A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  Eventually, he made a noise—coughed, shuffled his feet, something—and I stopped in my tracks. The ball pattered once or twice over the floor and fell dead. Standing there, panting and wide-eyed, I held the racquet out, body immobilized in mid-shot, skin drenched, chest pumping. At last, I had been caught. We looked at each other and then my father nodded, scanning a room in complete disarray—the table pushed haphazardly to the other end; a mess of plates waiting for me in the bucket; stale tears of bread my brothers had left on the counter in their haste—then back to me, to my still-frozen racquet hovering, and finally to the ball at my feet. He put down his overstuffed satchel, stood up straight, put a hand on the doorframe as though to steady himself from what he knew was coming. Then he laughed so hard I thought he’d made the lights flicker.

  “Do you think we are blind, Maria? We all know what you’ve been doing. I just waited for you to tell me. But knowing and seeing are two different things—two different things by far. You realize this is the first time I’ve seen you play.”

  Bewildered, I just stood there, panting like an animal, the racquet hanging from my hands like a broken limb. Then my father walked across the floor and held his arms out to the battered white wall as though in reverence to a masterpiece. The full white surface was covered in a faint constellation of black and gray smudges. I’d scoured that wall each afternoon with a cleaning brush and then put back the table. I believed I’d done a good job—until then. Sitting on the cold cement, I realized the absurdity of what I’d been doing. Leaning down, my father took my racquet from me. He practiced a few empty swings, and then he held it up and looked at me through the mesh.

  “Albert Einstein once said: ‘A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit, and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?’ You are fortunate, Maria, because you only need one thing—a squash racquet.”

  “Are you telling me to go back to the courts, Baba?”

  “I’m not telling you anything—I made that mistake already. All I will say is that if you do decide to go back . . . this time, be strong about it.”

  Then he handed me my racquet.

  *

  My timing was way off. The group had just finished a set of matches, and pairs were packing up, some already filing out of the courts. All those useless weeks behind me like a canyon, my father’s laughter in my mind, I cut a straight line through the crowd of boys in long, determined strides. I could feel stares on me like a single hot sun. Racquet bag slung over my shoulder, I had a brand-new ball in my hand, a gift from the Wing Commander to welcome me back. One or two of the boys pulled a grimace, let out a laugh, but I just kept going. By then, I’d suffered much worse. I asked a boy if he was done with the first court. When he nodded, I thanked him eye to eye and went in.

  Racquet unleashed, I got straight to it, never turning to see if any of the boys had lined up behind me, though I was sure they were there. From the first merciless hit, I drilled the way I had in the kitchen—for myself, for the sheer joy of the game. My only focus was on increasing my intensity and speed. When I fell, I grunted and got right up. Slammed harder. Ran faster. At some point, I lost all sense of anything but taming that wild sphere. Hours—who knows how many—evaporated. Those gawking boys had already seen me play until my knees bled. From then on, they would see me play to another level of insanity—from the time the complex opened until it closed. Any time they were there, I would be there too.

  How long they lingered at my back, watching that first unbroken set of hits, I’ll never know. Whatever their taunts were that day, they no longer meant anything. And as far as bullies went, my recent experience with the scorpion-smoking assailant just around the corner from home reduced their efforts to the antics of circus animals. There was a far greater evil waiting for me outside the academy walls. Not even one hundred miles away, men were shooting holes in each other in the name of God; just up the street, addicts and fanatics lurked in the markets; and back in Bara Gate there was an empty desk at a school that could put me to sleep for eternity. All in all, I was in a safe place, doing the only thing I knew how to do. Sweat flew off my soaked hair. The rubber on my shoes disintegrated. I pursued the ball like a crazed hunter.

  I played that way for months, proving my point to them and to myself, and taking my rightful place. One night, as I packed up to leave the court, someone rose from the bench in the empty corridor and moved up to the glass. When I caught sight of his dark figure, I knew it in an instant—even his shape seemed surly. Our eyes met in the glass as though across a chasm. He’d been the first to come after me—the well-heeled, well-fed, immaculately dressed ringleader, the one whose whites, after a full afternoon of playing, never had a mark on them. We just stood there, his arms folded across his chest, the transparent wall between us. I could see from his face that he was holding something back, a card player afraid to give away his hand. I’d seen that look before, on the boys running the valleys and backstreets, and now I saw it on the smooth, scrubbed face of an elite player with every privilege, including insolence, to use at his leisure.

