We bought my ticket in cash—next available flight, in case anyone was watching. The Taliban had a network of spies at the airports. Within hours, they’d know which plane I was on, even which seat—everything but when I was coming back. Taimur counted up the money, and I watched him slapping the bills down on the counter like playing cards, realizing that my father hadn’t come home from the market with meat in over a month. It was the third day of Eid, when Muslims the world over finally broke their month-long dawn-to-sunset Ramadan fast. It was my sacred duty to show happiness, to give thanks, even just to smile, but I couldn’t feel a thing. Over the past few weeks, I’d steadily slipped down a well of depression. During the first day of feasting, I’d come back from our prayers morose and hadn’t shared in the celebratory meal of sweet, fragrant food. Every morsel that crossed my blistered lips tasted bitter. It was that night that my family enlisted Taimur to convince me to leave for the camp. If the Taliban didn’t kill me, they believed my purdah would.
Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, is the glittering crown jewel of South Asia. Not even there yet, I already felt the distant lure of that majestic city, which I’d visited on several occasions with my team. When I’d come home the first time and Ayesha asked, “What was it like?” I said simply: “Another planet— beautiful.”
When I left Taimur at the gate, he held me a long time, whispering things in my ear that I don’t remember now. He told me I was too warm and pulled down my hood, saying I couldn’t dress that way at an airport. Then he handed me the laptop and my racquet bag and ushered me to the security line. He stood way back. My brother had never been on a plane—been anywhere— and I could see the wonder in his face as he watched me feeding my bags into the mouth of the X-ray machine, taking off my shoes, handing over my computer. Over the loudspeaker, my flight was called, and I hauled my belongings off the conveyor belt. My throat was sore and dry. Water bottle long empty, I was dizzy with thirst and asked a man if there was somewhere I could get water. As though in a trance, I watched his mouth form words; I was so tired I could hardly speak anymore. He pointed down the hall and I simply followed his finger. Once, I looked back at Taimur and raised a hand; he waved back at me, stepped forward a pace, and stopped. I remember his smile slipping into a frown before I turned away and hauled my gear down to the gate. I stopped once to take a long drink of the sour water coming out of the drinking fountain—it tasted just the way parts of Peshawar smelled, and I thought it might make me sick.
The grinding of landing gear, the rush of wind, a stream of cloud racing over the flaps; I awoke from a long, cold sleep. Through spires of white cumulus cloud, I could see the two rivers my father had showed me years before in the atlas, Klang and Gombak, which converged down there into the brown water that gave the city its name: Kuala Lumpur—meaning muddy confluence. Around those watercourses, the city spread out in a wide mass of towering structures, like a child’s dream of the future made manifest. In the background, the Titiwangsa Mountains ranged. I let go of my breath slowly, my heart laboring from exhaustion. I thought I’d feel better when the plane touched the ground.
Curving highways wove through the heart of the city like asphalt ribbons leading into a giant jewelry box. Rain falling lightly on the cab, the sun still peeking through, streets glistened. Hundreds of towering buildings, glass faces all blazing, rose into a thin canopy of mist. I remember telling Babrak once: They are called skyscrapers because they really do scrape the sky—and in Kuala Lumpur it was true. But I wasn’t paying attention to any of it. The pain behind my eyes made them twitch. When I blinked, it felt as though my lids were made of sandpaper. Every now and then my limbs erupted in strange aches and twinges. I kept drinking water from my water bottle. The driver kept looking at me in the rearview mirror. I remember his turban—white and wrapped tight around his scalp. My father told me they never take it off in public, but I couldn’t remember why. Hindi music playing low, he asked me questions, and I know I answered him, though I’m not sure how.
The apartment building towered into a polluted haze, and as I went toward the entrance, I looked up into that rough yellow veil, felt myself falling, and held out a hand against the front door to steady myself. Tobacco smoke stained the air of the lobby in which I met the man who was renting me a room. In the elevator, he gave me a key. Then, inside the apartment, he showed me to a room with a foam mattress and sleeping bag on the floor. I barely recall him or the hour that passed like heavy water between us. I told my landlord that the flight had made me tired and light-headed, and he left me alone.
