Once the twins were satisfied, their tiny hands sticky with mango juice and clutching at my braids, I carried them out into our garden out back. I wandered about in the sunlight, reciting verses from the Quran called ayahs and swaying until my arms strained and I put my brothers down on a carpet of blankets spread out in pools of shade, always watching as they rolled about grabbing at the air, grabbing at anything with their tiny fists. Once, I caught Sangeen with a stone in his mouth, and I learned my lesson. Eventually they would tire, and I would watch for a few minutes as they slumbered there together, to be sure their sleep was sound, trying to guess at what they saw behind those small, twitching lids. Gently I wrapped their small, warm bodies with cloth, as though they were packages, and slipped each into his hammock like a seed into a pod. They made soft sounds as they slept, like birds.
While the twins napped, I thought nothing of leaving them in their hanging beds while I put on my sandals and slipped out into the neighborhood. One day, I promised myself, I would run all the way to the Indus, so that I could see it gleaming along the edge of the field and give my greeting, at last, to Abasin. Until then, though, I restricted myself to the quiet little cul-de-sac just outside our front door, and usually just sat on the low curb by the gate. A Saraiki woman across the way, in a house that was the mirror image of ours, often came out to check on me or, more likely, my baby brothers. Sometimes she offered a cup of fresh yogurt, or I brought her buttermilk with which she made us mounds of dough for naan bread. Her fair Indo-Aryan skin held bold features so perfect in their symmetry they might have been painted, and her long locks of tar-black hair gleamed when she moved. Cloistered within my Pashtun tribe, I’d seen only Wazir faces like my own, and at first her exotic grace startled me. I’d never seen eyes so big, and her many beautiful children, who always swarmed at her waist, all looked just like her.
Our Saraiki neighbors often admired me in turn for my embroidered dresses and long, intricate braids, marveling at the juxtaposition of delicate adornments against my hard tribal posture. The muscles on my arms were as big as avocados from carting babies around. You could see when I walked tall and proud—always my father’s daughter—that I came from a long line of Wazir warriors.
Often at dusk the cul-de-sac would transform into a vibrant stage, a lone streetlight illuminating a pair of drummers assembled underneath the wooden lamp post. At the first loud beat of the dhol—a double-headed drum decked in pompoms—every able-bodied Punjabi from the neighborhood converged on the street and started to move in a wild dance of rolling bodies called the Bhangra, rocking their hips, sweeping their arms and feet— what locals called the “happy way.” The music reverberated in my chest, and I sat and watched them in awe.
*
Not long before my fifth birthday, I became keenly aware that I wasn’t a typical tribal daughter—I wasn’t a typical girl at all. Given the choice, I would much rather have played out in the mud plains with Taimur, tossing a ball or shooting marbles, than sit around playing dolls with my dainty sister, Ayesha. Finally, I told my father in a long, impassioned tirade that I wanted to wear clothes like my brother’s. He listened, hoisting me up into his lap, and nodded his head, laughing out loud. Everyone in the family had already noticed that I was far more masculine than I was feminine. Not long afterward, my generous Baba came home from the bazaar with a pair of yellow shorts and a matching T-shirt for me to wear around the house. I don’t think he ever dreamed that I would go out into the street in those clothes, which I did, always unobserved. Sometimes I look back and believe that that bright, boyish outfit actually changed my whole life.
One day, I strolled along in my sports clothes, following the thin white wake of a passing plane and reciting suras—short chapters of the Quran—to the blue heavens. The high, panicked whinny of a horse and the sudden pounding of a wild canter startled me. I saw the white-haired man sitting high on his horse cart, red kaffiyeh and AK-47 at his side, hanging from a decorated strap, coming toward me. He moved like a strange vision from an ancient time, threading in and out of tree shade, and I had to stop to watch him. The horse and cart gradually slowed as the man pulled on the reins with gloved hands, and they veered off the pathway. In a moment, the tall rider and horse faced me head-on. I searched the pockets of my shorts for sugar cubes, which I often stashed like candy.
