A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  “After the tournament, Baba, where will I go? What will I do?”

  “I’ve been trying to explain it. This is the best day of your life, not the worst. It is only the worst if you see it through a lens of fear. Bruce Lee called it having no limitation as a limitation.”

  “I am afraid, Baba.”

  “You will find your way, Maria, the way you always have. At four years old, all you needed were your brother’s old clothes and a new name. Now all you need is a racquet. If you work hard, America will give you everything else.”

  *

  Wilmington, Delaware, the first week of February—when I stepped outside without a jacket, the bitter wind walloped me. I remember that I had to hobble to a minivan, the door sliding open against the driving gusts. The happy, chattering sounds of other girls swirled all around me. International players at the tournament were put up in the homes of local squash club members, and the family I would stay with for three days was generous and kind and gave me a nice clean room. Looking back on those strange seventy-two hours, I’m sure they found me oddly quiet compared to my bubbly counterparts. They heated up their car until everyone else was sweating and unzipping coats, and still I shivered in the back as though I was sitting on a block of ice. I remember the father staring into his rearview mirror and asking several times if I was well. I nodded and breathed out a yes, but no one could have believed it. Everyone around me went silent when I spoke. The sound of my voice was so hollow, my words were practically lost in the air that carried them. The truth was, I’d never been more terrified.

  At the tournament I fared poorly and was beaten in the first round by a German girl with the raw drive of a great white zeroing in on a kill. Before we even spun our racquets, she had me beat with the cool look in her eye. Back in my prime, she was just the kind of opponent I liked to toy with, send racing around the court like a mouse, tire out before a final scalping. I’d do it with a shrug and a smile, but now I could barely catch my breath. I wasn’t going to be a contender in that tournament and everyone knew it, so they paid me little attention. When I lost the third game after a humiliating dusting, it all seemed inevitable. Up in the stands, a loser chugging lukewarm water, I looked down and felt my body sway. I was angry with myself for ever believing that I could find a way to just stay there and live. All I kept thinking was—how?

  Ayesha had printed copies of my résumé and told me to hand one to every coach there. I also had a long list of government offices I could go to for assistance. All around me, I heard the muffled beats of racquets hitting balls, the reactions of the crowd. The air seemed to thicken by the second. I closed my eyes and listened to a fast rally play out in rapid beats. When I opened them again, the lights seemed to flicker, and I felt the floor fall away. A loud sound like thunder crashed in my ears, but no one else even flinched. Suddenly, as though a hand had come down and plucked me right out of the stands, I was back at the squash academy, looking over at my brother Babrak. I saw the whites of his eyes, heard the strange birdlike sound he made. Somewhere a bomb had just gone off. When I came to, I was at the tournament again. I saw the court, but could still smell the dank streets of Peshawar. In a moment, I keeled over and retched. My gut heaved and acid rose up my throat, but nothing came out. I dripped saliva to the dark gray floor. Head between my knees, temples pulsing, my skin burned as though I was sitting over open flames.

  Soon people were surrounding me, offering water, offering words that had no meaning. As though it were a lifeline, I grabbed a gym towel from a generous hand and buried my face in it. I remember feeling shocked at what was happening. And it would happen again and again over the next two days—like a switch going off, my feet would lose the ground, my breath catching, heart thumping. I would fall away, mind and body lost in a maelstrom. Sometimes a voice or a hand on my shoulder would bring me out of it for a while. I thought I was going mad.

