A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  After that, I lost every game—one after the other. In his patience and capacity as the national team coach, Rahim Gul gave me another chance to run through a series of matches, but I failed again. Despite every ambition, the fissure of doubt that started in my mind during that first match soon tore me right open and settled in. From then on, I was doomed. On the last day of the trials, when the official from the Punjab team federation came out to tell me it was over, my bag was already packed. My father had left after the first day, and I sat outside alone on a bench.

  From the direction of the squash facility, I could hear a man calling out. As he moved up the long cement path through the dancing shade, the breeze brought me hints of him before I saw his face. The scent of the courts: hot rubber, sweat, and a sandalwood balm that would always announce Rahim Gul’s presence long before he ever came into view.

  “What are you doing out here? You’re not going anywhere, Maria Toorpakai. In three weeks there is a set of trials for the Asian Games and you will try again.”

  “Why would you keep me? I do nothing but lose.”

  “If you say so. I see something else—I see a winner. You can’t leave until you see it too.”

  He had a way of making me smile through tears, and I simply nodded—“Okay.”

  *

  After another long bus ride, north and closer to home, we reached the capital of Pakistan in the rain. Built in the 1960s, Islamabad replaced Karachi as the nation’s seat of government in 1966. It was just another big city sprawled out in a backdrop to my dreams, and I remember little of it—my father would surely have been disappointed. The military was on high alert, though I wouldn’t have known it at the time. Military checkpoints and tanks had become the wallpaper of Pakistan; soldiers with machine guns at intersections and outside buildings were as common as trees. Their dark presence all over the city foreshadowed nothing to me. In the background, there was a constant chatter of Iraq and the United States. I heard it crackling away on the bus radio—talk of chemical weapons, ceasefires, and UN resolutions. Before long, one of the girls asked the driver to put on music. He balked and turned our speakers off. I remember that when the sound went dead, the thin-boned girl next to me rolled her eyes and said: “If the Americans invade Iraq, we are done for.”

  But I never asked her what she meant.

  Traveling alongside the national team was a muted thrill. For the first time, I ranked lower than an underdog. I knew I was a dead weight. None of the team treated me that way, in part because of my size, which was an endless source of fascination to those lithe girls. At twelve, I was also the youngest. Older girls looked after me in motherly ways I wasn’t accustomed to— making sure I bathed, ate well, and went to sleep on time. Part of me enjoyed the coddling, and another part enjoyed nothing at all, because I couldn’t seem to win a single match to save my life. Whenever we went into the courts to practice, I got crushed. Still, I didn’t give up, not yet. I simply trained longer. Harder than the other girls.

  Even more than the Asian Junior championship, the biennial South Asian Games, being held in Islamabad, were steeped in prestige. All I could think about was replacing my broken trophy with something better, my bad luck with good. From the start, it wasn’t to be. The moment I stepped into the tank and went up against elite opponents from all over Pakistan proper, they hammered me down like a nail in every single match. Long gone were the days when I sauntered Peshawar taking down boys. In matches of pure brawn, I had beaten thoroughbred street rats. Genghis still lurked under my skin, as he would for life, and I hated losing, not just the matches—but against girls. The irony was not lost on me, but not relevant either. Genghis had been with me far too long, and in the courts he came to life. Still, even he wasn’t enough. I was on a losing streak, and every opponent sensed it like an odor coming off my skin. I remember thinking that Rocky Balboa had said that nothing knocked a person down harder than life. He was wrong. There was nothing worse than being a loser—especially after being a winner.

  Sheer nerve bearing down, I just kept at it right until the final match, which I thought I might take at last. I’d caught up against a girl from Karachi, point for point and game for game. If I could take her out, I might take another out after her and slip onto the team. A win had been elusive for so long that when I saw just a glimmer of possibility, I chased after it, panting. Then, like an intruder, a single thought, fleeting and lethal, took a jab at me while I met her toe-to-toe—losing. And I was back in a tailspin. When the ball swept high overhead, I cranked my neck, springing up. As I reached, pain tore through the muscles along my spine like a meat cleaver, and I went down to the floor like a felled tree. Lying there, looking up at the lights, for several minutes I couldn’t move. Coaches came in and cupped their hands to their mouths to warm them, then held their palms against my back, pushing to release the wound-up muscle. Then I sat up, head in my hands—the game was over.