  I wasn’t leaving the academy—ever—and he knew it. One of us had to give in, and it wasn’t going to be me. The smile I put up was more powerful than any punch I’d ever thrown. It hit him harder too, right through the clear wall, right between the eyes, and I knew he understood me at last. All I wanted to do was what I’d been doing—play the game like any other kid my age. Then I shrugged—take it or leave it—and I picked up my bag. A grin fought its way across his face, and he nodded. He raised a hand, put it up against the glass before turning and walking up the corridor. The next time I saw him in the crowded lobby, he said hello.

  *

  Within days, the Wing Commander slipped through the door into my court, a sheet of white paper in his hand. He’d been coming by more and more to watch my fanatical drills. Often we’d play a few rounds and he’d teach me new shots. In the end, he always made the same promise, as flimsy as the paper he was brandishing—to find me girls to play among. To build a female team. Despite recruiting efforts all over the city, and even past its limits, not a single girl had stepped forward to join the academy. Peshawar stood as a gateway to the tribal belt, whose conservative culture bled like an open artery into the largely Pashtun population. Girls might attend school until they married, but playing sports crossed an indelible line. I was more than a maverick—I was a freak of nature. The Wing Commander waved the paper at me like a flag; I could smell the ink from the fax machine. His teeth flashed when he grinned at me.

  “Your time has come, Maria Toorpakai. We are sending you to a tournament. You’ll play girls from all over Pakistan.”

  *

  Wah Cantonment—also known as Wah Cantt—is a city in the province of Punjab. Prosperous and civilized, it had the highest literacy rate in the country and housed the largest and most sophisticated ordnance factories in the nation. A military center into which government funds poured on a river of rupees, the clean city stood in a long, wide valley. Streams cut paths over the fertile bowl in winding ribbons; fruit trees grew in abundance. According to legend, a visiting Mughal emperor took one sweeping look from the hillside down over the lush landscape and exclaimed—wah!—in a reverent echo meaning “wow,” and gave the valley its breathless name. Eighty miles southeast of Peshawar, it took us just two hours by bus to get there. My mind wasn’t on the geography, though my father had sat me down to pinpoint the city on a map. It was on the event at hand, my unexpected chance to compete against actual people—against other girls. I took no small measure of pride from the fact that, win or lose, I was the only girl in Wah Cantt representing my city.

  The squash club on the eastern rim of town was sandwiched between vibrant blocks of degree colleges and campuses on one side and a long span of ordnance factories on the other. Right off the bus, I was ready with my squash bag and the small duffel I’d borrowed from Taimur. I’d had to use a special glue to fix a tear in my shoes, and I’d scrubbed the dull white as best I could.
It was either the tournament or a new pair of shoes—the tournament had won hands down.

  No member of my family had traveled with me; the rupees it took to get me as far as Wah Cantt had been a monumental sacrifice. If I thought about winning, which I did every minute of the day, I thought about it first in the context of making good on the expense it took to send me there in those torn clothes and castaway shoes.

  As I saw the other girls disembark from their buses and move toward the registration building, I felt those careworn clothes on me like a layer of dirt. Most of the girls wore bright uniforms that matched their full white smiles. Silky ribbons adorned their hair, and bangles glinted on their narrow wrists. Lean athletic limbs. Tiny waists. The Wing Commander looked over and smiled as though reading my mind. All around us, girls chattered in a way that made me think of birds, or of the front of the school bus before I walked to the back.

