A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  *

  Into the heart of a cloud, white as ice caps over the Suleiman Range, I held my breath. Tears of condensation streaked the oval window; maybe it was rain. At thirty thousand feet, it was hard to tell. I took in every detail: the movement of the flaps as we shed altitude, the slight tip of the long, gleaming wing out my window, the way the sky showed through every now and again in winks of pure blue. Far below us—an expanse of thousands of miles—nothing but ocean. The plane shook, tossed us about gently. I felt my ears pop and swallowed hard, looked to the girl next to me and we laughed. Then, in an exhilarating flash, the plane shot like a fist out of the vapor and into clean sunshine. I let out a small sound of exultation, whispered a sura, and offered a prayer miles above the earth—as close to heaven as I’d ever been.

  First time on a plane. First time out of Pakistan. Traveling with my team—we all had seats together across several rows. Hurtling and rattling up the runway, I’d felt the takeoff in my belly and was unafraid. I thought of my mother in the doorway early that morning, shawl wrapped about her shoulders. Sleep still all over us like mist, she touched my face. The awe was already there, ideas she could not fathom—while she sat on a ramshackle bus, detouring skirmishes in a hotbed of holy war, the daughter before her would be airborne in a giant silver bird. Unfathomable heights. Spellbinding speeds. Different part of the planet entirely.

  The night before, our entire family had gathered around a map of South Asia, my father on his knees, an index finger tracing my journey. It seemed like a stone’s throw—down Pakistan, slicing across India, sweeping over the Bay of Bengal. Over mountain ranges and rivers, dictators and holy shrines, all the ills and graces of humanity reduced to pinpricks. A stop in the Philippines, and then over the South China Sea to Malaysia. Places, my mother whispered, she would only read about for the rest of her life. A hand still on my cheek, she looked past me to the open door, sounds of morning in Bara Gate just rising. She was letting me go—“I give you to God.”

  Silver wings dipping into a long glide over the Bay of Bengal, whose waters married into the Andaman Sea—the ancient trade route between India and China—my father’s backyard laundry basin world came to life as it had only in my childhood imagination when we pretended to sail the ancient seas in avocado hulls. I peered out, forehead pressed against the glass. Small mounds of islands like dropped stones. Whitecaps lay scattered over the teal water like miniature boomerangs. A wave. I’d never seen one. Never once heard its storied roar. And yet there they were—scattered below me, silent and waiting as far as the eye could see.

  Coastline ahead, a giant hand rising through mist. Boats on the water. Low enough now that I could discern individual things: palm trees, a long ribbon of white beach, people dotted over it like ants. Thatched rooftops hemmed the sand, dwellings borrowed from a fable. Lush greenery. I kept thinking, People live down there. Paradise. Everything I thought about the future changed in that instant; it was like finding out I was going to live for ten thousand years. I sat back as the landing gear cranked out of the carriage and waited to touch the earth.

  My team was all around me—the best female players in Pakistan. Malaysia was a first for all of us. In Pakistan, we were antagonists, fought huge battles in the court—shouting at each other and hurling balls to the ground. The girls could be just as hotheaded as the boys. When it was over, we barely looked at each other. In the court, opponents weren’t people. Not to me, not to them. They were pieces in a game, like checkers on a board—the only true adversary I ever played against was myself. Out there, I harnessed Genghis, often receiving warnings from the referees for my theatrical tirades. Back in the hostel with those girls, I was Maria Toorpakai, teammate, and the thing I’d never truly been before to anyone—friend.

  Up against top-tier teams from all over the world, we weren’t expected to play well and didn’t—it wouldn’t have mattered if we had never got off that plane. But even more than winning together, losing together brought us closer as a team. At the end of another punishing set of matches, we would meet in our rooms and share the suffering of our humiliations. Malaysia brought us up against a stark new reality: female players in Pakistan were third-class athletes. We were staying in a hostel; the boys were in hotels. We scrounged to pay our expenses; the boys had precious few. For the first time, I recognized that playing well and winning accolades wasn’t going to be enough. I had to make them see me—and I would.

  *

  Whenever I came home from a tournament anywhere, my family welcomed me as though I had left just the hour before. It was their way. In the absence of a telephone or reliable mail, I had to take care of logistics on my own. When I packed my bags and left the house, I was simply gone—no looking back—sometimes for months at a time. My mother always kissed me when I came back in. My father would look up from his chair, from a map, from a radio.

  You been playing squash again? Get the atlas.

  My parents had no idea how to play the game and were never able to come watch a match together. My father saw me play just once in Lahore. It was already a miracle that I wasn’t out running amok in the streets or living in purdah in a mud hut. Years later, it amazed me to learn how Western parents obsessed over the athletic achievements of their children. Mine simply didn’t have that luxury—they were dodging bullets and bombs just to get to work. To get to my games would also have cost money we simply didn’t have in travel expenses alone. We were all too busy trying to survive day to day. Though I didn’t know it yet, our circumstances were slipping over a cliff. In 2005, tensions in the tribal belt tightened a thousand notches—Talibanization was spreading like a brush fire.

