A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  Under those circumstances, reaching the top of the rankings wasn’t a glorious moment; in many ways it passed me by. For four years, I’d been winning in my divisions steadily, one tournament at a time, concentrating on the individual match, never looking beyond what was happening in the court, wherever it was: another town, another country, another world—Hong Kong, Singapore, Cairo, Kuala Lumpur. Sometimes I saw my name listed in the newspaper, the occasional picture of me holding a medal buried in the sports pages, and I remember feeling something—as proud as I dared. Think too much and you start to lose—I knew that already.

  Since 2005, I’d been making several thousand rupees per month playing for the army, and later the WAPDA (Water and Power Development Authority). When I played in the National Games against the top players from all over Pakistan—army, navy, air force, banks, provinces—I won two gold medals: as an individual and as a member of my department team. On the board at those games, I was ranked first in the country. I saw that with some measure of awe, then pushed the thought aside. I was there to play a particular opponent and beat her, and I did. I was on a long, steep road. Squash was all I had—home was all I thought about.

  But you didn’t go home after winning a medal, only to find out your mother’s school had been bombed to the ground, and think of telling her how well you did in your tournament. Or tell her you were number one. Or tell her anything at all.

  Just like my father, she sat a long time, drinking tea and staring out. She waited as though contemplating a terminal diagnosis. Then she said another one was gone—matter-of-fact. Eventually, the education board would send her elsewhere. She knew FATA like the back of her hand, hardly needed a map. As long as there were girls—even just one in a room with a thirsty brain—she would be there.

  Most of the schoolhouses left in FATA were small brick-and-mortar buildings with few rooms, flags hanging outside until it was too dangerous, girls inside—shades were drawn if they had them. Some girls came on buses from many miles away, until militants popped off the drivers as though it were sport. To be fair, they issued warnings first: anyone caught behind the wheel of a school bus would be killed. The militants made good on their promise, usually from a great distance with a shot to the head. Sometimes the assassins simply climbed aboard the vehicle and dragged the man out, beat him senseless, then shot him— small faces all watching the scene unfold at the side of a dirt road, every detail going home, better than a bloodcurdling edict. In Waziristan, dozens of schools had already closed without explosives in just that way: shooting the adults in front of them was a perfect way to keep the girls from coming back, keep them in burqas, behind four walls.

  *

  My mother and I were home within minutes of each other, from opposite ends of Pakistan, separate ends of the earth. She sat down, drained her teacup, put her elbows on the table, and let her chador fall away. None of it made much sense to me. I’d been living inside a brightly lit box for hours every day; I took a bus back, slept most of the way. From another room, we could hear my father fiddling with the radio—not music anymore, just the news. Lately, they’d been going to work in FATA together, my mother always in the rear bed while my father drove. There was no radio in the car, which surely must have driven my father mad. Music was haram—forbidden. “What’s next?” my father said. “Air?” They’d shoot you if they heard a single note. To be safe, he’d pulled the whole contraption right out of the dashboard.

  As she sat there, breaths of the valley came off her clothes as though a nostalgic wind had perfumed her in my childhood—pine and clean river, mountain and mimosa. I brought her more tea—it’s all I felt good for.

  “How do they do it, Aami? They just blow it up?”

  “They left a note first. Some of the schools have chalkboards outside; the girls learn well under the sky. They found our chalk. The spelling was very bad.”

  “What did it say?”

  She was living it again before me—I could see it: trudging up the hill to the stone schoolhouse anchored to the rocky plain; small children gathered all around the defaced board. One of the younger ones said they should make corrections before Madam arrived. Another muttered that they should leave it as it was for her to see.

  “It said: ‘We are going to bomb this school. If you go in and die, your death is your own to answer for.’”

  “Did you go in?”

  “No. The girls had a math exam the day before that hadn’t been graded. We could see the pile on my desk from one of the windows. I thought of going in, only for a second, just for the tests. They’d worked hard. I’d promised candy.”

  “But you did not.”

