A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  “Umehani.”

  Bending to push me down, arranging things all around me— IV lines and pillows—she was shaking her head. “Maria, Maria, the fever has passed.”

  And I looked up into the corner of the ceiling for the man who’d been sitting there on and off, watching me, for days. He was gone.

  “He was here. He left.”

  “Who left?”

  She was frantically pressing a button next to my head.

  I heard an alarm in the hallway and then the man with the clipboard was back. He sat down next to the bed and talked to me awhile, told me just to listen. The doctor who saved me had quite a story to tell. I lay there taking in everything that had gone wrong with my body: internal bleeding, build-up of fluid around the lungs and in the abdomen, severe hypotension, decreased blood supply to vital organs. When I got to the hospital, I was hours from death.

  I’d been in intensive care for over a week. Umehani had been sleeping in the chair in the corner for days, though her clean chador showed no sign of it. Three times, she’d been told I might not survive the night. Doctor gone, the nurse stood next to me. Umehani held my head while she brought a phone to my ear. My sister’s voice came through, and I let out a feeble cry. We spoke for a few minutes, and I remember telling her that I was better, only very tired. She told me about the goat my mother had slaughtered at nightfall, and how everyone believed it was the reason the fever had lifted. She had messages for me from each member of the family, and from others whose names meant little to me in the confused state I was in. Talking to her was like slipping in and out of wrinkles in time. When she asked a final question, I was barely there:

  “Maria, who is Jonathon Power?”

  I said nothing and lay there limp, phone hot against my ear. Maybe I didn’t believe her. I’d already had my miracle—I was alive.

  “Did you hear me, Maria? Jonathon Power . . .”

  Ayesha said later that I never answered, and she wasn’t sure if I’d even heard her. Long before the call ended, I was in the deep forest of another long dream.

  20. Liberty Bell

  Dengue fever had pushed me to the very edge. My platelets were hovering at just above the benchmark of death. I remember telling someone later that the agony was more than a physical sensation, it was a primordial pain. It yanked me right out of my own skin and into a void of hot light, like drowning in a star. When the fever was done tearing through my insides, it simply cast away the leftover shell, as though on a raft far out at sea, on which I lay in a languid stupor. Arms and legs, fingers and toes no longer had any form. I seemed to have dissolved. For a long time I couldn’t feel anything. As the viral hurricane disbanded, I was no more substantial than the stillness in which I blended and fell asleep, a sleep so deep it came with the feeling of falling until there was nothing, and I floated in my own bottomless slumber. Several times, I wondered if I was still alive.

  Buried under cold sheets, arms sprouting strange vines of tubes and wires, whenever I came to it was in an anguished torrent of confusion that made me flail and gasp. The room was so bright with electric light, the walls pure white, it was like waking up within a glacier. I remember the nurse coming in and speaking, and the hard feel of a telephone held to my ear. Members of my family had called several times, spoken to me softly, their voices chiming in my empty consciousness like tiny distant bells. At last, on her third try, my sister’s voice, clear as a songbird through the crackling static, flooded my head. Somehow, I could not reach her; the air from my lungs came out in thin rasps, as though I was buried in gravel. Nothing she said seemed to make any sense; my mind struggled to understand simple sentences. When I heard Ayesha say my name, I know that I wept, my eyes burning, incapable of making a single tear. She said again and again how they had all prayed night and day, and that I would be going home soon.

  Grief engulfed me in a new pain; I wanted home, but not Peshawar. Back to where it all started, our big house in the timeless valley . . . filling a metal bucket with cool water from the stream . . . the perfume of tamped clay floors. As she spoke, I felt my arms lifting that full bucket, upending the water down over me in the courtyard. The scent of the soap my father brought from the market, wrapped up in tissue like a precious gift. The taste of it forming on my tongue as I took the tiniest of secret bites. On hot days, when I plunged my full head into that cool water, the world outside was instantly muted—just as it was as I stared out from the curtain of my slowly lifting illness, unsure of what was real and what was not. Before Ayesha was done talking to me, I was back in the courtyard, my small head submerged in the full bucket, the cold dark water dulling all the pain. Then my father came and pulled me out, carried me wet and cold in his arms, stepping across the threshold of our home, and placed my ruined body in bed between himself and my mother.