  No question, I stood out. As I walked in and moved into a line, I thought I heard whispers. Heads turned over shoulders; quick glances shot like darts in my direction. I could see that familiar uncertainty flicker over faces. They were all trying hard to place my gender and coming up short. By then, questioning stares were routine. I’d already been attacked by a madman; a perplexed glance was nothing. I was too absorbed in what I was there to do, and the price my parents had paid to send me. The tournament had cost my mother several days’ pay. When I did the math for myself, I nearly backed out, but the family sat down and insisted—without that sport, they told me, I seemed to die from the outside in. I didn’t go to school, so there was no tuition or supplies to pay for; I never wore expensive dresses, oiled my hair, or asked for silk ribbons—overall, they said, I came cheap. In the lineup, I stood quietly, considering my best shots and picking out the strongest-looking players. None of them came close to me in terms of pure muscle. My biceps were as wide as many of their thighs. Two of any one of those girls could have hidden side by side behind me. For a moment, I thought back to the weight-lifting tournament in Lahore, which hadn’t cost my family anything, but could have cost me everything. There was no way of knowing what would have happened if I’d been caught in that Genghis Khan masquerade. I squinted up into the bright ranks of electric lights overhead, relieved. It would be so much easier to play in a tournament without having to live a lie.

  At the top of the line, I stared over the heads of the girls to a formation of desks. The girl in front of me took her identity badge, gathered up her paperwork, and moved off to one side. In her pretty long-haired wake, I stepped forward. I stood alone before the PAF official. I don’t remember why, but the Wing Commander had left for a few minutes that turned out to be crucial. The man looked up. He took in the single earring studded to my lobe, and then the squash bag slung over my shoulder. Slowly, he replaced the cap on his pen. I remember that he yawned.

  “Yes?”

  I put down my racquet bag and the duffel, said my name and city. The man shrugged, took a long index finger, and slid it down a typed-out list, lifting pages silently and then tapping once against the typeface when he found me under T—Toorpakai. I remember that his fingertip was tinged orange—a saffron stain. Smiling, he scanned the vacancy around me and frowned. Right away, I understood that he thought I was a boy—perhaps the dutiful brother accompanying his sister, who was the only player from Peshawar. I wasn’t offended. It was a routine error. I’d never felt any embarrassment about my appearance; if I had, I would have changed it long before. I laughed, shook my head, and told him who I was. The man simply refused to listen. Several times he said no, each time louder than the last. I could feel the few girls behind me who were within earshot go quiet. A smattering of quick whispers rippled along the front line like a small wave curling up a shoreline.

  Perhaps sensing the confusion, the man’s colleague in the next chair looked over. The men talked together quietly and then marched their eyes over me. Finally, one of them got up and conferred with the other PAF officials. Soon they were all at the same table. Now the auditorium was at a standstill while my sex was debated in hushed tones around the table in front of me. I felt the absence of my coach like losing hold of a life ring. The irony was not lost on me that, just a moment before, I’d felt such relief at playing as myself, as Maria. Now, the truth was my enemy, not the lie. When the man came back, he was grave and barely met my eyes. My registration was refused. I watched him sit down, take his pen, remove the cap, and summarily scratch my name from the list.

  There was nothing else for me to do. My coach was nowhere in sight. Finally, the official put down the pen, pushed aside the papers as though they’d offended him, and delivered a long, quiet tirade that might as well have sucked the blood from my veins. When he was done, I could still hear single words ricochet in my brain like fired bullets—“fraudulent,” “deception,” “disgrace.” In the midst of it all, I remembered how carefully my mother had placed my registration fee into a big envelope. She handed it to me as I packed my duffel. Her face was full of pride, but I saw then the circles that framed her once-vibrant eyes. In those eyes I saw long days in the poverty- and war-ravaged tribal belt. My mother could have requested a transfer to a safe school in Peshawar or further into Pakistan proper, but the idea never would have occurred to her. She endured so that illiterate children of our cousin tribes could learn to read and write. After all, she had told me, we were all fruit born from different branches on the same tribal tree. Standing there, my name scratched out on a registration sheet, cast out of the tournament in Wah Cantt all because of peculiarities that were cherished at home—I had squandered it all. Tears swelled and stung in my eyes. Then, as though out of the sky, a firm hand rested on my shoulder. I turned to see the amber-eyed Wing Commander looking down at me.