Wallpaper swimming around me in strange patterns like snakes, I found a glass next to the sink in the bathroom and took a long drink. Moving through an eerie pain in my bones, I did everything in slow methodical movements, thinking only of the thin mattress waiting for me like a raft at the other end of the room. I had the laptop open—I’d promised to email when I got in. Ayesha would relay the message; she and I used the same address. I just made my fingers hit the keys. The inbox flashed blue and I stared at it, seeing blurred words that I couldn’t read. I typed out a single word—here—pressed send, and went to sleep.
Twelve hours later I awoke and reached for my laptop. I kept thinking I should tell someone I was sick; Taimur might have guessed it already. Even as my body heaved and trembled, I thought it was a combination of raw nerves and overexertion. In training, I often took things too far. I stared at the white screen a long time, at the lit-up blue line in my inbox, read the name through the inertia of my steadily rising fever—Jonathon Power. For several minutes, it meant nothing. Then its full meaning rose into my consciousness like a massive bright balloon. I might have read the message two or three times, not quite believing it. All I could think of after that was that I would wake up any minute, and how cold it was in the room. Somehow I typed out an answer that I would later forget even having written in the drama of my unfolding agony.
Sometime after, I slogged to the door, took the elevator down. I felt like I was drowning inside that small box. Then, as I heaved against the elevator walls, I slowly lifted up my squalid sweatshirt to reveal a sea of red patches covering every inch of my skin. So hard to focus, eyes and head pulsing like the inside of a struck bell—where was I going? I didn’t know. The lobby spread before me in a forest of people and potted palms. My feet dragged across it as though through sand. People walked past me in bright, flowing clothes that made me think of tropical birds, or the streaks of sunset I’d seen the last time I was in the city.
Crossing the street in the damp heat outside was like wading through water. Twice I fell across the road. I cried out but made no sound—it felt as though every bone in my body was breaking into pieces, like a tapped eggshell. In the quick space between my falls, the air of the city breathed over my blazing skin. I kept thinking, What’s wrong with me? People milled all around as I lay there; I could see their moving feet. Some stopped, glanced down briefly, and shuffled past. I was only one hundred feet from the sports center, but it might as well have been a thousand miles. Eventually, a few people came out and led me into the shade of a tree. Spine against the hard bark, I stretched out my legs and winced. After conferring around me, several other squash players from the camp helped me to the medical center. I heard myself mutter that I must have gotten injured playing in the bedroom.
At the doctor’s office, a nurse took vials of blood and I watched them filling fast. The deep color brought to mind the purple jamun fruit of home, and I asked her if it was true that inside veins, blood ran blue. If she gave an answer, I don’t remember it. The only thing I do recall is the calm face of the doctor explaining what platelets were, how crucial to life, and that mine were dwindling. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the words “dengue fever,” and I knew well what that meant. In the month of Ramadan that had just passed, a cataclysmic flood had ravaged parts of Pakistan, swallowing whole villages and washing away the inhabitants. In its aftermath, deadly illnesses erupted, many born of the stagnant, poll
uted waters and the insects they harbored. At the golden hours of dawn and sunset, insects swarmed in such numbers that the air seemed to vibrate, and people who lived near the swollen river banks often stayed indoors. It wasn’t a sports injury that caused the throbbing tearing in my limbs but a mosquito of the genus Aedes, carrying a lethal virus. Mosquito bites and their scars stippled my arms and legs perhaps from those late-night squash matches in the abandoned park with Taimur. As the doctor explained my diagnosis, I remembered that last drive home, car window down, watching the mosquito coolly sucking at my blood.
Dengue was also known as breakbone fever—and I knew why. When I moved, I thought parts of me were snapping away like twigs. When I was given a phone to call our neighbors back home, they rushed to find my mother and brought her to meet my shaken voice. As the name of my illness crossed the receiver, she let out a high-pitched cry I’d never heard before. People told me later she had fallen straight to the floor, where she sat bent over herself, phone cradled. Then for several minutes she spoke in a whirlwind, horror and fear fraying her words. She assured me several times that they would find help by nightfall, and hung up. It took three men to get her to her feet to go find Shams.