  When people think of the Taliban, they think only of Afghanistan, when in fact it is a monolithic term used to describe a group of factions with separate histories, ideologies, and agendas. As I was building a squash career, the still nameless Pakistani Taliban was just taking root, gathering armies. Leaders killed off rival tribal elders, increasing their reach and galvanizing their intent. They harvested soldiers from disgruntled tribal factions in the valleys and mountains I still called home. Enemy Number One was the Pakistani army and government, who were conducting military operations against pro-Al Qaeda and pro-Taliban forces. Whole contingents of government troops armed to the teeth had already swept into the Tirah Valley of the Khyber Agency. Over time they moved further into the beating heart of FATA, into the Shawal Valley of North Waziristan, and soon after crossed into South Waziristan. Paranoid subtribes saw those maneuvers as a veiled attempt to subjugate them. Then, in October of 2006, a missile blew up a Muslim religious seminary, in Chenagai village in the region of Bajaur. Boys as young as twelve perished in the attack. Many people pointed their fingers at a US drone, though the Pakistani military took responsibility at the time. No matter. Innocent children lay scattered in pieces. Villagers wanted revenge. They would get it. Within eight days, eighty-five miles northwest of Islamabad, a suicide bomber blew himself and forty-two Pakistani soldiers up in Dargai. After that, it was total war.

  And in the midst of it all, my parents took the bus, and when the buses stopped going into the mountains, they took the pick up. In and out every day—my father to teach classes in colleges here and there and my mother still a principal on the outskirts of Darra Adam Khel. Walls rattled against the bombs exploding in the mountains as my father taught groups of wide-eyed students the mechanics of combustion; my mother read fairy tales aloud to a kindergarten class whose teacher simply stopped coming— and for a brief moment they all forgot there even was a war.

  *

  Riding home on my bike that day, I came upon my father sitting in the front doorway, halfway out and halfway in. He looked up at me, his face covered in dust, as though only just realizing where he was: at home, safe and sound, in Bara Gate, all of his children but me still in their schools up the road. We went inside and I saw his feet, one shoe missing, small cuts on his calf. He had a slight limp. Satchel nowhere to be seen. Slumped down in a chair, finge
rs traveling his legs as though to make sure they were still there—or to hide the tremble that I could just make out when I brought him his tea. He spoke in a grainy whisper.

  “It’s gone.”

  “What is, Baba?”

  “The college. First they came and took all of my instruments. Then they set off explosives. All that’s left is a crater. How was your day, Maria?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Deliberately, he asked again and sat back.

  So I droned on, taking in his filthy clothes, the tears in his shirt. How strange to see him without his bag full of books— his treasure—as though he’d lost a limb. I told him that I had just changed sponsors from the air force to the army squash academy and wasn’t happy about it, but it would mean a bigger stipend. The Wing Commander had broken the news and said he was giving me an opportunity and them a gift. My father nodded, motioning with his hands for me to continue. I talked about the tournaments I was playing, that I was ranked third, sometimes second. He coughed a few times, dust coming off him, hands scratched as though he’d clawed his way out of the earth. I gasped.

  “My hands still look better than yours do, Maria. Keep going, don’t stop for what you see. I’ll get to that later—a few decades from now.”

  Door flying open, my twin brothers came rolling in. Fighting. Exchanging insults. One had the other in a headlock. They scrapped over the floor. Not quite teenagers yet. Their voices still high and piercing. When they saw our father there, they stopped in their tracks. Sangeen opened his mouth to speak, but I raised a hand and signaled for them both to leave the room—letting them know I’d brought home samosas from the market. As they went out, I noticed how tall they were getting, how broad in the shoulders. Not so long ago, they were half my height, came at night to wake me, and sat in my lap. From his corner, my father also watched them go.

  “What is it they do after school, Maria—when they come home?”

  “They eat, Baba. Make noise. Make messes. That’s about it.”

  “Do they go out?”

  “Sometimes. I don’t know where.”

  “Not good. Take them to play with you. You’ll need them one day, and they will need you.”

  They had their own bicycles—rusted red—nearly as fast as mine under their eleven-year-old feet. Up the main street, lengths of rope keeping racquets strapped to their backs, we rode across town. Gliding in and out of the lanes of traffic as a trio, I held out my arms to signal turns. Along the boulevard, through the market. Past men leading donkeys hauling carts full of firewood, the kebab sellers, the cobbler’s shop. Past men huddled under a bridge smoking hashish. Past pale addicts, and holy men shouting out verses. Past the rich in their silks and the poor in their tatters—all of Peshawar in beautiful blinks of color. Every few seconds, I looked back to see my brothers, racing each other, racing the wind, their laughter rising over the welter. Then I looked ahead again, into the sun, and for that one moment, a golden memory even before it was over, I loved my city as I loved those boys.