  “I did correct the board—the spelling. I thought: Let them see me do that. I knew it’s what Shams would have done. Then we went down the hill fast, fifty girls at least running around the rocks. When it came, it was fast. Like a giant wave. And all the girls fell.”

  “And the schoolhouse?”

  “Gone—like the ground just swallowed it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We were all scattered all over the ground like seeds. What could we do? We saw the smoke. We all cried. The girls went home.”

  “Did you see who did it?”

  “There is no who, Maria—there is just a them. No faces, no souls—they are bombs and bullets and cries to Allah in the mountains.”

  In a moment, she leaned down and rummaged in her bag. Fishing out a stack of papers, she asked me to fill her cup. I could see the rank equations from where I was sitting—the young handwriting like pleas in the dark. And then she took out her red pen.

  17. In the Crosshairs

  People said they carried long knives for skinning and slitting throats. Whole villages were at their mercy, entire territories trapped under the ruthless fist of full-blown jihad. Tiptoeing treacherous terrain as though it were a playground, they picked off Frontier Corps and Pakistan Army officers like grouse, lured whole contingents into booby-trapped towns, where oblivious soldiers spread out into a labyrinth of empty dwellings packed with TNT. While the soldiers searched for them in vain, the Talibs slithered into a crude network of tunnels, coming out into the camouflage of nearby hillsides. There they’d wait with their detonators, bellies low to the ground, coolly calculating as the army cleared house after empty house, useless weapons at the ready—and when they’d ensnared a good number, giving a signal and blowing them all up. Elder tribesmen who stood against them were quickly done away with, usually out in broad daylight, the methods involving high degrees of pain and enough blood on the ground to make an indelible point. Starting out as many cells fighting for the same cause, they married into a single cruel and unrelenting force—the Taliban in Pakistan—and whatever prize they sought, they were winning.

  Frequently now, men stopped in to speak to my father in the living room—old neighbors from our long-lost valleys in South Waziristan, others from all over the war-ravaged region. By now my family were living in a different house—I had my own room—not far from the last, nestled in a colony full of carpetbagger Pashtuns like ourselves. It was a better home, with more space and among our own people, a move that was made possible through my mother’s continued work for the education board. We called the neighborhood Little FATA, and you would think just from the people all jabbering away in Pashto and sipping tea on jeweled mats that we were back there again. Rumors spiraled up from those mats and hovered in the room like motes of dust—girls dropped in acid vats, pilotless birds dropping bombs into schools. People went missing in the night; whole villages vanished.

  Every time I passed the front room on my way out, I heard the clink of cups, sibilant sounds of men sipping, the rich bass of my father’s voice rising above the rest; more often than not, I also heard the word “Taliban” and my mind cleaved—to men lurking in alleys smoking scorpion tails and to the war in Afghanistan. I didn’t know there were many rings of Taliban, stretched over FATA in a linked chain of common hatreds and shared ideals, just as there were
many strains of viruses. Once they fused into a single deadly hydra, they took the name Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan—Taliban Movement of Pakistan—and they weren’t just at our back door anymore. On our streets, burrowed in houses, roaming the refugee camps collecting recruits, the Taliban had been with us for a while, hunkered down and armed to the teeth for a long, cut-throat battle. What all those contingents had in common was a bloodthirsty pursuit of holy ideals: ridding sacred land of invading infidels—Pakistani military, government, the heretic West—while imposing their own extreme interpretation of Islam on the population. People said Taliban combatants had infiltrated every corner of Peshawar. Even more deadly than the ineluctable lure of their hatred, their most effective weapon was their ability to blend in—as filthy vagrants and affable fruit sellers, cobblers, scholars, the young boy next door, the man loitering at a corner; one of them could be right there, sitting among us in our front room, just listening in, gathering up information and marking the names of people to pick off later. My father sat talking, sifting out loud from the wild tales of the Taliban’s unimaginable cruelties what was true from what could not be. Some of it he’d seen for himself. What was true was that the Taliban had gained more than just pure ground—they’d consolidated while the government and army blundered, and were running the show not fifty miles away.