  On the last day in Wilmington, I was sitting in the back row, trying to calm my mind and stake out a desperate plan. Deon Saffery, an English girl, had just beaten the Canadian Samantha Cornett. At the winning point, the audience stood up and cheers whirred around me. Nothing registered. My bag, sitting at my feet, let me know I was still there, and I was still breathing. I clung to those moments of peace until something set me off again. It could be anything—flickering lights, a loud shout, someone asking if I was all right. People were hurrying to leave. I just sat, immobilized. There was a dinner afterward, but I knew that I couldn’t sit at a table with white cloths and folded napkins. I wouldn’t be able to lift up a fork, eat a meal, and pretend that I was all right. I felt people moving and shifting all around. Part of me was desperate to call Pakistan. I had our neighbor’s number and kept repeating it in my mind, knowing full well as I did that it was both a beacon and a bullet. Then, in the darkness of my closed eyes, a familiar scent rose like a specter: coriander, cumin, and a fine ribbon of sweet sandalwood—home. I looked up, expecting to find myself inside another dream. In a way, I did.

  A gray-haired man in a dark woolen sweater was looking down at me. Right away, I knew him for what he was by his wide eyes and the sharp bones in his face. Then a smile, like a flare going up, and a Pashto greeting fell down into my pit of fear like a ladder back up into the safe world. Everyone called him Zia; but for the next two months, I would refer to him as Uncle. Someone in Wilmington had found a way to reach my parents back in Pakistan and had related the desperate state I was in. In no time, my father had the entire block at our house, looking for anyone who knew anyone in America. Suddenly, the man who did everything for everyone was calling in a favor. It turned out that one of our neighbors had an old Pashtun friend who lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. When the neighbor found a way to reach Zia and told him that there was a tribal girl stuck in Delaware needing help, he got straight into his car and drove more than four hundred miles to reach me. Uncle Zia was from our valley back in FATA, and he knew of my parents’ good work in the region. He’d been living and working as a taxi driver in the United States for more than ten years. By the way he spoke to me about our home, as though reciting a cherished prayer, I knew I would find safe harbor in his.

  Our Pashtunwali code is a wonderful living thing, a constitution by which my people have lived and thrived over generations and centuries. It has sheltered the good and the bad, but mostly it has kept the good alive. It was what made it possible for me to find family among my own, thousands of miles away from the ancient mountains where all of us were born. Uncle Zia helped me to pack up my few things in Delaware, and then we traveled more than ten hours back to his pleasant suburban house. Feeling protected under his wing, I slept most of the way in the passenger seat of his hatchback. Zia had five sons and two daughters, and they all lived in a large redbrick house in Charlotte. His wife made huge mounds of hot-spiced food for us, and we sat together on the floor over a big flowered sheet, eating.

  Even there, tucked under the arm of my own people, uncertainty made chase. It woke me like a fist in the night, choked for breath, sheets coiled around my legs. Quietly, I wondered what I was going to do, how I’d ever find my way back to the squash circuit. I was trapped in a pleasant labyrinth with no way out.

  What happened next doesn’t seem quite real, even now. Uncle Zia showed me how to use his laptop so that I could check on the news back home and send emails. It had been weeks since I’d checked my mail. My family hardly ever used their shared account, but with me ensconced on the other side of the world, we had to change our ways. As soon as I logged in, my inbox flared. The latest message was simple: a phone number—the same one he has today. I remember turning to my uncle and calmly asking to use the telephone, though my heart was leaping. I don’t know what I expected—dead air, laughter, or a busy signal that went on into oblivion. Standing by the kitchen window as a thin flurry of snow descended, I dialed and looked out. An upended deck chair on the patio made a bridge over the flagstones, under which a small bird sat huddled against the cold.

  T
he ringtone at the other end stopped. Then I heard the voice and knew it was his. Back at the squash academy, I’d seen videos of his greatest matches—he often yelled at referees and later gave interviews, cool as a cucumber, to an admiring media. When Jonathon Power visited Pakistan, it was always national news— red carpets came out, dignitaries cleared their schedules, squash players everywhere held their racquets in reverence. Auburn-haired, hot-tempered, and tall, with a repertoire of trick shots that could fool lightning, he had a cocky curl to his lip when he spoke. I never thought a man like him would help a girl like me. But I was wrong.

  “This is Maria Toorpakai Wazir. I apologize for my lateness.”