  When I woke again, he was gone and I was back in the hospital, wondering what had happened to Ayesha’s voice. Trying to think was like trying to untangle a huge knot and pulling loose only a few strands at a time. My sister had called, asked me things I could not answer—that was all I knew. Under my skin, the flesh was soft and bruised in strange mottled patches. I stared down the length of my lifeless limbs, trying to imagine what they had once been capable of: running around courts—winning. I was the number one female player in Pakistan, and here I was, lying in a small room in Kuala Lumpur, hardly able to move. At no time did I recall the name Ayesha later said she had repeated many times—Jonathon Power. He was just a vague figment in a dream I had, and then let go of.

  Seven days later, I was back on a plane. My family picked me up at the airport in Peshawar, and I recall the flurry of their arms and hands touching, so many voices speaking in a chorus. My mother said that she’d sent a whole daughter to Malaysia, but only half of her had come back.

  The neighbors slaughtered a lamb, roasted the meat, and everyone ate outside in the street. I was in a chair, wrapped up, always cold. Every now and again someone came to sit with me, filled my cup with water, and held it to my lips. Later, from the quiet of my bedroom, I could hear my family gathered downstairs in the front room, talking. I heard my name repeated and sensed in the quick, breathless intonations the fullness of their fear. I wondered how bad I must look for people to stare at me and need to touch my skin softly and so often. My mother came in several times, sighing in the near darkness as she moved about, and rubbed a pink lotion over my body that smelled of roses and made me want to sleep. And I did, on and off, for days.

  *

  When my father came in with two cups of tea, I was sitting up. Squash racquet in my lap, I was taping the frayed handle. Outside the open window, a soft rain was falling, perfuming the warm pavement. Now that I was recuperating, my senses had sharpened. It was almost as though the fever had left a live wire running through me. I heard every murmur in the house, sensed every movement, smelled every layer of the outside world, from the asphalt and damp earth to the scent of coriander and butchered animals rolling in from the market street miles up the road. Even the distant mountains came to me in whispers, alive at that time of year with so many fragrant flowers, no one bothered to name them all. When my father sat down near me, we sipped in tandem. I knew what he would say before he said it. The Taliban had increased the intensity of their attacks in the city, bombing crowded markets and killing by the dozens, or sniping their enemies one bullet at a time. Even in my debilitated state, I was still firmly in their crosshairs. If I stopped playing squash altogether, I would still be me—half boy, half girl—a freak of nature in their narrow eyes. Without even thinking about it, a Talib with my name on his list would shoot me for riding a bicycle or wearing shorts. I no longer had the energy to continue living a life of self-imposed purdah. My father took my racquet from me and squeezed the handle, checked the wrapping before giving it back.

  “There isn’t any time left, Maria.”

  “I know, Baba

  “Have you thought about what to do?”

  “Yes. There is a t
ournament in Delaware. Taimur told me. All I have to do is register as a player. The Pakistan Squash Federation can help me obtain a travel visa to the United States. They give visas to professional athletes.”

  “Good. If you can go, you must go.”

  “But I won’t play well.”

  “It’s not about playing anymore, Maria. It’s about staying alive.”

  At the end of all my options, it still never occurred to me to follow up on the emails from Jonathon Power—I simply had no recollection of their existence. As far as I was concerned, our brief exchange had never happened. In my stupor, I’d even deleted letters, so there was no way for me to check up on my failed memory.