  “They have a special bomb that kills only impure women. They shot it into a village near Bannu, and only one female survived. Her they gave to the mullah for his wife.”

  “Impossible”—my father scoffed.

  “A girl was caught showing her face at a window and they took her into the market, held her down, and beat her to death.”

  “True,” my father said. “It’s why they paint the windows black.”

  *

  Bombs every Friday without fail—our holiest day of the week, like Sunday to a Christian or every day to a Buddhist. Each time the roar and rumble came, everyone stopped, looked to the sky for the telltale plumes of acrid smoke. It got so the day arrived, the sun dragging terror behind it, and the populace braced itself for the inevitable attempts at slaughter. Soon, there were attacks on other days of the week, more frequent and more elaborate— car bombings, kidnappings, and suicide attacks in the markets where women shopped. Second-nature survival habits emerged, as though awakened from some vestigial part of the brain. We scanned crowds along the main streets, checking from the safety of their fringes for a suspect backpack, for anyone walking too deliberately, mouth muttering a vicious prayer, or for the doped-up vagrant, weapon concealed in layers of grime, who had no idea as he zigzagged down the vendors’ stalls that he had a short-term job as a mass murderer. We had to go out to buy things. Going into the bazaars and along the market streets suddenly became acts of faith. Faith alone was what kept people going.

  In high school, my brother Taimur grew as pious as Ayesha. Every morning, he rose and washed himself with soap and warm water filling the sink upstairs—Fridays especially. I could hear him on the other side of the door: muted splashing, furious lathering, hands foaming, the way he sometimes whispered to himself in the gray light as though already halfway into his prayers. When he emerged, he was dressed in his white shalwar kameez and a soft grin:

  “You have your racquet, Maria, and I have my Quran.”

  We hadn’t played squash together in years. Plunged into his teens, Taimur went to school, met up with friends, became my father’s apprentice—fixing things with duct tape, rebuilding radios, reading maps, and losing himself in books. Immersed in my game, I traveled the country and was gone sometimes weeks at a time, training at the academy in Peshawar, playing matches, accumulating medals, getting to number one in the rankings, bringing home a check when there was one—doing my fair share in unfair times. Between us, things hadn’t been as they were before—his reckless brother Genghis, my silent guardian shadow. No argument, just a distancing as he went about the business of becoming a man. Agile. Tall. Superior. He’d used the racquet like a broom, sweeping me right across the hard floor as I scuttled after the ball. The last time we played, I was still a beginner. It was only our second week in the courts together, and I lost three games in a row, not a single point in my favor. I stood there, racquet at my feet, as he drank from his can of Fanta; every rise and fall of his Adam’s apple as he gulped was an insult, and I seethed. Lowering his head, he saw my pinched face and raised his arm, can proffered in consolation: “Why so angry? I’m a boy—of course I beat you. I always will.”

  On little more than impulse, I sauntered over and sledge-hammered a fist into his solar plexus, felt that familiar wishbone cracking of the knuckles that would leave me sore for days; heard him let out a quick shock of air, the clink-clink of the tin can denting. Taimur stepped back, shook his head to brush off the blow like a sudden chill. He coughed a little, reached out, and shoved me once, not hard. We looked at each other. Then he just laughed and got his racquet, left me the last of his drink.

  Now we were alone together in the kitchen, a halo of soap surrounding his polished skin. Through the shy light of daybreak, he held out a small pomegranate to me, like a forgotten memory of a time and place lost to us forever. Childhood. Pomegranates were costly and hard to come by, and I hadn’t tasted one of those ruby seeds in years. I sliced the fruit open, offered him his half, which he refused, and so I sat picking soft gems from the white hull. Every Friday now, he and my father went to the mosque to assemble and pray with the other brave men of Peshawar. I listened to the sounds of pipes tapping from upstairs, my father’s footfalls. I looked up and saw the brown webs of a slow leak growing over the sagging ceiling. Outside, a hot wind whispered through the open window behind Taimur, buffeting his short black hair. Cooking smoke floated in; the map of the world tacked to the wall rippled. Savoring my last pomegranate seed, I looked over at Taimur, his face faraway as he gazed at the backs of his hands, as though amazed they were still there. I wondered if he was thinking what I was—would that perfect body he lived in be in pieces later? There was a long list of things you couldn’t say in those days—“Don’t go” was one of them. “Why?” was another. He and my father had already made a pact between themselves and with God. Submission did not run in our Wazir blood.