  On the bed in the hostel, lying over bags of ice, I believed my time had truly come. I didn’t pray to God so much as plead with him—asking why. Alone in a heap, I wept as I never had before. Later, when my back loosened and the girls were all still out, I went downstairs and through the doors—bags already packed and waiting in the lobby. There was a phone in an adjacent house that we were allowed to use to call our families. Before I went there to place a call to Bara Gate, I sat awhile on a bench outside. For weeks I’d longed for anything of home, and shuffled through stills of memories: the front door open and my mother inside it, putting down her bags and opening her arms; twin brothers running down the road, kicking up dust to greet me; Taimur’s shy grin; Ayesha’s hand so pale, like a bird’s wing over mine whenever I cried about anything. And my father, who was home itself. Once again under a tree, on a bench and weeping for my losses, Rahim Gul found me.

  “Here we are again, Maria—you thinking you’re leaving and me telling you to stay. It’s my job to decide. It’s your job to play. Stop crying now. Stop crying and get back inside. You’re staying to train with the team.”

  And I did.

  Soon after, March 20, 2003, the United States unleashed war against Iraq. Rumors of an invasion had swirled through the corridors like confetti for months. Iraq, two thousand miles away over mountain chains and across deserts, beyond Afghanistan and past Iran to the west, meant absolutely nothing to me. All that mattered was winning a medal—and I’d failed at the trials. When the invasion started, it was televised the world over. I still remember people huddled around small TV sets, watching. Explosions over Baghdad bloomed onscreen in huge clouds of debris that flashed as though they had swallowed lightning. I remember wondering, as I made my way to and from the courts, if they were swallowing people too. Hardly anyone spoke. People just wandered the hallways. Some had already packed up and left. All of that silent foreboding made no sense to me until my roommates filed into our room and started pulling clothes from drawers, all of them weeping. I just sat on the bed, a bag of pistachios in my hand, watching them until one turned and told me to arrange for my bus ticket home.

  “The Americans have invaded Iraq, Maria.”

  “So?”

  “The games have been postponed.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like World War Three—that’s what everyone says. In a few months, we will have to come back and do it all over again.”

  “Do what over again—the trials?”

  “Yes. It’s a disaster.”

  Not for me. My child’s mind truly believed for weeks afterward that Allah had intervened so that I could try again. He’d heard my wailing whys and realized that he didn’t have a good answer. Rahim Gul had also been coaching me at every chance; sometimes we played a match just for the fun of the game and nothing else. He told me that winning is a process, not an event, and that as soon as I believed him, I would start to win. The moment I got that miracle second chance, I knew that I would— after all, Allah would only start a war for a winner.

  *


  Months later, after Saddam Hussein was caught in a rathole, the games were rescheduled and I was in my right mind again. There isn’t much to say about the matches, apart from the fact that I beat nearly every opponent in my division and finally made the Pakistani team. For the first time since before burning the dresses, I had new clothes of my own. Even now, I remember everything about those clothes—the smell of the cotton pulled from the crinkling paper; the fabric so pristine I didn’t dare unwrap all of it for days. Piles of shirts, sweatpants, and socks. The feel of the cotton touching my skin was like a soft kiss. I had been welcomed, clean and ready, to a new life, the filth from my past all gone. I belonged somewhere. More than anything, I felt like a champion.

  And I was. A fanfare of parades, speeches, television crews, and cheering crowds opened the games. All I thought about was going home with a medal to replace the broken trophy that had started me on my losing streak in the first place. In razor-close matches against top-tier players from all over South Asia, I won two medals—a bronze for the individual matches, silver as a team. I didn’t win just because I was a better player; I won because I knew finally that I could, my coach cheering me on from the sidelines. When he came up to me, jumping and clapping his hands, I saw myself as he did—at last.