  He shook his head and walked around me with an air of authority that seemed to double his height. A word or two into the ear of the official and then he handed over his military identification. Loud and clear, I heard him say my name. He found the scratched-out evidence on the roster and pointed to it, asked who was in charge. Then, before them all, he vouched for my identity. An argument ensued that drew in every official in the room and then, within minutes, more from elsewhere. By now the auditorium had gone silent. The back of my neck was hot; all of the eyes on me seemed to be drilling holes through my skin. From the ceiling, I could hear the whir of the ventilation system and the electric drone from the long banks of overhead lights. Still they all continued to debate my gender, voices low. I heard them say I looked nothing like a girl, dressed nothing like a girl, and therefore could not be one. I heard the Wing Commander laugh.

  He began rummaging through his own duffel, pulling out files and envelopes from the depth of athletic clothes folded neatly inside—until he found what he was looking for. He looked up, gave me a calming glance, and I knew. The sheet of paper that had let me play the game in the first place was in his hand. When he handed over my birth certificate, the man who first questioned me sat back, holding up the seal to the overhead lights. Then he made a sound as though he had been punched. One last time, he looked at me, his mouth so round he could have swallowed a jamun whole.

  A few minutes later, it was all over. Without a word, they handed me my registration badge and a color-coded map of the complex. When I turned, I felt all the girls down the length of the room staring, more than one hundred of them, straight at me. Swinging my bags over my shoulder, I followed in the long footsteps of the Wing Commander as though he were lighting a path.

  Outside, I needed to sit awhile. We found a tucked-away spot on a low wall in the trembling shade of a tree. Next to me, but a space away, the Wing Commander faced the sun, eyes closed.

  “The moment I met you, Maria, and realized who you were, what you were doing, and then watched as you played all those hours alone, I have thought one thing and one thing only. If you think it too, it will see you through.”

  “What is that?”

  “Simple—it is written.”

  And my mother�
�s soft voice dovetailed in over his like an echo. She’d said the very same thing to me as I left our home in Bara Gate. I saw her face as she stood in the doorway, my twin brothers grinning waist-high at her sides, watching me go.

  In my room at the girls’ hostel, I chose a bed by the door. Still alone, I took off my beaten-up shoes. My feet were hot, and sweat from my hairline dripped down my back. I lay down on the bed, looking around the empty room that I would share with five other girls from all over the country. The space was quiet except for a fat fly buzzing and tapping against the windowpane. Soon, I could hear girls walking up the hall like music rising. Footfalls stopped at the door and it opened. When they came into the room, I was ready—ready to say my name and become a girl among girls. I’d lived the life of a boy among boys so long that I wondered how I would do at behaving like one of them—whatever that meant. I remember hoping that it meant being kind.

  The first girl who came in paused, saw my cinder-block feet. Her gaze journeyed up my frame, taking in the trunk of my neck and then my attempt at a smile, which more than any other part of me seemed to astonish her.

  “Hello, I’m Maria Toorpakai.”

  I didn’t let her suffer so much as a nanosecond of confusion.

  After I said it, the others came in behind her, not looking at me yet, just choosing beds. One cranked open the window at the far end, another zipped open her bag and pulled out a sack of sugar-dusted Turkish delight, which she passed around for the others to share. The first girl was still standing as before, speechless. After a moment, she turned to the others, waiting for them to see what she had seen. I didn’t move from the bed, just sat up still smiling, opened my bag, and got out my water bottle to take a drink. I closed my eyes as the cool water quenched my thirst. When I was done, all the girls in the room were looking at me.

  Shock moved through my body as though I’d jumped into a cold pool on a hot day. Before me, all I saw were smiles—shy, curious, surprised—without so much as a flicker of disdain. Then, as though lured, they all crossed the long room and converged around me, looking down, asking questions all at once. I had on shorts and a T-shirt, and the first thing they wanted to know was where I’d come by them; then how I’d had the idea for the single stud earring; my short hair—how my family reacted. All of those questions swirling without end, like the ribbons in their hair, led me to a full recounting of my childhood in Waziristan. It was there, in that room, that I first told my story to anyone—born a girl; burned my dresses; lived as Genghis until I picked up a racquet. In the awed silence that hovered, I waited for their curiosity to splinter into hostility—but no such thing happened. I should have known that more than anyone, those athletic Pakistani girls, all of them pioneers in their own way, would accept me as no one else could. When the sack of candies came my way, I took one and passed it to the next girl, and settled right in.