A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  The stench of the city sewers hung in the air. The boys all pulled up alongside me in the alleyway. Wordlessly, one or two of the half dozen who were still following me got off their bikes. One of them called out something in a language I didn’t recognize. I said nothing back. I assumed the strongest among them would step forward. He wasn’t hard to spot—there was always an alpha dog in a group of males. In Darra Adam Khel, the alpha had been me.

  The boy who walked up to face me was a head shorter than I was but he was stocky, like a bag of cement. Big hands, wide shoulders, he would put up a good fight. Still, I figured it would be fast. We’d hit each other a few times. He’d try to take something from me. Probably my watch. I wouldn’t let him. Instead, I would get him in a choke hold, scare him a little—simple as that. The others would watch, shouting, placing bets. I’d seen that show of male dominance play out many times in Darra.

  For a few seconds, everything was quiet in that narrow, dark laneway. I could hear water dripping from a pipe behind me and felt my thirst again. I was calm and swallowed hard. My heartbeat was steady. Standing there, surrounded by nameless boys holding up bicycles, their leader drawing in closer, I curled my fingers into a loose ball. The boy came up to me, and we stared each other down a moment or two, both of us lit for a fight. Then he nodded, eyes never leaving mine, and spat at my feet. That was just the way he wanted to start things between us.

  I didn’t think hard about what I did next. The outcome was already clear in my mind—no one could beat me, not there, not ever. I pulled back my arm jackhammer-style and shot my fist straight out and into his jaw. He stammered out a cry, his head going back, but he squared himself fast, stood his ground, and shot me right back dead center in the mouth. I felt a tooth loosen and a spurt of warm blood, used my tongue to jam the tooth back into the gum line. Soon the boy and I were tangled up, wrestling arm to arm, forehead to forehead, breathing in grunts against each other like sparring bulls. Before long, his endurance waned—all it took was a slight weakening of his grip and I had him down in the choke hold, one knee on the ground boring into the paving, the other bent to prop up the boy I had subdued. He was wheezing from the squeeze of my arm muscles wrapped around his neck. The unsteady staccato of his heartbeat pulsed against my flexed forearm. His sour sweat stank.

  One by one, the boys in the alley quietened down, got on their bikes, and slowly pulled out into the road. The show was over; I watched them go. Still, I held the boy tight and waited for the last one to move out of the alley shadow, round the corner, and disappear. Finally alone, I let the boy go, and he fell away, off my knee to the ground at my feet. Gulping the air for breath and clutching at his bruised neck, he never looked at me once. A water bottle sat in a holder on his bike, and I walked over and grabbed it, taking a long drink. Then I went up to the boy and upended the bottle over his filthy sweat-soaked face. I felt good standing over him, seeing his weakness. In my mind, that kid panting for breath on the ground wasn’t a person at all: I’d just beat up Peshawar in the first round—but I had a feeling there would be others.

  *

  I walked through the door to our apartment with blood trickling down one side of my mouth—pretending nothing had happened —slowly took off my sandals, put them side by side in the closet. My father took one look at my swollen lip as I handed over the sack of flour he’d sent me to the market for, and nodded. I think he believed that in my first big-city street fight, I was getting something out of my system—but whatever that something was, it had already infiltrated my veins. The fact was, I’d enjoyed the raw excitement of the fight. I’d also loved the feeling of winning.

  “What were you doing out there today, Genghis Khan? Fighting back a horde of invading Mongols?”

  “Something like that, Baba.”

  “Well, then my timing is both unfortunate and perfect.”