  This time, it was my father I saw when I came in with my bags. I’d come back home to tell my family in person that I’d placed well. He was dozing in a chair in the front room, papers in his lap, open books strewn all over the floor, a cup of cold tea on the table next to him. The house was silent, as though it had been sleeping the entire time I was gone, stopping time and just waiting for me. It had been months since I’d been home, and I stood there a long time in my team clothes, relishing the feel of it. Before I’d left Islamabad, a man had dropped off a government letter at the hostel, announcing that a cash prize would be awarded with our medals. Reading it over many times, it took most of the bus ride home for me to believe it. I had won more money than I could fathom—three thousand five hundred US dollars. When I tried to imagine what that amount would look like in cash, I couldn’t. The envelope was folded in my pocket, the paper already going soft and tearing along the seams from constant touching. This time, I wasn’t paying just for a bit of food for the family—I was helping to pave a whole future.

  As I crossed the room, my father stirred. When he saw me there, he just looked at me, blinking as though still halfway in a dream.

  “I’ve come home with a surprise, Baba.”

  Opening the envelope I’d placed in his lap, he read the letter and nodded. I could have gone all the way to London and brought back the crown jewels in a carpet bag, and I doubt he would have even blinked. He asked me to bring fresh tea. I came back with two steaming cups and we sat together in the quiet house, waiting for the others.

  “Rahim Gul is a good man, Maria. He called and told me that you asked him why he had you stay there when you had given nothing but losses.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember what they called the saint buried at the shrine in Lahore?”

  “The Giver of Treasure.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s why we could eat and sleep in his house.”

  “Sometimes, a person has a pearl buried in their soul, and they need to find a giver—except the precious thing they give is a thing you already have. Until we encountered Rahim Gul, I thought that was my job alone. It was a strange thing, finding out that another man could do what I had always done. Then I realized what he’d done for you, he’d also done for me.”

  “It was actually very simple, Baba. He said I had a loser mentality. I just had to find my winning mentality.”

  “Exactly. And now you know the power of a thought. There is no bomb that can match it.”

  “It was bombs that gave me a second chance at the games.”

  “No. When you walked in here and I saw you, I thought just one word.”

  “What was that, Baba?”

  “Treasure. And I had no idea about your prize money. You look like what you are at last—and we owe it to him.”

  Later, when Sangeen and Babrak gifted me my glued-up trophy, the crack bleeding dried gobs of glue, I thanked them and put it on the table next to my new medals. For years, until it was lost in a move, it sat there untouched. In fact, I never touched anything for luck again—just went out the door and got to my game.

  16. Number One

  Rahim Gul was right: winning was a process—a state of mind. Sometimes I secured it only after a nail-biting inner conflict; at other times, victory slipped into my palm like fallen fruit. It began as a mantra when I walked on court, feeling it braid into my body as I paced the walls—priming muscle and reflexes even before I spun my racquet. The same held true for becoming a champion, the ultimate player, a dream that first stirred when I put on my team colors—green blazer, white dress, polished black shoes—for a tea party at the home of the president of Pakistan. The president had invited my team to celebrate our South Asian victories. The elaborate invitation came on embossed paper so thick my father said he could use it to shave.

  I’d buffed the leather of my elegant shoes, the smell of polish like gun oil, until the tips flashed. Long-sleeved, hem falling below the knees, the first dress I’d worn since my bonfire felt like wearing a bag. When my family, assembled in the kitchen going about their daily routines, saw me, they all froze. Taimur put down a screwdriver and pulled a hand from the gutted Philips radio in front of him. My father put down his pliers. My mother stepped away from the counter, hands rushing to her cheeks as though to keep her head from falling off. Ayesha dropped a pen, Babrak a slingshot. Sangeen just laughed out loud, doubled over, and pointed at me.

