A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  The man behind the table motioned to our group and we all moved forward to register. I thought I might throw up. I searched desperately for an excuse in the seconds it took for me to print Genghis Khan, Male, Age 12 across a form, but all I felt was panic as I walked with the others, mind completely blank, into the room with the scales. I watched a boy get down from the platform and put his clothes back on. My brother was next to me saying something about letting him go first. The man in the room was looking me over. My entire body went hot. I’d had a gun pointed at me in Darra Adam Khel, but faced with removing my clothes and revealing my secret in that room sent me into a frenzied state of fear that I had never experienced. Taimur was right, I had no choice—I could not do it. The official standing by the scale with the clipboard took one look at my pallid face and knew that something was wrong. He motioned to the table and instructed me to remove my clothes and step up onto the scale. My teammates were already unbuttoning. I think he must have said it two or three times before I thought of what to say.

  “No, sir—I cannot.” Taimur’s voice was thin but clear. My big brother didn’t care about weightlifting and had only agreed to compete so that he could chaperone me to the tournament. Now I’d put him in an impossible position. At the sound of his voice cutting through my fear, I thought of the missed chance to show my strength after two months of backbreaking training. I assumed that it was over for me—not just weightlifting but playing any sport at all. I’d be back on the streets brawling with my boys in less than a week. And I thought of my brave brother who was willing to sacrifice his own pride just for me.

  Then I stepped up next to him. “I cannot either.”

  The man by the scale stared at us. He was clean-shaven and tall and smelled heavily of soap. I noted his copy of the Quran on the table next to the scale, and a thick prayer mat rolled up in the corner. His eyes, long lashed and dark, moved over me intently. Without a shadow of doubt, I thought he could see right through my clothes. I was about to simply cut and run—all the way back across the park to the hostel—when he came in closer, placed a hand on my shoulder, and looked down at me.

  “You are both ashamed. I understand.”

  We nodded. I looked to the floor, my heart sinking into my chest so that I could barely take a full breath, and waited—for what I don’t know. A slap to my brother’s face and then mine? A tirade? Some final humiliation followed by the end of my world? But he just led me to the scale by the arm, clothed in my T-shirt and shorts, and asked me simply to remove my running shoes. I kept my socks on. When he shifted the sliding weight and read out the number, scribbled it down, I just stood there frozen. One second later, I was done. I moved off the scale and onto the other side of my fear as though I had crossed a treacherous ocean. Bending down to retrieve my shoes, I was breathing heavily and on the verge of passing out. The man patted me on the back and wished me good luck. I did up the laces with trembling hands and looked up just in time to see my brother stepping up fully clothed onto the scale. When I passed by him, we looked at each other, said nothing, yet exchanged a thousand words, and I saw that stoic Taimur had tears in his eyes.

  By the grace of God, the locker rooms were empty when I went in to suit up. Taimur quietly took his post guarding the door. My eyes adjusted to the strange artificial light, the absence of a window—I had never been in a room underground before. There was a faint smell of talc and the low hum of fluorescent lighting. Wet towels and papers and candy bar wrappers were strewn about the rows of metal benches. There was a wad of bloody tissues on the ground. Above me, I could hear the muted din of the crowd massed in the stadium, though the subterranean room was completely still. Every now and then a buzzer went off, signaling the end of a match, and applause thundered overhead like a drum line. I had only minutes to get ready before my name was called. It would be the first time I’d ever competed at anything in my life, but I wasn’t afraid—I only wanted to win.

  I took a breath, chalked up my hands. Then the stadium erupted above me again; the crowd was pounding the floor in unison. I looked at the ceiling, imagining them all up there, faces filling the bowl of the stadium, the high pitch of their cheers, and felt my heart kick-start. I was still keyed up from the close call at weigh-in, but I could not allow doubt to splinter my mind. I thought of the man in the scale room, the sureness of his decision to save me from shame, and of the Quran sitting on the table right by him, within arm’s reach. So I got down on my knees to do the only thing I could think of that would dial me down. I slid all the way to the floor, head bowed. Eyes closed, my hands flat on my thighs, I whispered suras to Allah, one after the other, until I could feel my pulse slow and the throbbing at my temples die along with the sounds of the crowd three floors above me.