  I trailed my father into the living room, trying hard not to touch the bruises blooming over my face. I saw the television set and VCR sitting on a stand in the corner. My father always found a way to hustle vendors and rent equipment and movie cassettes; sometimes he came home with as many as seven movies in a big paper bag. Over his weekends off, my family would sit sprawled in a mess of blankets and cushions all over the living room floor of our small apartment and watch together. Sometimes we screened television shows from the United States. I was never sure where he found such rarities. My favorite of them all was CHiPs, a series about two highway patrol officers with impossibly white teeth, who rode around California on motorcycles, fighting crime. The dry sierras framing the Los Angeles basin looked just like the beautiful rolling brown foothills of Darra. When my father slipped Rocky into the VCR and pressed the PLAY button, he turned to me and grinned. I don’t know if he intended Rocky Balboa to become my new hero, but from the moment an underdog Rocky agreed to fight the invincible Apollo Creed, it was too late. I was riveted. Right away, I identified with the strong and aimless hero battling his demons for recognition in a callous city. What he was doing in the ring, I had just done in the streets. My father was right; the timing was perfect.

  Rocky Balboa’s Philadelphia slum-world wasn’t all that different from mine. I was miserable living in Peshawar and saw only its blemishes: pitted roads, neglected gateways, dilapidated curbs, the overfilled dumpsters, the overcrowded buses—the utter absence of anything green. You could walk a mile and never once see a tree. Nothing could subdue my rage against that city for caging me. Peshawar was the Apollo Creed I had to vanquish but already feared I could not—the city was simply too massive. And when Rocky Balboa spoke onscreen, I thought he was speaking right to me. His words, which I had to read in subtitles, made my heart beat stronger.

  Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.

  And I was always moving forward, from town to town, valley to valley, neighborhood to neighborhood, past mosques and shrines, hospitals, schools, the ghettos, the Afghan refugee camps on the outskirts, the alley slums in the old city. The next time I went out on the Sohrab, I went out as Rocky Balboa looking for a fight. And it didn’t take long for me to find one.

  I had no gang of my own—and still no invitations to join one. I raced my bike up the main arteries of Peshawar all the way to the outskirts, where the traffic and roads thinned. In my mind I was in Philadelphia, running the streets. I shuttled through scenes in the movie, which I had watched several times already— Rocky Balboa pounding meat carcasses instead of punching bags, the way he took eye-splitting hits to his face and kept coming back for more.

  Along the rim of the city, I passed crowds of young men loitering. Some were Afghans, whiling away the months until their official repatriation back to their homeland. The United Nations had just granted those displaced by the Soviet war official refugee status, although that’s exactly what many had been for well over ten years. Others had only just gotten to Peshawar, on the run from the Taliban who were in power on the other side of the Durand Line. My father had shown us pictures of the sprawling Jalozai encampment, an ocean of huts and makeshift tents planted in a wasted dust bowl twenty miles outside of Peshawar. The new UN-designated camp Shamshatoo was fifteen miles away off an unpaved road into the wilderness, and officials were in the midst of moving people from one camp to the other. I’d seen the long, beaten-up dirt road leading all the way to the camp, and the water trucks lumbering up it carrying rations and stirring up yellow clouds of dust, and then the people coming down into the city looking for work or more food. You didn’t have to be dead, I thought, looking into the voids of their faces, to no longer be living. Baba said, Bureaucracy kills more people than bullets. And he was right.

  I turned down a small residential street whe
re laundry hung from lines above. Children wailed through open windows; a lamb bayed. I didn’t know I was being followed—and could have been for hours and miles. Ever since I took that boy down in a choke hold, a bull’s-eye was on my back. All those boys knew where I lived and had been waiting for me. Inside Peshawar’s urban labyrinth there was a whole network of wily street gangs, I would learn. And once they targeted a kid for a fight, you didn’t have a choice. Unwittingly, in beating one of their own, I’d started a war.

  Some of the streets in the old part of the city were a narrow no-man’s-land. Many of the buildings—shabby bungalows and corner shops—were shuttered. Garbage littered the curbs. As though they knew something I didn’t, several old men who had been sitting outside under awnings went quietly indoors when they saw me. I put my foot down on the pavement and looked up to the strip of blue sky in time to see a bird beat past.

