A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  The Wing Commander called my opponent and me to the center T, told us to shake hands. I remember the kid had my brother’s name, Sangeen, and I told him so. We smiled at each other as we clasped palms then turned to join our teammates. As I began to walk off the court, the Wing Commander looked at me and said the thing that changed everything in the space of one breath.

  “You’ll break that racquet before long, Maria.”

  He might as well have painted the air red.

  Then he slipped through the small white door in the back wall. Before it shut, I could feel the change in the energy inside the tank. My breaths were suddenly shallow and I could hear the blood rushing through me. I waited for one of the boys to say something and strike a match. My head was still pounding from the game. I hadn’t crossed so much ground on foot since living out in the open in the valleys. I picked the ball up from the floor where our coach had left it, held it between my hands. No one said a word.

  “It’s still hot.” I spoke without a trace of hesitation. Then I handed it to my opponent.

  He took it from me, met my eyes for a second, and then looked away. The other boys were still peering through the glass. One or two had heard my name. I could see it in their deliberate stares through the court window. They were looking right at me like some foreign creature on exhibit. Still, I felt no shame, no fear. If the cat was out of the bag, there was nothing I could do. My days of cutting and running were far behind me. I was there to play squash at the invitation of the Wing Commander, and I’d done that before them all to the very edge of insanity. No boy there could touch me. When I coughed hard into the white towel, my lungs tightened and I thought I was going to spit up blood. If they wanted to confront me—to even ask—they wouldn’t dare. Not yet. Not after that game. Blood was running down my knees. They knew from my big square hands and cinder-block arms that what I’d done to that squash ball— whatever I was—I could easily do to them.

  My opponent was going to pretend it was a mistake, that he’d simply heard wrong. I could see his confusion in his frenetic blinking as he prepared to leave the court. The others followed suit, just stealing looks over their shoulders as we assembled in the corridor to get our bags from the floor. They peered at my chest, at my careworn shorts, along the length of my stocky legs, looking for clues. I could read the questions in those weighted glimpses. Let them ask, I thought—I don’t owe anyone a thing.

  The biggest one among them would step out from the crowd, and I should have anticipated that’s how it would go down. Even in the upper echelons of a clean sport like squash, there was an animal code. Someone was always an alpha. He came up next to me as I made my way out, taking confident swigs from my canteen, some of the boys shadowing, quietly listening. I could have picked him out in a second. He was the one with all the perfect whites—the easy life. Even after a morning of hard-core training, he was still pristine. I could smell the sweet sandalwood coming off him in heady wafts like insults to the squalor he assumed I came from. Maybe he thought he could see it all, just from the tears along the seams in my shirt, the old stains on my shorts.

  “I should have guessed. You play like a girl. You can’t even run.”

  I thought about stopping and facing him down right there under the bright lights of the lobby. Our coach was at his desk, talking on the telephone. Against the walls hung the framed portraits of champions—five decades—not a single girl among them. Suddenly, I felt some pride in this. I’d joined a nationally revered sport at the invitation of the Air Force; the commander had told me the government was pursuing a mandate to include more girls in athletics. I knew already that I was among the first. The president of Pakistan, for whatever reason, wanted girls in the court.

  I turned to the kids, pointed my racquet out straight, and grinned.

  “That’s right. I’ll show you again next week.”

  *

  Nothing I said mattered—after that, the boys were after me. Every time I played, they leered at me through the glass with their tongues wagging. Word had gotten out: there was a Pashtun girl on the courts. Nothing the Wing Commander could say or do could erase that mark from me. Their male pride was too raw. I’d sent more than one of them into a fit of frustration with a single hard kill in the tank. The truth was, they feared me. I could see it. I wasn’t like the girls they knew: the veiled diffident sisters, the quiet doting mothers. I was just like them, but stronger. But when the boy in those immaculate whites walked behind me and ran his hands along my backside, laughing as he passed me in the court, something inside me snapped in two. I didn’t turn to face him, just went into the corridor with my racquet and beat-up bag and made my way home. The next morning—and every morning after that—I was up before dawn, dressed in an old sweatsuit, pumping across Peshawar to the courts. The only way to beat them was to beat them. That’s all I knew.