  I was holding on to the phone and holding on to myself as he talked. He sounded happy to hear from me; he sounded like he was in the next room. Based on that first email, exchanged before the dengue virus abducted my mind, Jonathon had gone to work on my behalf, making calls and hatching plans. I remember asking if he needed my résumé, not realizing he already had it. Several times he broke out into a full laugh—it had been years since I’d heard anyone laugh with every part of themselves that way. Jonathon knew my country, understood its culture, understood the unfathomable miracle that a Pashtun girl was the national champion—was still alive in the dark time of the Taliban—and standing in a kitchen with nowhere to go in Charlotte, North Carolina. At the other end of the room, Uncle Zia leaned against the wall, listening. I could see his eyes jumping as he hushed the rest of the family. The children were skipping around the room, hands over their mouths, not knowing why, but trying not to laugh.

  *

  March 22, 2011. Another plane, another one-way ticket. Two hundred Canadian dollars that my parents sent via Western Union tucked into the envelope my mother had given me back in Peshawar, which I had used to keep Ayesha’s gift of photographs. The envelope still had one of her old happy-face stickers stuck to it, the edges curling away. From time to time, I caressed it, reaching into my pocket with the other hand to touch the pebble. In my duffel bag was a small, smooth stone plucked from the cool stream right where I used to collect our daily water in FATA. All my talismans holding sentry, I thought of my mother’s small chest of mementos—her own river stones, bangles, embroidered shoes, and a blue jean jacket frayed at the cuff—that she carted from place to place like a grail. Soon, a honey-voiced captain came over the intercom to announce our descent into Toronto, and I felt a light pull in my belly. Tightening my seat belt, I gazed out. Inclining through soft cloud, far below was a sheet of white without horizon. Patches of black lay scattered over the surface like giant puddles. Lake Ontario. I’d seen it on a map. As soon as Jonathon booked my ticket, I asked Uncle Zia for an atlas. Canada—a vast land nestled between oceans—was the second-largest country in the world. Somewhere down there was a small room that would be my own. Somewhere down there a world champion waited, and a nightmare spanning years started to lift as the plane touched down on the runway.

  At every step after disembarking, I waited for someone to stop me. In line at customs, I was sure an official would pull me aside, send me back to Charlotte, and toss me back to Pakistan in shame like damaged goods. An officer stamped my visa and motioned as though it were nothing to a pair of frosted-glass double doors. I didn’t have any baggage, just a racquet bag and the duffel, as I stepped out into the massive airport arcade. I remember that it was very bright, full of windows, and there were hordes of people waiting. Some held up signs, names written on them in black ink—Kaplan, Russo, Chang. I didn’t see Toorpakai. All those people assembled outside the doors sent me into a whirlwind of panic—he might not be there; I might be in the wrong place. I followed the footsteps in front of me; the rolling suitcases; children lolling in strollers, their blankets dragging all the way down the gallery and outside into the cold. People were coming and going under the overhang—taxis and hotel shuttles—and I stood at the curb shivering.

  Then I heard my name rise over the hum and turned to a smile coming toward me over a sea of heads. Feeling his eyes on me, eyes that I knew from pictures, I squinted, torrents of fear dissolving as though into a full sun.

  The first thing Jonathon Power did was grab my bag and hoist it over his shoulder; he was talking the whole time, telling me where we were going—right to his squash academy, just as I’d asked. Walking barely a pace behind him, I had a quick chance to study the man—the icon. I could see the swells along his arm as he held my bag, which against his broad frame seemed diminished. My family pictures were in there, Taimur’s Quran, my precious stone—all my simple treasures. Jonathon maneuvered through the crowd, lifted my old bag higher. His hand curled around the handles, the same way he held his racquet. Those very same appendages, moving less than a foot from me, had made that man the best in the world at our game—twice.