While I was sent back to the apartment with a bottleful of pills and instructions to rest and drink fluids, my mother was flying out into the street, a half-dozen neighbors behind her and my twin brothers at her side, to look for my father. The doctor was hoping my youth would overwhelm the pathogens waging war over my blood, but my mother knew better. When she found my father, he was coming up the walk with a satchel full of fruit he’d bartered for—with what, no one knew. Sometimes he left the house carting nothing more than a grin and an empty stomach, strolling back home with delectable gems—a box of honeyed dates, squares of Turkish delight, a ripe pomegranate, a handful of jamun. When he looked up and saw my mother rushing toward him, they say he dropped the bag, oranges and mangoes, plums and lemons hitting the sidewalk and rolling into the gutter. The book he held on to tight.
One of our neighbors in Little FATA knew a Shia doctor from Para-Chinaar in the Kurram Agency who now lived with his wife in Kuala Lumpur. When the man heard that there was a Pashtun girl lying sick in an apartment in the city, he came for me. Dr. Saadat and his wife, Umehani, both dark-haired angels, brought me to their home, and helped me into a clean bed. Having crossed into their forties without the blessing of a single longed-for child, they embraced me as their own. It didn’t matter to either one of them that I was a Sunni Muslim and that our people often existed in opposition to one another—we were Muslims, and one way or the other that made us family. I, in turn, came to think of them as a mother and father, while I was so sick and so far from home. Over the next four or five days, they took shifts administering medicine, brought spoonfuls of soft, warm custard to my lips, telling me again and again to eat, to drink a lot, a little at a time. We all kept thinking that eventually I would get better; but as hard as my body fought, the virus was ransacking my blood, cell by cell—fast.
In the predawn hours, I woke, shirt covered in vomit. A gulp of water seemed to slice down my throat like a serrated blade. My mouth was coated in a strange slick paste of saliva and blood—so much, I thought I was losing all my teeth. Pulling back the sheets, I lay there and looked up at the ceiling, where fan blades rotated. Stirred air that should have been soft seemed to pelt my hot skin. I could see myself as though from above, saw my red eyes, the rash creeping up my neck, blooming over my cheeks, making them look as though they’d been slapped. I could feel my pulse slow until it barely registered at all. Then a numb weightlessness ran down me like a shaman’s dancing hands, lifting away every possible sensation, and one by one the waking world shut its doors.
Later, Umehani found me and called the ambulance in which I woke up howling. Somewhere within, a moving carousel of razor blades was shredding my body. In that blinding fog of agony, I saw my father standing at the end of the stretcher, holding up a sheet of paper on which he’d drawn a diagram of a detonating cloud and a stick figure on the ground—stress waves enter the body invisibly, and rip apart tissue. A paramedic was trying to put the oxygen mask over my face and yelling my name, but I heard him only as though from some deep underground cavern. I grabbed his hand and squeezed, the ambulance siren clanging, until be brought his face to my lips. I said the only thing I could say—“Taliban. Bomb.”
After that, there was nothing, a void of people moving over me as though casting a spell, voices like tiny flashes of light beaming randomly through the dark: gastrointestinal bleeding, fluid accumulation in the abdominal cavity, blood pressure dropping, shock. I woke up wrapped in white sheets. I had been dreaming of the Americans and their colorful candies, pulled from a white sack. Opening my eyes, I smelled the faint sweetness of sugar, heard one of them laugh, felt myself holding out a hand as he dropped a yellow gumdrop into my smooth palm, like a tiny sun. I raised an arm and tried to rub my face, and a tangle of rubber lines came with it, as though half of me had been tied down. The painful tugging in my forearms made my eyes flutter open. It was that dull ache that told me I was still there, still anywhere—wherever that was. At the foot of the bed, a man was standing, something in his hands, and speaking softly to a figure in a corner chair. Drawing back my sheet, I tried to sit up, squinting. The sheet felt as though it was made of lead.