I could feel the intensity of the heat coming off the animal’s skin and hear the rough, wet breaths. Its massive belly bulged and its big long neck shone almost silver as I reached out to touch the horse. The man made a sound and the horse stepped forward several paces and I ran my hands along its side as it moved past me. Then I felt the hard tip of a boot tap at my shoulder, and I looked way up at the man’s face silhouetted in black shadow against a bright backdrop of summer sky.
“I see the ribbons in your hair, girl, and the devil on your filthy skin.”
I brought a hand to my face, felt a silky ribbon slide down my wet back. I should have known by then to run. He loomed above me dark and wheezing, and the horse grunted and looked back. The man fingered his gun strap and nodded as he looked me over from head to toe. Then a riding whip came down through the air with the hiss of a spitting cobra, slicing down my cheek. I shrieked. Loud and hard. I cursed not just the man sitting stunned in his saddle but the dark mountains from which I was sure he had traveled to find me. Before he could hit me again, I ran, back to our neighborhood, up our walkway, and into the pounded-clay rooms of our home.
Within days I allowed my mother to dress me without any grievance, saying nothing, blank-faced as she dropped a heavy, embroidered garment over my head, the weight of the dress nearly equal to my own. While twisting silk ribbons into my hair, fingertips sweetly scented with oil, she looked at me and pointed to the thin red line emblazoned like a burn across my cheek. I shrugged, holding back a torrent of anger. In a day it would be gone, I told her.
That afternoon, from an open window, I watched the boys from our village play in the dry dirt field some distance from my house. I sat there leaning against the mud sill, observing their free movements and feeling my skin grow hot. The gleeful shouting and the back-and-forth dance of the rubber ball between the boys’ quick bare feet tormented me. Every now and then, a boy would glance over in my direction and we’d look at each other. I didn’t put much emotion into what I did next. A strange new rush of adrenaline and raw instinct propelled me into the fateful act that would define my entire future.
When I lit the pile of silken, kerosene-soaked dresses in the pit, they went up in a wall of flames that made loud cracking sounds like the gunshots fired in celebration of the birth of a new tribal son. The many ribbon adornments came loose and fluttered up with the sudden rush of air and embers. The burning heap of dresses themselves looked like small female bodies stacked lifeless on a pyre after the passing of a fatal judgment. I left everything to burn and put on my brother Taimur’s shirt and pants, rolled up the sleeves and cuffs. In another minute, I took a knife to my long hair, tossing the thick, tangled clumps into the fire. Then I ran as though possessed around the flames raging under the tree.
My father entered the garden as the last tongues of smoke raced up to the bright sky, bits of fabric disintegrating into the hot blue air. For a while, he simply watched me. When I finally turned and caught sight of him standing there, I could see that he was stunned but not angry; I saw in his face a recognition of the very thing he always hoped I would harness—pure Wazir courage. Then he stepped up to me and the two of us stood together in the softly descending ashes, watching the smoke travel toward the horizon like a prophecy. He laughed as he bade farewell to his second daughter and welcomed into his arms his new son.
After I burned my dresses and cut off my hair, my mother and father allowed me to dress and live as I pleased—as Genghis Khan. There was simply no other choice for a child like me, who was living less than half a life as a girl. I had made up my mind already, and it was safer to help me be myself.
And life as a boy wa
s beautiful—without silk ribbons or beaded dresses or long, black braids. It was a bold and rugged beauty, free to run under blue skies. It was sweat-soaked T-shirts and my brother’s cast-off shorts. Running shoes and flying kites on the wide-open plain. On one of my first days as a boy, I went out back and crossed into the valley. I joined the group of boys assembled around a huge projection of rock that I knew from my window-watching was their regular meeting spot. Stepping over the blackened pit of an extinguished campfire, I kicked the soot off my new white shoes, eyes never leaving the soccer ball dancing between pairs of moving feet.
The group had names for everything. They called the ball “Magic,” the field itself “Ocean,” the wealthiest among them “Dubai,” the poorest “Uthana”, which is Pashto for penny. The fastest was a lean Punjabi called Boomerang. Fists pinned to my sides, hair shorn down to the scalp—my name, I told them, was Genghis Khan.