  I felt someone coming up from behind me like a low electrical current, and the air suddenly changed. Turning, my hands slipped against the handlebars. A checkered scarf covered half his face. The look in his eyes told me everything I needed to know and what he was after: nothing I had, no material thing he could take—just me. Other boys came sauntering into the roadway with their bicycles or on foot. A few came out of houses just to watch. They had the cool look that came from knowing that you own the ground and the moment itself. I counted them up fast— got to ten and stopped. The boy facing me was so close I could smell his caraway-seed breath. Casually, I walked over to a pockmarked brick wall, propped up my bike, and then went back. I was poised: they didn’t know I was channeling Rocky—it was the main reason I was still there.

  The first boy started jabbering at me about the mess I’d made of his brother. There was no explanation I could give. His brother had come after me first, not the other way around. I shrugged my shoulders, saying nothing. Two boys slid to either side of me, and I figured they were all just going to take me down in a riot of kicks and punches. Then, my opponent held up a hand, shaking his head, and they backed off quietly. That was the moment I felt as though I really was Rocky—in the ring, ready to go the distance. I had nothing to lose but my pride, and that was all I had worth keeping—it was the thing that had kept me at the top of the food chain with the boys back in Darra, and I had no reason to believe the pecking order would be any different here. People were watching like shadows from behind their shutters. I could hear their voices and the shifting of latches. The desire to win spiked my nerves. My mind grabbed a line from the movie; I may have said it in my head or uttered it aloud, I can’t remember now. “You’re gonna eat lightning!”

  Then he shoved me hard—with one hand—testing me out. His breath escaped in a quick huff. I shoved him back with both palms hitting flat against his torso, and he fell back—and we were in the thick of round one. I thwacked him in the face again and again, and he did the same to me. I feigned weakness for a while, seeing what he had in mind, and we toyed with each other, dancing around, hitting and jabbing this way and that in the alley. I knew he was trying to imitate my choke hold; the other boys and his defeated brother must have described it to him. He kept coming at me with a bent arm, trying to loop my neck. I knew that would be his undoing—fixating on a single endgame maneuver while I calculated against it. Every adversary hid a fatal weakness; you had to find it and dig your way in—this was what my father had taught me long before I learned about the proverbial Achilles’ heel. All I had to do was grab that bent arm fast, pull it straight, and jam it back with two hands, popping out his elbow—just like breaking a hinge.

  His joint made a hollow sound when I cranked it. I held his limb firm, considering my next move. Then we looked at each other as though seeing one another for the first time. I noted the pain cutting through his black eyes, and we exchanged a sure knowledge that if I wanted, I could snap his arm in two. I was one pulse away, and he knew it—another half inch and he’d need a cast. Those wide wet eyes begged me to stop—and that was enough. I let go, tossing him down like a sack of flour. We were done.

  Music from a radio floated in the air. Drumbeats, an electric guitar. I thought of my father and what he would say when he saw my knuckles pummeled and wet with blood, the gash on my top lip. All the air was gone from the long, filthy street, as though we’d sucked it away, using up every ounce of oxygen in our brawling. We’d been at it for a long time, maybe a half hour. It was suddenly hot. Already, the other boys were slowly leaving on their bikes, like an audience exiting the auditorium, all of them mute in their beat-up shoes just as before, and abandoning their comrade to the ground where he cradled his elbow. This time, instead of simply vanishing, one or two of them looked back and nodded at me. Silent approval, respect—it was all I needed. I turned, held out my bleeding hand to help my Apollo Creed up, and then went for my bike. I walked it up the street.

  When the brick hit my head, it split the skin straight down the back of my skull. Blood gushed, I could feel it and smell it. I stood there teetering, let go of my bike. It fell in a clatter to the ground, one wheel spinning. Then I was on my knees. The back of my T-shirt was suddenly sticky and warm, and I thought one thing—honey. All of the adrenaline from the fight was gone from my body. The Hollywood spell was broken. For a moment, I thought the boy might have hit me hard enough to kill, but I could feel my heart stampeding. At first, pain didn’t come from the wound but erupted from my gut and spread right up my throat. I lurched forward and vomited. Glancing up the dizzy street, I focused just enough to see a pair of ripped-up running shoes stop before me a moment. Then everything simply went white, just like an old tube television does when you turn it off. My head fell to the ground with the rest of me, and I closed my eyes.