  My steadied mind and closed lids steered me into the past, and I saw my father standing next to me by the cooking fire, a heap of dresses burning. I felt his arms surround me then, and heard his voice whisper my new name and the azan call to prayer. His work in the tribal regions meant that he couldn’t be in Lahore with me, but I’d brought a piece of him. I reached into my gym bag and found the gold coin he’d given me that afternoon so long ago under the ancient blue dome of Waziristan. Still folded in prayer over the floor, I held the coin hard in my palm. The metal heated and bored into my skin. As though he were right there with me, I could hear my father say my name loud and clear—Genghis Khan. And I knew I could beat them all.

  I got up and made my way to the competition floor. The snatch lift was first. A bar stood before me. I looked along its length, eyed it as though it were a living opponent, and steadied my breath. I went down into position, feet hip-width apart, back straight, and breathing in and out in a strong, quick rhythm. My head filled with fury against nothing and everything, against the fact that I was there as a boy at all—I felt it course down, shooting into my limbs like a filament of lightning. I gripped the bar—hands wide, spine locked—and separated the weight from the floor. A deep gulp of air, and everything in my body and mind went into the one motion, lifting the barbell up and over my head. I stared out, eyes bulging, and the full weight seemed to vanish as I hauled it, drawing all of my strength into it. I held the weight, arms straight over my head, the crowd roaring to life, until I heard the signal buzzer. Then I let out my breath and heaved the bar down. The crowd cheered so loudly that it reverberated in my chest. I felt my body thunder with pride. Over and over, I repeated the maneuver, the plates loaded higher and higher to twenty-five and a half kilograms—until I crushed every opponent in my class.

  The clean and jerk was my last event. I was up against a burly Punjabi, several years older, with cinder-block hands and legs like cannons; he was the reigning champion. I’d told him in the corridor that his time had come, and he’d laughed in my face. Before easing into my stance, I noticed him off to the side and winked. Then, exploding with strength, I executed a series of perfect lifts until he and I were matched weight for weight. By that time, it wasn’t about beating that boy or anyone else anymore. I was in my element under the blazing lights, the audience wild, witnessing my show of strength. I’d already surpassed the best of them and myself. Then, as I lifted the weight-to-win, seventy-five kilograms, past my deltoids, my knee torqued and I felt something pop. The bar was just over my head and I dropped it, almost in tandem with the buzzer—off by only a millisecond. The crowd deadened and I rammed my eyes shut, biting my lip so hard that it bled.

  A quick round of polite applause met the Punjabi when he went up for his gold—he’d done what was expected of him. He was the oldest, the biggest, and he’d been in training for years. Then it was my turn to cross the stage for the silver. I’d resigned myself to the moment of muted glory. All things considered, I shouldn’t have been there at all, winning anything. The announcer shouted out my name—PRESENTING GENGHIS KHAN OF PESHAWAR—the underdog, the youngest, competing after barely eight weeks in the sport. And it was as though a thunderclap hit the stadium. The audience leapt to their feet, shoutin
g my name again and again in a wild chant. I stood on the platform, smiled, arms held high like a champion, and bowed my head to the cheering crowd. As far as they were concerned, I won that day. I felt like the strongest kid in Pakistan. I started to laugh, tears in my eyes—I’d done as my father had asked, and won the noblest of all victories. Secretly, I relished the fact that I had beaten so many boys without them knowing I was a girl. I had fooled them all, and that was the best part.

  On the way home on the bus, my brother kept glancing at me, but he wasn’t smiling. He sighed several times, saying nothing. Finally, I looked over and told him that if he had something on his mind, he’d better say it right then and there. During our trip we’d barely exchanged more than a few sentences—that was his way. Taimur took my hand and squeezed it hard, but he wasn’t looking at me. He turned his face and stared a long time out at the scenery blurring past the window, rain pouring down the glass. We could hear sirens and see flashing lights along the side of the road. There were several accidents and we would be late getting home. When Taimur spoke to me, it was in a low murmur that I could barely hear, though I knew afterward that it took everything out of him to say it. He told me that he saw himself as my great protector, and I realized that for three days straight, while I lived and breathed the glory of competition, he’d lived in terror of failing me.