  That’s when playing squash went from a game to a full-blown addiction. The janitors always let me in, and sometimes we played together. I’d take up a match with anyone I could find if it meant having a solid back-and-forth game. Taimur was only good for a few matches here and there after school. I played air force pilots, custodial staff looking for a pick-up game after work, teachers, cooks. When there wasn’t a willing soul with a racquet around, I just found an empty court and slapped the ball. I knew what I had to master—lithe speed and the precision that came with it. Over the course of frenzied weeks of playing hours each day in the court, sometimes up to eight if I could get away with it, I transformed. It wasn’t just a hobby anymore, an occupation that would keep me off the filthy streets and out of trouble, a way to exercise my untamed aggression. Playing squash became the pursuit of my soul. My father didn’t question my sudden obsessive drive—gone at first light, back all battered and swollen at night. Better a racquet than a gun or a fist. Better a squash court than a back alley and fourteen stitches to the back of my skull. There is a difference between a winner and a champion. It was an all-or-nothing attitude—and I already had it. Every time I chased that wild ball, I saw those kids in their perfect whites, and I saw myself beating them, one after the other.

  *

  I was in the stairwell with my racquet the day I heard all the boys coming; some of them were already there, congregating outside the courts, checking the posted game roster. My hands were taped to hide the cracked calluses across my palms, my ruined knees wrapped in gauze. I’d lost two fingernails from falls in the court and shed so many pounds that I had to wear an old pair of track pants, the drawstring pulled tight around my waist. I was still a wall of muscle, but I’d cut enough bulk to give me an edge of added agility. In defiance of every lewd grimace in the glass behind me as I trained, I let my hair grow—let them see me as a girl all they want. I’d gotten an ice cube, held it to my lobe, and pierced my own ears over the bathroom sink with a sewing needle. If those clean private-school boys were trying to get to me, they were going about it the wrong way.

  When I walked the corridor along the full benches, heads turned on cue as I passed. I had a bright pink band in my hair. The coach wasn’t there at the start of that practice. I put my bag down in the corner and got out my racquet, felt around for a ball. Some of the boys were already starting up—standing behind me, giving looks, daring one another into who knows what. I walked past them toward my designated court, looked around for my partner, and then pointed my racquet to choose one myself. They were all laughing. It was just like in the streets, I thought, even among those elite players in their starched clothes. They all went to school five days a week but were as dumb as they come—that’s what I believed, and maybe I said it. I don’t remember now.

  My first opponent and I stood squared in the court, racquets at the ready. I can’t recall who served, only what came after it. From then on, I raised my arm and shot him down again and again. As though it was nothing, I mowed the ball and beat him into a stupor of confusion. That’s when I made up my mind: I was going to run down the full rank of them right there and th
en. Fourteen was the number, I remember it well. Before I got to seven, they were starting to quieten down behind the glass— all of them but the boy in those bleached and ironed whites. He had a mouth on him and pressed his full body right up against the glass. He hollered something about liking my new hairdo and asked if my father knew what his harlot daughter was up to. And that’s when I invited him into the cube with me. As he sauntered in, our separate tensions met and electrified the court. He knew if he lost he was done for. I knew if I won they’d all hate me more than ever before. The paradox was a question of survival for me— with that particular hatred would come a distant respect. If I didn’t annihilate that kid, they’d never let me play the game in peace.

