street after street. Glancing back again, I could still see him not far behind me. Sweat soaked his red shirt right down the middle. I heard him call out “Little Madam’s boy.” Up and down the alleys, where toothless men were sawing off bits for rifle stocks, small boys fashioning pistol hammers and squatting in the dirt; past a smiling mullah, behind him a herd of goats on their way to the slaughterhouse; past the poor begging by the fruit seller’s stall; past the rich bandits with their gold teeth and expensive sunglasses. The deaf. The blind. I kept going until I was too out of breath to go on—the kid was relentless in his pursuit. I figured that this time he’d been sent to do more than intimidate me. Usually, he’d give up after such a long, pointless trek in the heat. My mind swam and I stopped in my tracks, turned, and waited. I’d had enough of him—no matter who he worked for.

  In a moment he was right there, and we stood before each other, panting, tongues loose and hanging in our mouths. I said nothing for a while, just stared him down. He was a head taller than I was, but thin—practically skin and bones. The minute you have a gun, you start planning how to use it. I didn’t have a desire to kill; I just knew that I could if it came to that—if that was what he was sent to do to me, I’d made up my mind already that I’d shoot first.

  Gently, I pulled up the sweat-drenched hem of my shirt and fingered the polished black grip poking out of my tight waistband. Firing just an hour before, I’d hit the Fanta can right through the first letter A, and I could smell the fresh oil coating the barrel. My lungs wheezed from the exertions of our run. The boy was staring back at me hard, like he didn’t care one bit what I had by my side. So I let my full hand take the grip and bit my lip, never blinking. The boy’s eyes shifted gears as he took in my small movements, and he stopped panting. He stood stock-still, holding his breath, and watched me slowly move the safety. Then I saw that one of his hands was out of sight behind him, but my gun was already out. He didn’t move.

  For a moment, I was back home at the kitchen table, and I felt my father cover my hands with his own. In the slow suffocation of those seconds, the hot air buzzed and I was propelled to a place I never thought I would be. The tip of my extended muzzle was barely two feet from him. I had the boy’s fast-beating heart in my sights. Ever since my father gave me the Makarov, I’d had fantasies about using it. I thought about what I could have done with it when those men had taunted me—the ones by the willow tree during the volleyball game; the man on horseback who slapped me with his whip. I turned to the boy and looked him in the eyes. Whatever happened, I had a gun now. Whatever they’d sent the boy to do to me, I was ready.

  “What do you want?”

  “What are you doing that for—haven’t you been listening?” He blinked twice, swallowed hard.

  “What do you want?” I said it louder, index finger hovering at the trigger.

  The boy swallowed again. “The bicycle, the ten-speed.”

  “What?”

  “I just want a ride—that’s all.”

  “You keep following me. Who sent you?”

  My open hand was so wet that I could feel the grip slipping. Remembering the slug nestled in the chamber, I moved my finger away from the trigger. I could feel the muscles all along my forearms twitching.

  “No one sent me. I just want a ride on the Sohrab. That’s what I kept telling you. I want to ride your bike.”

  It was so absurd that I didn’t quite believe him.

  “What do you have there in your back pocket—a gun? Show it to me. Do anything stupid and I’ll shoot this thing.”

  He was shaking his head fast. No—no way. It’s nothing.

  Then, from his back pocket, he carefully pulled out a pack of chewing gum. It looked to me like he’d had it for a while—the packaging was worn and bent out of shape. Who knows how he’d gotten it. He offered the pack to me from his flat, open palm and nodded, all his fingers trembling. Then he turned all the way around, showing me that he had nothing else on him.

  Slowly, I lowered my arm and pushed the safety back into position. I shook my head and he carefully put the pack of gum away. Then I loosened my palm from the slick grip, tossing it like a dead thing to the ground at my feet, my eyes never leaving the boy. We were lucky the gun didn’t go off.

  He watched me do those things, his chest rising and falling fast. When my Makarov hit the ground, he let out a long breath, and his eyes flickered. Then he shook his head, held out his arms, and shrugged.

  “So?” Sweat poured down his face.

  “So what?”

 
“So, can I have a ride? I won’t steal it—if that’s what you were thinking.”