  “If they ever find out what you did in Lahore, Maria, beating them that way, they’ll hunt you down, believe me—they’ll hunt you down, and they will kill you.”

  11. I Am Maria

  Somehow, my reign of glory didn’t last. The silver medal went up in our living room, and there it dangled from a hook. I’d also come back from the tournament with a large cut-glass trophy, the grooves so sharp they glinted before the dingy window like thousands of tiny knives. The trophy held a place of pride on a table, and the championship certificate rested in a frame next to it, my bogus name—Genghis Khan—written across white paper in swirling calligraphy. Maybe I expected some significant change to take place after that Rocky Balboa triumph in Lahore—but it didn’t. Back home again, time spun on a carousel. Weightlifting tournaments were rare: it could be another year before I’d get a chance to compete onstage in another city again. And there wasn’t any point in going out into the mess of streets to muscle the boys anymore.

  Several times each week, I was back in the weight room at the sports complex, training alongside Taimur. When my father couldn’t be there for me in Peshawar—or anywhere—Taimur was. He didn’t have to tell me so; every time I turned around he was looking out for me. We also understood each other. I was more like a little brother than a sister to him—we played sports together and I wore his old clothes. We scarcely spoke, just loaded and unloaded the bar. Counted our lifts. Took swigs from our water bottles. Exchanged the occasional high five. Every so often, the coach might show up to check on our form or take us to another room to step on a scale—I was always dressed head to toe.

  My first victory had come as easily as tossing a coin in the air and watching it drop, but as far as pure ambition went, I was a featherweight. One part of me wanted to go back to Lahore to compete for a gold and crush the boy who’d bested me by a hair. The other part of me didn’t care so much. I already knew that in actual fact I’d beaten him; the roaring crowd told me so, and so did the numbers—another month back in training at home and I had him by increasing kilograms. The trouble was that I’d have to wait a year to prove it. Emotionally, I was sinking. All I seemed to do was go back and forth on a pendulum, crossing Peshawar between home and the sports center. Most of the time I traveled on a packed public jingle bus, sardined against my steadfast brother.

  Weightlifting is also a lonesome pursuit. In all those weeks after the tournament, I never ran into my teammates at the complex or anywhere else. Sometimes I believed we’d all simply come together in a vibrant dream of Lahore; that gleaming city diminished by the day to a barely lit illusion, which itself slipped further from memory as I drifted through my dull routines.

  When I was very small, my father told us the ancient Greek myth of King Sisyphus, and I found myself thinking of that king, along with dozens of other stories Baba had recounted, to pass the time while I trained. Zeus condemned Sisyphus to roll a boulder up a hill for having the audacity to liken himself to an immortal. Each time the breathless king was about to heave the rock over the lip of the hill, Zeus made it slip and roll all the way back to the bottom. Until the end of time, the weary king would have to start over with each new dawn, consigned to an eternity of massive wasted exertion. As it happened, every other day Taimur and I went through the same lifts, again and again and again, stacking up the plates—as though sentenced to a Sisyphean fate—and I felt condemned.

  Just one thing was different and changing all the time: me. The swells of living fiber rippling along my bones tore against the weights and refashioned themselves like the recasting of cannons. At home, or standing at food stalls in the market, I ate with the voraciousness of a caged animal, scooping up rice and tearing off chunks of meat and naan; and I guzzled water from aluminum bottles in loud gulps. Through Taimur’s castoff shirts, my biceps bulged, the sweat-soaked fabric plastered to skin, showing every contour. My neck widened to a trunk. Sometimes I’d glimpse my reflection in the full mirrors lining the weight room as I lifted. My breath would catch and I’d almost let go—who was that huge boy? Not me, that is not me. Physically, I no longer knew myself from the outside—maybe on the inside too. People stopped as they passed by me in the training room, or even in the streets, to get a good look at my frame. The cords of sinew flexing along my legs as I moved were like slithering ropes.