  Deliberately, I took my time with the serve. He was already disgruntled that he’d lost the racquet drop. Almost lazily, I walked to my corner, feeling the ball, squeezing it in my hand and looking him over. The lights kept going on and off, and the boys behind us let out a chorus of moans. I could smell the burn from the electrical system working at full capacity. The air buzzed. Then, without so much as taking a breath, I just took the ball and swatted it, detonating a hit so hard, the ball was in two pieces before it hit the wall. I looked over my shoulder and one of the kids brought out a fresh one. When he did, I noticed that he couldn’t meet me in the eyes as I thanked him. It was already starting—the change. I had to follow through putting them down or I was all but finished at the academy.

  I’d like to say my opponent put up a good fight, but he didn’t do much more than flinch. I’d psyched him out the moment I split the ball on first serve. And I was a girl, right in his face— bright hairband, the small hoop earrings that my sister had found for me. On that day, I looked more feminine than I had in years, and somehow I think that made it harder for him to go toe-to-toe against me. So I did what I was there to do, what I’d been training for daily, hours on end, week after week. I crushed him, one point after another. By the time I was done, I could hear his breath coming out of him in long, angry drafts. Chin buckled, he went to the door, swung it open so that it slammed against the back wall. Then he turned to me—

  “I will pray for your father. No man, whatever his sins, should have a slut like you for a daughter.”

  He crept out. Then, from the other side, he went right up to the glass to face me, all the boys surrounding him. I stood watching as he pressed his pants up to the glass and let his tongue hang out. Some of the boys were snickering; most of them just stared, not sure what to do. The brave among them simply left.

  I felt that familiar heat boiling up my neck. I took my racquet, held it high, and shouted at him—at every single boy or man who’d ever tried to torment me. As my fury exploded, I hurled my racquet like a javelin straight into the glass. The boy jumped back when it struck the surface, the frame snapping. Then I invited him in for a different kind of match. He could see that I was dead serious. I stood there waiting, tapping my foot, motioning with my hand. I got right up to the glass wall, our faces eye to eye, and stared him down until I could see the terror creep over him like a sudden illness. I made him know that I wasn’t afraid to hurt him—if he’d gotten into the cage with me, I would have torn him to pieces and he knew it. He was already backing away when I screamed at the top of my lungs:

  “You want to see how girls play? This is how we play.”

  13. Smoking Scorpions

  Wild dogs used to roam the hills of our tribal lands. After the move to Peshawar, those animals came back to me in restless dreams, sometimes only their eerie sounds and nothing else. I would hear echoes of the high barking calls the dogs made as they hunted along the night-blackened ridgeline. As a small child, I used to lie awake in the airy expanse of our slumbering house, listening to rabid packs chasing whatever creature they were after, round and round the rim of our valley, in and out of gullies and out across the cold plain. I could sense their shifting movements by the rise and fall of their sounds, which increased in intensity as the hounds slowly surrounded their prey. Then came the final series of savage cries when they all closed in and tore whatever they’d caught to pieces. Sometimes the dying animal howled once feebly into the night. The moan of death was unmistakable to me, even then.

  When I was younger, my family kept a domesticated female dog in our home. Many families in the village used dogs to guard the house or herds of sheep. Always, in the new warmth of spring, her scent would attract those wild dogs, luring them all the way down into our quiet village. Entering in a long row of ten or more, they moved along the river path like a gang of hooligans— wet tongues hanging, heads low. When they slunk into our courtyard, our dog would cower inside a back room, though the front door was bolted and the windows shuttered. My father told us there was nothing we could do to keep them away, as a hail of vicious snarls fell against our walls. They knew we had a female in there, and they wanted her. Eventually, the hounds worked themselves up into such a frenzy that they attacked the door with a ferocity that terrified me, scratching and growling as though they’d all gone mad. Despite the comfort of my father’s arms, I believed those violent animals were after me, after all of us, and wouldn’t stop until they found a way in. Once or twice, men from the village came and shot a few of them dead sending the others scattering back into the hills.