The man came closer, said my name, and felt my forehead. He brought a cold disk to my chest and held it there. When I tried to speak, the words wouldn’t come, as though they were trapped deep down in my throat and I had to tug hard against a rope to pull each one out:
“Taliban. They have a bomb that only kills impure women.”
“Sit back now, sit back.”
And I did. Closed my eyes and was gone again.
*
Umehani was there, sitting by the window, wrapped in the soft tulle of early morning. Even as I stared, she vanished. Then, what seemed like a minute later, she was standing near me, touching my face. Dr. Saadat was there too, and I could hear their low murmurs. They knew something I didn’t—what was happening, whether I would live or die. The doctors at the hospital said the odds were fifty-fifty and were calling my family back in Little FATA. I remember the cold phone against my ear and the voices of home, listening with a strange detachment, telling them not to worry, as though I was embarking on a long journey. After that, time peeled away and I stayed still, just went back down into some primal cave in my mind, in which I nestled like a hibernating animal. Sleep. I wanted nothing else for a while. Forever even. I checked one last time to see if Umehani was there, and the chair sat empty. Then my eyes shifted to the other side of the room. From the corner, nestled high up like a spider in its web, a man watched and waited. Just there, staring out from tight rolls of silk turban and mottled skin, he drew a smoldering reefer to his lips. The acrid smell of smoke, warm and venomous—I knew the scent with a horror that made my soul fall back into itself, before I drifted off.
While I traced the thin line between life and death, my body making up its mind like tossing a coin, my mother was counting out rupees. On the outskirts of Peshawar, she went with Taimur and found a man who sold her a black goat for a good price, and somehow they got it home. The farmer wished her Allah’s grace; her request for a dark beast meant she had suffered a misfortune. By the time she came home, my father had brought back a mullah to conduct the sacrifice. With a red autumnal moon already hanging, the mullah led the animal into our street, long blade in his hand. Just behind him, her head bowed, my mother carried a white cloth in the crook of her arm. The animal bucked and whimpered—it knew. People watched my mother, her face pale with panic, her expression wild; she was muttering senseless things, her eyes darting. No one dared go near her. Lips forming a breathless prayer, she clutched the animal by the fur along its head, which jerked between herself and the mullah. In a moment, the mullah forced its chin up exposing the full smooth neck. For a few seconds the animal resisted, the whites of its eyes bul
ging, as you could see the whites of my mother’s knuckles while she held fast to the beast. For the moment, the hind legs scraping over the pavement was the only sound. But then Aami spoke softly, her face close to a twitching ear, her tears dripping into the black fur. As though her words were a lulling drug, the animal’s full body gradually gave way, its head drooping to one side. Just then the mullah held up the blade. In the end, it let him do the thing my mother believed would save me. My calm, beautiful mother watched as he slit the neck of the gasping animal in one quick movement. As red liquid poured from the fissure and over the ground, she invoked the name of Allah and stared up silently, eyes begging the darkening sky. Slowly drained of its blood, the animal struggled to stand. It went down on its forelegs before collapsing, the last breaths coming out in slow labored beats. When the animal was dead, my mother handed the white cloth to the mullah in which to wipe his hands and wrap his blade. Then in a final act of charity known as sadaqah, she cut up and gave the fresh meat to feed the poor. That night, my fever finally broke.
The next time I waded up to wakefulness, Umehani was back in the chair. Darkness behind her, her pale face glowed blue as though she was gazing into a pool. Fingers tapping on her cell phone, she made small movements with her mouth, and I thought somehow that she was swallowing words instead of speaking. I struggled to sit up.
“Umehani.”
Then she was right there, clutching my hand. I could feel her pulse in the space between our palms. I was making an inventory of things—my feet, legs, arms, and hands—all of me still there and moving. Twitching. A burning itch flared over every inch of my skin, and I winced. It would take a thousand hands to quell it.
A Different Kind of Daughter Page 31