  For a moment it seemed that I’d stepped out of my own skin. I fell to my knees. I looked up at the boy again, his face staring back—I’d actually been a hair away from pulling the trigger. It was just a rusted ten-speed. I had a bicycle, he didn’t—just like the yellow kite in Miranshah. Simple as that. The voice I heard then, as I knelt in the dirt, was not my own. It was the voice of someone who’d been to the very edge of hell and back again.

  “Okay, follow me home. I’ll have to ask my father—he bought the bike.”

  8. Deities, Temples, and Angels

  While we were living in Darra Adam Khel, my five-year-old brother Sangeen often asked me to tell him stories about all the places we had lived. Those simple memories kept me calm amid the perpetual violence. After a day of kicking around the streets and foothills, I’d walk through the front door to find my brother sitting cross-legged on the floor, waiting. If it was late afternoon, Ayesha—who had entered her teens—would be somewhere in the house, studying and looking after him and Babrak.

  “Explain to me again how I got my big Pashtun lips, Genghis.”

  “You know that already. You got them from the Afridi woman who was visiting the house near Baba’s college in Dera Ismail Khan.”

  “No, no, no—tell a story—the way you do.”

  “All right, sit down with me right here, and I’ll start from the beginning.”

  The last time I had sat with Sangeen and repeated the tale was just before I ran into trouble at the mosque. I would need that story for my heart, far more than he did for his ears. I would need it to remind me that the world is full of people, not religions. Deities and temples don’t make us good—our actions do.

  At barely a year old, Sangeen had a cry that could stop God in his tracks—full-mouthed and earsplitting. On an afternoon when it rained so heavily the stream broke its banks, turning the roads to rushing brown rivers, he woke in tandem with a thunderclap. I held my brother by an open window, watching the deluge, and he shrieked as though he’d made a pact with the tempest. Whenever anything went wrong, I prayed to Allah—we all did. My family were devout but open-minded Muslims. Until then, I only knew of one God—my own. I believed that when I called him, he listened, and as I stood rocking my fitful brother, I called out desperate ayahs. One hour, then two, then three passed that way: “Peace be upon Him, peace be upon Him, peace be upon Him,” as Sangeen screamed along with the raging sky. When the weather cleared, I hoped his heavy heart would too.

  But no matter how I tried, I could not calm him. I had little money that week, and I’d used the last of the milk at breakfast. There were no more rupees left in the jar. So into Sangeen’s mouth I poured spoonfuls of water and dropped soggy bits of stale naan. But this only seemed to fuel his ire, until his body grew so rigid with rage that I could barely hold him, his face turned beet red, and his quavering lips squeezed so tight they went bloodless and white. Again and again and in a panic, I gave him water, and he guzzled and belched only to explode anew. It amazed me then as now how a tiny living thing could emit such power.

  The Saraiki woman across the way caught his bloodcurdling cries and came in from the street. I heard her clamoring down in the front hall, yelling my name and my brother’s. Then she tore into our kitchen, where I stood exhausted and pale and half out of my mind with fear. Inconsolable Sangeen paused and stared at her, mouth hanging open, his voice eclipsed but for a moment as our neighbor unleashed a barrage of incomprehensible Urdu. Then he started up again, and the woman grabbed him from me by the armpits and hoisted his flailing body to her chest. Together we ran out into the waterlogged street.

  She bolted toward a neighboring house and darted through the open door. From the first step inside I felt the pungent warmth of Masala chai tea envelop me, and heard the delicate clanking of cups. I followed her into the strange front room, where a Pashtun woman of the Afridi tribe sat on a raft of cushions. I knew her clan from her colorful headscarf, her robust body, and the bright paleness of her smooth face. Right next to her on a long silk mat lounged the woman whom I had seen before in the streets and knew lived in the house. She was another Saraiki lady with high Tibetan-like cheeks and dressed in reams of robes—all pinks and burnt yellows—both women looked up startled in the dim, shuttered light. The visiting Afridi sat back and quickly adjusted her heavy shawl, rings on her fingers flashing. Her eyes darted from the sight of the two figures standing in the threshold, panting, to the sleeping Pashtun infant cocooned in the makeshift cot next to her. I don’t remember what was said, if much of anything. My neighbor simply walked up to the Afridi and handed over a whimpering Sangeen.