  During the weeks before the tournament, I was unable to train because I was too weak. Just once, and for what would turn out to be the last time, I went to the complex, huddled in the backseat of a neighbor’s car. The administration at the academy had changed hands, and the new one wasn’t keen on supporting the female team. Most of the new girls came from poor backgrounds, with few resources. The fact that they were playing a sport at all in their battered shoes and thin veils was a miracle. The academy gave them nothing more than the court on which they played for an hour here or there. No clothes. Broken racquets. Even balls were scarce. No coaching was made available. No training. Things had changed. The new order just wanted all of us to disappear, back into our homes, into hot kitchens, into suffocating burqas— where we belonged. As I walked the corridor between the courts, scanning the long line of young girls waiting for a turn in their tattered clothes, I looked across at the boys assembled on the other side. All whites. Their sneakers so new, I could smell the clean rubber. They were filing into a single court, where the secretary who ran the squash program was handing out new racquets. Members of the media were there taking pictures, scribbling. So many smiles, they could light up the box for a week. I watched it all through the clean sheet of glass, the girls behind me whispering in the darkened corridor. I was the number one player in the nation and I knew, as the secretary’s eyes fell momentarily on me, that he had no idea who I was—and didn’t care. When I was in the hospital in Malaysia, my family had to scrape together my airfare home. The squash academy had ignored their many entreaties. Thankfully, the hospital hadn’t charged a rupee for saving my life.

  Various teams were leaving for a tournament the next day, and I assumed that was the reason for the media attention. Soon everyone was crowded in the long hallway, and I listened to the federation secretary—whom I didn’t recognize, but a well-fed man by the looks of him—make a short, impassioned speech in his tight-fitting green blazer. He spoke about his mandate as the head of the academy to foster the female team, and as I listened and camera shutters snapped, the girls stood quietly. I studied each one, but they were all the same—just a row of poor girls from all over the country in their scuffed shoes and old shirts, used-up racquets in their hands. Pathetic.

  As the man droned on, my anger grew so vivid that it seemed to take on shades of red as it rose to a boil. My eyes pulsed in their sockets. Something had happened to my mind since I’d been ill. At any given time, an emotion or primal urge could overtake me like a rogue wave. When I was hungry, I gorged. When I was sad, I wailed. When I was tired, I slept all day. When I felt anguish, I raged. The secretary didn’t see me charging for him up the hall and through the crowd, accusations spilling out, finger thrust at his face like a dagger. I gestured to the girls’ shoes, might have pulled one off a hapless foot to show him the filthy, frayed laces, the fact the girl didn’t have socks—none of them did. I grabbed and held up a broken racquet for all to see. Then I told them, in a voice that I didn’t recognize as my own, that the Taliban was winning with their bombs and bullets. Still I wasn’t finished. I pointed out the boys’ team in their immaculate clothes, as they stood around gawking. A few of the journalists ushered me, half wild and still raging, into an office and brought towels and cups of water. The secretary came in after them, calling me names like “big mouth” and “troublemaker.” He still didn’t know who I was, as I sat breathing fast and wiping sweat from the back of my burning neck. When I told him my full name and rank, just like a soldier might, I remember that he blanched, as though someone had taken an eraser to his face and rubbed away all the high color. I don’t remember what happened afterward, but I didn’t get any help from him with my US visa application. Later that day, I was told that within an hour of my tirade, the girls were all having their feet measured for new shoes. Before nightfall, they were decked head to toe in brand-new Nike athletic gear. By the next day, I was standing in a long line at the US consulate, application in hand and waiting my turn. Ayesha, who was active and well-connected in regional politics, made several calls to influential friends and secured me a last-minute interview with an American visa officer. The rest, she told me, was up to Allah.

  As I waited, I became anxious. My mother and brother were several blocks away, waiting for me in the car. In April of that year, a band of militants had swooped onto Hospital Road in two vehicles packed with explosives and attacked the consulate in Peshawar. The suicide bombers blew themselves up to become shaheeds or would-be martyrs, while others tried to storm the building from behind a furious hail of gunfire. In another part of town, a simultaneous and coordinated attack took place at the headquarters of the Pakistani intelligence service. Over fifty people died that day, and more than one hundred were critically wounded. Several months later, just gaining admittance into the heavily fortified consulate building in Islamabad was a serious undertaking, requiring several checks to my pockets and satchel. Steely-eyed Marines were everywhere, kitted out in combat fatigues and body armor, assault rifles at the ready. Every now and then, one of them would walk through with a German shepherd scenting the ground. Though packed with people, the building was eerily quiet. When a man coughed in front of me, everyone turned around fast and stared at him.

  “What is the purpose of your travel to the United States?”