  I must have trained in that dull tank for hundreds of hours. All around me I heard the clanking of metal plates, the strained grunts of men, and the whir of the ventilation system. Fluorescent light flooded the room and there were no windows. Walls of mirrors. The sour stench of male exertion. Men and boys came and went and nothing changed but the ticking hour. The sheer stillness of my sport held a certain beauty—and, for me, a lethal monotony: I’d never been so bored in my life.

  I remember looking over at my brother when I dropped the bar hard and its weighted ends bounced as they hit the concrete floor—boom. He tilted his head and said nothing; his eyes were on the disks rolling toward his feet.

  “What are we doing in here, Taimur?”

  “Lifting weights.”

  “I don’t care for it anymore—do you?”

  “No—not so much.”

  On the way home, men crowded our jingle bus, hanging from the rails suspended off the back, as the vehicle—painted gold, yellow, and pink and covered in ornaments—careened around corners, teetering up and down the streets like an overloaded ferry. Bells on the bus clanged, men jabbered, and the engine groaned, tailpipe spewing soot into the air. Jingle buses never quite stopped to pick up passengers, but slowed and then took off again, lurching forward into the gridlock. Poised on the sidewalk, Taimur and I watched the decked-out bus approach through the hot chaos of traffic. Everything depended on one big jump, getting my sandal in and finding anything to grab—a held-out hand, a window lever, a rail—and then hauling my body up just as the vehicle picked up speed, pushing my way deep into the sweaty mass of bodies. Sometimes we would lose each other, call out, always laughing. I’d find a way to look through the forest of limbs and see him still standing in the road, hands out at his sides, hollering. I would have to force my way to the very back of the bus and jump off the rear. Men called for me to stop, but I’d fly out wide-eyed and grinning, right into the traffic and back to my waiting brother. It was all a game to me, and the only time on any given day that I felt alive.

  On the day I knew I was done lifting weights, I stared out as we cut across the city from end to end, all those male bodies pressing against mine—each wearing a shalwar kameez, hair combed, dark, and oiled to the sheen of mink pelts. I was dressed in sweaty track pants and a T-shirt. Standing among them, I stuck out like a
hard pillar, but unmistakably male. I didn’t have to fabricate anything—I just was what I was. I liked dressing in athletic clothes: never once did I wish for a dress. Every man on that bus—in Peshawar, in Pakistan proper, in the entire world— would have bet his life on me being one of the boys. My suffocating existence had nothing to do with my gargantuan lie, or even whether I was a girl or not. In the city, I lived half-starved on faded daydreams of mountains and open sky, eyes closed as we trundled over the tight grid of pockmarked roads. Out there in the bare-boned world with my old friends, zigzagging rock-strewn valleys, kicking soccer balls, chasing kites, no single day ever resembled another. In Peshawar, all I had was the bus.

  Lately, I also had the sense that a clock was ticking over my head. Within a year or two, I would no longer be able to so easily hide the fact that I was female. Impending puberty stalked me like a death sentence. I lived on a knife blade. When I looked at Ayesha, already blooming into a confident woman, I was both in awe of her and afraid for myself. There was no escaping hormones and cultural expectations. For a long time, I’d been aware of the inevitable changes that my body would soon undergo. Physically transforming into a woman was a reality that I never wanted to face. It meant the end of Genghis and of my freedom. In the quiet of night, or while standing on the bus, I wondered what would happen to me when I began to change and finally lost the gift of androgyny. The future was an opponent I couldn’t outrun.

  Every now and then I thought about the Americans who stayed with us back in Miranshah for those few days, telling stories and giving glimpses of their glittering side of the world like pieces of candy dropped into my open palms. My father always said those boys were lucky to have survived their journey into the tribal belt, that he hoped they steered clear of Peshawar. At the time, I wasn’t sure what he meant. It never occurred to me that we lived in a region that was dangerous to foreigners, because there simply weren’t any around. Ever since getting back from Lahore and my victory as Genghis, I wondered if I wasn’t just as fortunate as those visitors from New York City. They might not have lasted thirty seconds on that jingle bus without some sort of trouble—and yet there I was, standing in plain sight in my short hair, camouflaged in my brother’s old clothes. On that bus, city men surrounding me, I was as foreign as they come.