  Years later, when we moved to Peshawar, I wondered why I dreamed so often of those dogs, always chasing me—and me alone—across a dead sea of night. Between 2001 and 2002 the city of Peshawar, once a vibrant frontier town, seemed to slowly darken. The crowds teeming along the market streets thinned, though the population was steadily rising; passing faces grew gaunt with foreboding, but that meant little to me as a child. I simply noticed that the atmosphere of the city seemed heavier; people lost their tempers more often; refugee children were left hungry at the side of the roads; gangs of addicts multiplied like a virus. At home, my father often fell into long spells of quiet contemplation. I never asked him why. I was too absorbed in hitting that rubber ball as hard and as fast as I could. Already, though I was full of awkward stumbles and missed shots, playing squash was my whole world. I often look back and wonder how my father and mother managed their miracle. They raised our family in a sanctuary of peace on the cusp of a massive war so fanatical that it threatened to destroy everything in its path.

  For my entire life and for over twenty years, Afghanistan, with whom we shared a border and ancient bloodlines, had been mired in conflict: the Soviet invasion and occupation (1979–1989), the ensuing civil wars (1989–2001)—the first ousting the communist Najibullah government, and the next ushering in the dark reign of the Taliban. My father had taught me the basics, and I understood that strife was part of the fabric of that country and of ours. But 2001 was a very different year, one that unleashed an unprecedented savagery—and that’s saying something for a region with such a blood-soaked history. Across FATA and over the Durand Line, the rising call of war churned our part of the world as though in a huge cauldron. Long-simmering tensions, some of them generations in the making, had reached their apex and, one apocalyptic day, lit a long, never-ending fuse.

  I’ve learned that most Westerners remember precisely where they were when history-making events took place: the first moon landing; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; the space shuttle Challenger disaster; 9/11. On September 11, 2001, when terrorists flew two fuel-packed American jetliners, engines screaming, into the World Trade Center in New York City, then another into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and then lost another to the bravery of its innocent passengers over a lonely field in Pennsylvania, I have no idea what I was doing. We were still newcomers to Peshawar, without a television or access to any news whatsoever. It took hours for the story, which at first seemed improbable, to find its way to us. Even when I heard about the attack and saw fleeting pictures at newspaper stands as I rode past on the Sohrab, it didn’t register—not the magnitude of the horror or the loss of thousands of civilian lives, which no one told me about, or how you could t
race that cataclysmic moment in time back through a series of links, all the way to our pinprick on the map of the world. America was continents and oceans away, and no more real to me than the Hollywood movies my father borrowed from time to time. The home of those fabled backpackers was a dissolving dream of colorful candies and flashy grins.

  On 9/11, I was almost eleven years old, spending my days fist fighting for a place on those congested urban streets—angry and oblivious. Looking back, I do remember waking up to find a teenaged Ayesha sitting as though frozen in grief on the floor, her face down, the white chador pooled around her, my father leaning down, speaking softly. Taimur was a grim silhouette in the background, staring at his hands. Somewhere, they’d seen footage of the terrorist attacks, gotten hold of the newspapers, sifted through the gruesome accounts, and read the death tolls. My mother found out about it only later, when she came home and my father sat with her sipping tea in a corner of our living room. I heard her sighing over and over again as my father whispered into her ear well into the night. I remember hearing the word’s “Al Qaeda”—in a quick murmur, as though it was a forbidden spell—but they meant nothing to me. Later, I heard her offering prayers for all the departed souls and then the sounds of her feet moving over the floor as she wandered from room to room. She didn’t sleep that night, none of us did. A few days afterward, my father and Ayesha both went out into the rain, and I watched from the window, their bowed forms dissolving into mist. They were gone for hours, standing in a long line on Hospital Road to sign the book of condolences at the consulate general of the United States. Drenched and sullen, they came home and barely spoke except to ask me for tea; they just sat together in the dim quiet, thinking. They knew what I did not—that we were living in the midst of a powder keg, and it was only a matter of time before it went off.