  One look at me, all bones draped in wasted muscle hobbling to the wicket, and he didn’t believe my answer. I’d entered in a veil but pulled it down over my shoulders as I stood before the bulletproof glass screen to reveal a track suit underneath, in a gesture that seemed to startle him. I remember that he had green eyes, and that when he blinked, his lashes were so long and pale that the light shone right through them. It wasn’t often you saw a full-blooded Westerner. I looked at his hands as they sifted through my application, smooth and strong and all-American. Papers, jars of pencils, pens, a tray full of paper clips cluttered the counter. There was a small photograph of an old couple on a sailboat smiling broadly, the sun beaming over their faces— grandparents. A steaming coffee mug stood on the desk to his right; every few minutes he lifted it to his face and put it back down. I sat staring through the thick glass and across the cluttered expanse as though it were an ocean. Just two and a half feet wide, to me the air between us was the whole world separating Pakistan from America. When he looked up shaking his head, my panic was instant. I don’t think he even knew his power over me—that with a single word, barely a fraction of breath, my future would be obliterated.

  A little over a year before, CNN had posted a short article about me on their US website. My father had printed a copy to take along in case my documents and explanations weren’t enough. I had that paper folded and tucked into my pocket, and my fingers trembling I pushed it fast through a small drawer cut into the partition. Decision made, red tape in place, I could see the officer wasn’t interested. He glanced over my shoulder. The line behind me stretched down the hall. As he unfolded the thin sheet, he looked dubious and his shoulders rose and fell. Then, as he took in the headline—TEEN ATHLETE FLED TALIBAN STRONGHOLD TO PURSUE DREAM—I saw a perceptible change. He read for about a minute while I waited—never once touched his cup. When he looked up, I could see his surprise and told him quietly that I had to go to the United States to play. As an American embassy official in Islamabad, he was a b
igger target than I was, working in the biggest target in the capital. I hoped he would understand. Nodding, he picked up his telephone, and within seconds, another man walked in and they conferred for a while. They checked my passport and read the article. The entire time, I was perfectly still, as though someone had glued me to the floor. When the other man left, I struggled to breathe. In the end, the visa officer nodded. The space between us clear as he handed me back the article.

  “Okay, your visa is good to go. Good luck, Miss Toorpakai.”

  On a one-way ticket, I was twenty years old and boarding a plane in Peshawar bound for Philadelphia. Two stops in between—a total traveling time of thirty-seven hours. When the plane went up, cutting through the wash of morning light, I thought of my family. It would be a long time before I saw them again. Before leaving, they’d all found their way into my room to help me pack my bag—the single tattered duffel that had shuttled my few possessions across Pakistan and all over South Asia. No one was sure what I would need, but just about everything I owned fit inside that bag. My sister, Ayesha, gave me a small envelope of photographs, my brother his copy of the Quran, the pages soft as silk. The twins went out into the street and found a pebble, slipped it into my palm, saying I should take a small piece of Pakistan for luck. My parents gave the thing I needed most of all—their blessing.

  On the plane, I held that little bit of Pakistan hard in my hand. I felt as though I had jumped off a cliff and was simply falling through the air, hoping someone down there had a plan to catch me. My father had once told me all I needed to be happy was a squash racquet, but I knew on the cusp of my departure that I would need more than that.

  The night before, the entire family sat around a small television set and watched a Bruce Lee movie that my father had brought home from the market. I don’t remember the movie, but I recall my father’s passion for the iconic martial artist. If Rocky Balboa was my fighting hero, Bruce Lee was his. Before the film, my father had told us that Bruce Lee had developed his own form of fighting called Jeet Kune Do—the way of the intercepting fist. When he came into my room, he was still talking about it, as though he hadn’t slept all night and was simply going person to person, finding ears for his lecture. I wasn’t in a state to listen; I wanted to say a proper farewell and knew he was filling that dwindling space with anything but the vocabulary of goodbye. I stopped him in mid-sentence. I remember that he was telling me how Bruce Lee had taken a steamship from Hong Kong to San Francisco with just one hundred dollars in his pocket and an aptitude for kung fu.