  Sometime later, I somehow got up and wobbled home. I remember seeing my building rising from the roadway, setting sun shooting off the honeycomb of glass windows, and not knowing how I’d even gotten there. By some miracle, I still had the bike and was pushing it along. A grime of blood, sweat, and filth coated the handlebars. I don’t want to know how I looked when I stumbled through the door to our apartment and called out for a glass of water.

  It didn’t matter how it happened or where. I don’t think he even asked me. All my father saw was my blood. Our arms intertwined, he took me to the couch and checked me over, limb by limb. Asked me questions: my name, our address, to count backward from ten. No one else was home. Often, my parents traded off days taking care of the household between their teaching shifts. The living room filled with our murmurs and nothing else. I kept my eyes closed as my father talked to me softly, using a cloth to tamp down my wound and stop it from gushing. I’ve never forgotten the way he sounded, like a much younger version of himself, like a man tending to his infant.

  At the hospital in Peshawar, the doctors gave me stitches and administered pain medications. They ran tests and let me go. Before we left, my father came into the examination room and stood before me; drops of my blood spattered his white shalwar kameez. I was pulling dried clumps of blood from my hair and tried not to look at him. I felt ashamed. He talked to me about anger, how I needed to grab it by the reins and pull it in. He was back to himself, a solid baritone of strength now that his daughter had been put back together again. After he was done, he took my shoulders and held me close to his chest, so that I could hear his breathing and the sureness of his heartbeats. Just then, I wanted to fold myself up and into him. Peshawar wasn’t home: home was my father—I didn’t need anywhere else.

  “Maria, don’t you remember what Rocky Balboa said about what you’re doing?”

  “He said a lot of things, Baba. A lot of things about trying to win.”

  He stepped back and looked at me half-smiling. Then he touched my beat-up face.

  “You gotta be a moron . . . you gotta be a moron to want to be a fighter.”

  10. The Capital of Empires

  Fourteen stitches didn’t deter me, nor did my father’s sentiments in the hospital, though at first I did try to clean up
my act. The story of the brick splitting open my scalp took on legendary proportions among the street kids, and soon I couldn’t walk the pavement without a new contender following me. It seemed like everyone wanted to fight the new Pashtun. I didn’t feel as though I had a choice. One after the other, I subdued boys quickly and with as little blood as possible.

  Fist fighting became a sport to me—and, strangely, it was a sure way of making friends, which I desperately craved. Brawling was how poor boys in the streets both socialized and protected themselves. I’d figured out from watching that once you’d proven yourself, you would be invited into a gang. That was how the system worked, and I waited for my turn. At the same time, those sweaty brawls cured an insatiable drive to exercise my physical strength. I became a master of the slick one-two punch, always landing it right between the eyes. The first hit stunned, the second sent them to the ground—ten seconds flat, maybe less, and it was all over. I split lips, smashed teeth, broke noses, and I never turned my back on any of my opponents again. I pinned them down but never pulverized—that was a deal I made with myself. Sometimes I fought for rupees or food; most of the time I just wanted to win. Not just the fight, but a position of respect among the gangs. Those gangs weren’t unlike tribes, and I knew I needed one in order to survive living day-to-day with nowhere to go and little to do in the city. When I was done, I’d hold out a battered hand and help my adversary to his feet, pat his back, offer pleasantries, and we’d make our way onto the market street, where I’d buy him a conciliatory mango if I had enough rupees— no hard feelings.

  Soon, I roved the neighborhoods with a gang of ten boys, all of whom I’d beaten. After that, it was accepted that I was one of them. We all had nicknames and talked in our own slang. They took me from one end of the city to the other. People called us bandits, though we didn’t break any laws—never so much as stole a piece of naan. None of us ever asked each other personal questions, and I liked it that way.