  In the days leading up to the event, I heard stories about the presidential palace looking like a multi-tiered wedding cake sitting high on a hill at the end of a long four-lane drive. A thousand windows. A hundred rooms. Gold-plated faucets. Elevators. A house right out of a movie. I couldn’t wait to see it. Instead, the team bus veered fourteen miles south of the capital and took us up a short, narrow drive to a humdrum two-story building in the sister city of Rawalpindi. President Pervez Musharraf, military dictator in power since 1999, lived at the austere Army House. Someone said he went to the palace only to sign papers and call superpowers. No matter, the venue was a letdown. Going up the walkway to the garden where the party was already underway, I looked up at the house. Snipers along the rooftop, machine gun nests on the ground. Barred windows, barbed wire, and a satellite dish. To me, a Pashtun who’d been raised under the codes of tribal law—and had made the national squash team by the skin of her teeth—the dictator was just a curiosity.

  Huge white tents had been set up outside. Pots of flowers, blooms spilling over. Uniformed servants floated among the guests, offering colorful bites of this and that from trays like exotic islands—samosas, patties, cakes, and sweets. My father and I enjoyed ourselves in a style we had never known—nibbling luscious food from china plates, dressed in finery, the pleasant cacophony of idle chitchat playing all around us like foreign music. I remember watching my father in his starched clothes and handsome Pashtun waistcoat, the way his hands moved when he talked, fingers swimming through the twilight. Standing among the crowd in his high decorative turban he showed no sign of the starstruck nerves I watched distort the faces of everyone else around us when the president moved over the manicured lawn as though it were an inspection line—as though he were a king—dainty porcelain teacup in his hand.

  When it was our turn in the lineup, I remember standing next to my Baba, studying Musharraf as they exchanged pleasantries like business cards. I’d seen that dark face in the newspaper, heard his voice on the radio. The perfectly groomed black hair, markings of white up his sideburns and just over his ears on either side, so like feathers. His position should have transmuted him from man to lion, but he wasn’t much taller than I was. The brief encounter under a white tent, towers of fruit and vases of birds-of-paradise as a ba
ckdrop—it was all so casual. I wonder now if my father wasn’t chewing off his own tongue as they bantered about my wins at the games in Islamabad. Just the day before, my father had slipped in and out of the cauldron of violence brewing in the tribal belt to get to a lecture hall whose occupants were diminishing by the hour. The man he was speaking to through a serene veil of late summer was more than just a witness to history; he was one of its masters, the man in charge— and already losing his grip. As we sipped and chatted, militants were swarming the region like hornets. If my father could have said anything, anything at all, I’m sure he would have started with—I could have told you so.

  Musharraf spoke to me about my game. It was the same conversation, repeated over and over again as he walked the soft grass. All those wide-eyed athletes clung to the tip of his tongue, though I doubt he would remember a single name. He had a gleaming smile that appeared so genuine; for a few seconds, it enveloped me. My father had warned me of the politician’s first weapon: the brighter the smile, he said, the sharper the knife. In many ways, President Musharraf seemed like an affable man without a care in the world, but under that crisp uniform he’d strapped himself into a ten-pound bulletproof vest. Guards front and back carried sub-machine guns. Rumor had it that he kept cyanide pills in a hidden pocket over his sidearm. Still, none of these measures would make a bit of difference against that one bullet or one bomb in the right place at the right time. Musharraf’s enemies were relentless. They could afford to try and fail as many times as it took to finally kill—he could not afford to fail once. At that very moment, militants—hunkered down in the Abode of God, scattered over valleys, cloaked in camps outside remote villages—were thinking up dramatic ways to kill him. If they could, they’d just mete out his punishment the old-fashioned way and tear him limb from limb. Suicide recruits were lining up by the hundreds for the chance to stuff backpacks full of explosives and blow him to smithereens. His crimes were simple and abominable—a pawn of the infidels in the West, he’d let his army and theirs run roughshod over the region. What began as a security mission to rout out Al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts was brewing into a full-blown jihad. If history could choose a winner, it wouldn’t be the man I heard asking a girl if she’d enjoyed the cake. Though I liked him enough, I saw him for what he was: flesh and blood, slightly pudgy, fingerprints smudging his frameless glasses. Within less than a minute, he looked past me, and with a shift in the breeze, President Musharraf was gone, clanking away in his green uniform, guards at his side. All evening I could see that flashing grin as he made his way from tent to tent, entourage following his every move like a gaggle of birds in military clothes. When I got home to Peshawar, all I told my mother about was the food.