  In the car, the air was warm, and Jonathon reached out and turned the ignition. He was telling me about his academy, how I was precisely the kind of player they were looking for. Many weeks later, he would tell me that he was just as stunned as I was that I was actually there, sitting in his car. Out on the straight highway, snow fell and I thought of my father at home sitting in his chair, and then of everything that had led me there. I had my birth coin in my hands, tarnished on one side. Over the drone of the engine and the whistling wind, I heard my father say my three names in my ear—Maria Gulgatai Toorpakai. I remembered then what I was above all else: my father’s daughter. I was a Wazir. Above all things, that meant not being afraid.

  When we pulled into the National Squash Academy, snow was falling in heavy flakes and there weren’t many other cars in the lot. Jonathon had built his state-of-the-art squash center out of an old aircraft hangar, and the massive structure loomed from the frozen ground. Trudging through drifts toward tall glass double doors, bits of ice melting into my eyes, I looked up and saw a towering ground to roof billboard in full color come to life. A man holding out a racquet in mid-shot, body electrified: a four-story giant leaping right out of the wall. I stopped and gazed at it, then looked over as the man in the flesh, dressed in a black parka, opened the door and waited for me.

  Right away, we were inside a court, sitting on the polished floor, backs against the wall. We talked awhile inside his temple, our voices echoing, sharing a bag of chips back and forth between us. He told me that he’d spent years raising the money to build the academy. It was the fulfillment of a long-held ambition: to teach the next generation the game, find and coach new champions, help underprivileged kids get off the streets. When he talked to me, I thought of what my father had always said—“Give those drug-addicted Talibs a racquet, and they won’t ever want a gun.”

  After we got to know each other a little, Jonathon tossed me a ball. If I was nervous, I labored not to show it. It was already obvious to him from the way I walked, with a slight hesitation, that I’d been through an ordeal. He already knew that I could play. Taking a good breath, I whispered a quick sura and sent the ball out. It kissed the back wall, and then I returned it again. Jonathon was poised at my side, a miracle I tried not to let distract me. From the get-go, he was giving out clear directions and coaching on the move.

  “Shuffle, shuffle and snap. Go back. Now snap the ball, Maria. Go back. Shuffle. Snap the ball. Hit it hard. Show me what you’ve got in there.”

  And just like that, we were in a rhythm, like two people playing music. It was all so natural and so surreal. I was in a court in Canada. I was in a kitchen in Peshawar. I was holed up in a bedroom afraid to go out. I was in an overgrown field in the dead of night with my brother, playing the game I loved. I was with Jonathon Power. I was free.

  When we’d played awhile, Jonathon caught the ball in his fist and told me he didn’t want to tire me out the first day in. Right then, heart galloping, my limbs hot and pulsing from the exertions of those few exhilarating minutes, I asked the thing I’d wanted to know from my first hit—the one thing every professional athlete wants to know.

  “How did you become a world cham
pion?”

  Jonathon shrugged and took a drink, his mouth rising to one side into the nonchalant grin that was his trademark. “One game and one country at a time.”

  “Do you think I can do it?”

  Jonathon frowned. “When I saw you standing outside at the airport, I was a little concerned. Then I saw you hit just now, and I said to myself: This girl has soft hands, soft hands and a hard hit. That’s really all you need. It’s gotten you this far, right? From the sounds of it, you’ve gotten halfway around the world that way already.”

  I didn’t know what he meant by the term “soft hands,” and I asked him to clarify. Putting down his racquet, he came up to me, held open my palm, and pushed a ball into its warm center.

  “You don’t just take hits, you absorb them in your fist, suck up the power, make it yours, and shoot it right back. That’s what we call having soft hands.”

  “Soft hands. I never knew that.”

  And I looked at the ball in my hand and gripped, feeling it against my skin. I thought back to everything that had gotten me to that moment, standing in a lit-up court across continents and oceans, winning against impossible odds, absorbing one hit after the other.

  *