  His eyes widened as he went from one woman to another, and I waited for him to wail in protest and wake the sleeping newborn swaddled barely a foot away. Then he groaned and let out one last feeble bawl, no doubt at the sight of the suddenly proffered milk-laden breast. He opened his mouth wide and latched on, eyes rolling back in his head and his chest fluttering as he breathed. He guzzled so violently that his cheeks filled and overflowed with milk, and the woman nursing him, whose name I would never learn, chuckled. As they settled into her island of soft cushions and robes as one together, she leaned way back and let out a contented sigh. A moment later, the woman of the house closed her eyes and started chanting—half song, half whisper—a mantra filled with a lulling translucent poetry. Somehow I felt her meaning, though I couldn’t decipher a word. Every now and again she opened her lids and looked over with a smile at her Afridi visitor and the suckling child, as though at a work of art gracing her home. Sangeen kneaded his fingers into the doughy skin, humming out gulps as he drank, and she repeated her steady refrain from her corner of the room. The Afridi smiled down at my brother, whispered a prayer and rocked him to the chanting rhythm. They all made a soft, sacred music together until he fell asleep, still drinking.

  Relieved, I took a seat on a thick mat with my neighbor, who poured me a cup of the heavily spiced tea from a small red pot with a bamboo handle. She crossed her legs, took a sip from her porcelain cup, and smiled broadly through a cloud of perfumed steam. I languished there a long time in the sweet air, watching smoke spiral up from a flickering candle positioned on a corner table. The flame danced before the smiling brass figure of Buddha, big belly polished to a gold sheen from the touches of so many fingertips. Off to the side, a white lotus flower hovered in a bowl of clear water, delicate petals like the pale upturned palm of a goddess. I examined all of the beautiful things surrounding me, each placed there with some mysterious intent. The entire room felt like a shrine to spiritual worlds, some of which I knew nothing of: gods and goddesses in framed paintings and figurines, pictures of holy men and prophets, a hanging brass bell in the shape of a coin, a cross fixed to the wall, and well-thumbed books lined up on shelves. Deities seemed to whisper through the house. An aura of strength also hovered over the woman who fed my brother from her generous breasts. The Afridi were as formidable as the Spin Ghar mountain range from which their tribe originated. She’d taken Sangeen and nourished him from her body without a word, simply because he was hungry and she had in plentiful supply the very thing he needed. We were all Pashtun, but to her, I believe, it was simpler than that—he was a baby and she was a mother. I still remember the steady melody of the woman chanting by her, caressing my ears in that Masala perfumed temple of stillness: “Namo Gurubhya, Namo Buddhaya, Namo Dharmaya, Namo Sanghaya . . .” She said it several times, at first in a halting voice as though practicing a line in a play, looking down and reading from the leather-bound book sitting in her lap like a second infant in the room, drawing her finger over the line of text and nodding. And in between, my brother’s hummingbird breaths and sighs.

  By the time we meandered back home through the damp streets, Sangeen’s head, dizzy with so much milk, lolled about in his blanket. I watched my Saraiki neighbor slip into her house across the way, vanishing through the door as though in
to another world. After that day, Sangeen grew stronger and his mouth swelled, as though he had developed the Afridi woman’s full, beautiful lips, like a memento of her generous heart.

  While I was still telling the tale that day, my father appeared. Smiling, he stepped through our front door with an overstuffed satchel at his side. The sounds of gunshots echoed behind him. He stood listening as my brother sat transfixed in my lap. My father liked to hear me tell my brother stories, perhaps because I spoke to my younger siblings just the way that he did. When I was done, we were all quiet for a long time. After I recounted the strange events of that rain-soaked afternoon, I ended up with a head full of questions. My mind drifted to the vision of the lotus floating in the bowl, dainty and beautiful, and the glinting of the smiling Buddha’s round belly, the cross, and paintings of holy men and all those books. Above all, I heard the incantations of the woman sitting in bright robes beating in my head.

  As Sangeen slid from my lap, I turned to my father. Then I stood up and asked him right there and then if Allah was the only true God as we professed on our knees five times a day—the Buddha, after all, was not Allah. And what about the Christian God and his son, Jesus, who was also one of our prophets. I had vague notions of other religions and knew there were many ways to reach God, but I’d made an assumption about the Almighty: there could be only one—mine. Otherwise, what were we doing going to the mosque, kneeling on our mats, and memorizing ayahs and suras. My father took me by the shoulders and smiled a long while, as though he saw a sun shining deep within me. He asked me to meet him in the kitchen, which is where we always discussed big matters.