  For weeks, we rode that way to the squash complex, and I showed them how to play the game, hoping it would take hold before something else did. In the courts, they fooled around behind me—dueling each other, their racquets clattering. Caged in the court, their savagery seemed amplified. They hit the ball into each other to settle scores, wild accusations of senseless cheating, mouths full of insults. Sometimes I just set them to running the tank, lap after lap around the perimeter, to keep them apart. By the end of the day, they were a savage mess on the ground, all kicks and slaps and groans, until I hauled them both by the scruff. I’d had enough. The next week, Sangeen went to play tennis; Babrak asked to stay with me.

  Huddled in the court without distraction, Babrak took right away to the game. The day he served the ball and split it in two, I knew he and I were one and the same. Of the two twins, he was the smaller, the one the Indus almost took back. When my parents had put them side by side on the bed, we could see that Sangeen had robbed most of the food inside my mother’s belly— one full head bigger, his lungs filled like balloons. And pathetic Babrak—in his twin’s greedy shadow—all feeble wishbones, arms so thin I was afraid to lift him in case they snapped. Fast-forward over a decade to a squash court—and there he was before me, splitting balls.

  Just as I was seeing the babe in the boy, the corridor was suddenly dark. A bulb in the ceiling flickered, went out, went back on. It was dark as a cave for a few seconds, and I heard Babrak make a sound like the cooing of a dove. The vents chugged air, games still pounding away in the other courts. Someone yelled out a score. I saw the janitor, almost spectral, skulk past like a shadow, bucket clanging, mop in one hand and a wave from the other— it’s peculiar to me even now how minute details embedded themselves like shrapnel. From that day on, I would understand what westerners meant when they said they could recall every horrifying second of 9/11. Then, from above us, ripping into the flickering quiet, the earth let out a massive groan. The air seemed to heave. There and gone again. What was it? We heard a man shout out. Then another. Then dozens. People ran into the corridor. A voice in my head said: Something is happening. Then Babrak dropped his racquet. He looked at me and said “Thunder.” I knew better.

  Outside, nothing but sirens. I yelled at Babrak to move and get on his bike. He was on the walkway looking up. Immobilized. In the sky, a thick plume of dark smoke rushed up, blooming over us. I’d seen that very thing before—on television screens in Islamabad. Babrak was still gawking. I hollered one thing to him to make him wake from his stupor—“BOMB!”—and our world changed in the blink of an eye.

  Amazing what you can get used to: human beings who were turned into living weapons and let loose among us like a plague—not every day or every week, but often enough at first that people lived on edge at all times. We never found out what happened that afternoon—just that a man had wandered toward a mosque and blown himself up. No one died, just him—as far as we knew. Babrak and I were pumping away from the black spout of smoke, mouths open, sucking down air in a panic, me shouting back to my brother—“Faster, faster, faster!” When we got home, the radio was on. Ayesha and my father were standing over the table in the kitchen, papers fanned out, map of FATA unfurled. They were staring at it as though for a clue to some profound mystery. Ayesha was always working on articles, making speeches in Islamabad, researching university papers. When they saw us soaked in fear in the threshold, we didn’t have to say a word.

  We got to know the signs and sounds: distant thunder, questioning faces. Was it the sky, or a combusting soldier of jihad? When it was thunder, people touched their hearts and laughed. When it wasn’t, they spoke in whispers, spoke to God, and rushed home. War turned the streets into a rumor mill. I tried not to listen. My father was specific: come and go; never linger; take the backstreets; stay away from hotels, bazaars, crowds. Some of the bombers were so doped up, they could barely walk in a straight line. In those cases, rumor had it, a remote detonator was used. The sober mastermind watching from a rooftop waited until his stoned game piece got close enough—into a crowded bazaar, a mosque, a bus—then dialed a number on his cell phone. Sometimes we went weeks and heard nothing, and I would think a bleak phase in the life of Peshawar was over. I was wrong. We were all in the middle of a jihad that was just getting warmed up.

  *

  Peace came with the game I played—and I was playing well, all over the country, all the time. In 2006, while the world around me seethed, I turned professional and continued to play tournaments throughout the continent; meeting my team at the training camps and then leaving together on a plane or a bus; winning medals; making money for the family; coming home to Peshawar and holding my breath. I was the best player on the team—hands down. Coaches from elite clubs called me Jahangir Khan, after the legendary Pakistani squash player and former world champion, for my nuclear hitting style.

  Looking back now, it was a miracle that anyone did anything at all—played sports, went to school�
��but we did. The sun came up in the main street, shops and restaurants opened, banks and businesses unlocked their doors. We washed and prayed—a moat of hope between us and them, to make it through the day without carnage. We had to. I played squash; Ayesha studied for her bachelor’s degree in international relations; Taimur and the boys still went to their local schools—and driving the dusty roads, my parents went right into the badlands of the tribal region, fearless, into the mouth of war every morning. They taught the young who were still willing in an act of bravery that bound them to their students more than any holy ceremony or their shared ancient ancestry ever could.