  In a state of wudu, my father entered. Taimur got up. Saying little, we all went to the door—squash racquet strapped to my back, holy books hooked to their palms. We moved up the street together. They were off to the side, ambling; I was in the road on the Sohrab, feet moving against the ground, spokes ticking beside them like a stopwatch. Mind moving a mile a minute, I took them in as one in sideways glances. Years later, I would meet other people who’d lived in randomly terrorized cities—Tokyo, New York, London. Each morning, as you left your loved ones in doorways, to tail lights, lumbering buses, or train whistles, it was always with a single unspoken question. Releasing it to the air would break open a dam of monumental fear, and so you held it in for all you were worth, managed a smile, and merely thought the thing that wouldn’t have an answer until dusk—Will I see you again?

  I let them go at the corner, turning right in a slow glide as they continued on up the narrow street, a single minaret in the distance like a high mast drilling into the sky, a long strip of cloud forming a soft banner behind it. They appeared in miniature before the tower, dissolving into the surge of a steadily forming crowd. More men, all ages, went up behind them in a white stream, pushing slowly forward, toward a fate dispensed according to the will of God—or the Talibs hidden along the rooftops, nestled in the alleys, behind the smile of the fruit seller with his pyramid of mangoes, and a detonator in his pocket. I remember thinking, at least once a day, We moved to Peshawar for a better life. I couldn’t tell you how or when we started living within a dark cloak of terror—we just did.

  *

  A man at the corner doing nothing much. Loitering. His shaven face, jawbone flexing, showed purpose, though he was just standing there leaning against a rail. Turban so elaborate, I imagined that, unraveled, th
e pale fabric would span a full block or more. From the corner of his eye, he clocked me and I saw the shift of his eyeball, barely discernible, but years chasing squash balls left me hypertuned to the subtlest movements. As I passed, smooth and steady along the beat-up road, feet still on the pedals, his head didn’t move to follow me. In fact, he didn’t move at all, not yet—in itself a chilling sign. Then, barely in my line of sight, I saw him raise a hand and hold it up. I glanced over my shoulder to be sure. Not a wave. Instinct told me to pedal faster, but not too much—not in a frenzy. Up ahead I spotted another man, standing just like the first, in mirror image, like a film rewound. My feet stopped, bike wobbling when I saw him, the familiar roar in my ears as I held my breath.

  Blinking dust from my eyes, I watched him, but he stared dead ahead just like the other man. A statue, a zombie—a soldier of jihad. Imagination in high gear, I tried to talk myself out of the foreboding—I’d heard too much talk in the front room. Gripping the handlebars, I made up my mind to hold my breath until the end of the street. Like a passing photograph, I saw a jingle bus go by. Heard the baying of a lamb. Not far now; he was less than a hundred yards away. Purposely, I braked a little and went ticking by, feigning nonchalance. I was just passing him, like a figment from a nightmare, and then he did it—one hand went up, marking me with an invisible target as I moved by—and I knew. Pedaling wildly, I scrambled up those last yards, shooting out the street and careening left, then right, and at the next turn right again. Blood rushed through my head, so I could barely hear the sirens or the call of the muezzin. I was on the move now—backstreets, narrow alleys, behind shops, along apartment blocks, tearing through the market thoroughfares. Sourness of the sewers, sweet warmth of butcher’s blood. Winds of terror chasing me. And then a distant rumble of thunder. I knew that it wasn’t a bomb—too long a roll, too far away. I stopped only to get to the building in which I took refuge. It had taken an hour’s sidetracking to get there.