Deliberately, I walked up to the ball and kicked it. Hard. I heard the taut rubber smack against my shoe and felt a sharp sting. Up it went, as though commanded, into a short, powerful arc. Everything stopped. We watched it spin, black and white blurring to gray, until the ball dropped again to the earth, sending up thin plumes of dust, and all the boys ran out shouting into the sunshine after it. One sure kick was all it took to let them know I would keep up in their group. Dubai and I stood together alone; and he grinned, tapped the glass on his gold watch. He was impressed. I already knew they were short a player.
“Just on time, Genghis Khan. Welcome.”
Every afternoon that my mother was home to look after the twins, I met the boys at the base of the rock and we poured across the flat plain, zigzagging around boulders and clusters of tall grasses, playing soccer, firing slingshots, running for no reason at all and stirring up huge sandy clouds. I sprinted among them until my shirt was soaked down the front and back and my temples dripped. When I’d had enough exertion, I’d kneel on the hot-plate ground. Strong, unashamed, hardened from head to toe, I was always first. The youngest by far, I excelled at every physical match. No opponent could beat me; within a week they didn’t dare try.
It was strange to think that while they had just met Genghis Khan, I’d known them all for months, watching from the shadows of an upstairs room. I’d seen them sitting on the dry terrain in a semicircle, legs crossed, peeling mangoes, the juice making their fingers glisten as they gnawed on huge pits. Sometimes one or two would brawl, voices cracking, fists flailing, stopping only when someone decided there was too much blood. One of the boys occasionally brought a handmade bow, and they’d wander around whittling away at thin branches with their pocket knives, fashioning arrows to shoot into the hearts of sand-filled sacks. Later, they’d disappear into the summer shimmer as they moved toward the Indus on long afternoon hunts for something live to kill: rabbits or gazelles. For a long time I’d hated those boys; now we were one and the same.
Other afternoons, I’d hike alone along the long, battered farm road running out of town straight into a mile-wide collar of sugarcane fields. Finding my pocket knife, I withdrew the blade from its ivory hull and dovetailed into the long rows, hands feeling stalks until I found one that suited. On my knees, I’d cut a reed close to the base and let it fall to the ground. Then I would chop away forearm lengths of stalk, preserving the joints where pockets of delicious sweet juice gathered, to take home and drink later. Sometimes I’d linger on the old road with time to kill, eating roasted cashews from my pockets. Maria long gone, arms and legs darkening in the sun and covered in bruises, every now and again I’d whisper my three birth names to myself just to make sure my father’s daughter was still there.
5. Bhutto’s Muse
Sugary green juice running down my chin, I chewed at the cane. A bundle of reeds tucked like a batch of kindling under one arm, I stepped into the coolness of our clay-floored house, such a contrast to the heat outside that my head throbbed. In the cold darkness, I heard my sister’s voice traveling through the depths of the quiet rooms, and I followed it out into the backyard.
Clad in a soft draping of white cloth, Ayesha stood as sure and ramrod-straight as a queen on the pitted cement patio. She spoke in a loud, clear voice, enunciating with a clarity and purpose that belied her nine years, delivering a speech about women’s rights that she’d been practicing for days. Somehow, my sister already knew that she was destined for a life in politics. By the age of seven, my father had taken her to debating and speech competitions all over the country. At the Government Degree College for Boys in Miranshah, she took first prize, though she was the only girl there as well as the youngest by almost a decade. While the other girls played with dolls and I ran amok, Ayesha honed her oratory skills. Her great ambition, she always told us, was to become secretary-general of the United Nations and work to bring peace to the world. As in all of our aspirations, our father encouraged Ayesha with unwavering enthusiasm. He helped her fine-tune her delivery, and shuttled her whenever he could to debating tournaments all over Pakistan. And when Ayesha had a chance to compete, she always came home with a trophy.
Scabs covering my battered knees, field dust coating my short hair, I could not move as I watched her—white hijab, ironed just that morning, so bright I had to squint, Ayesha held her arms at her sides. Before her, in many ranks, stood an army of upended red bricks, placed in perfect rows like checkers on a board. As Ayesha spoke, she addressed the bricks, staring down and taking carefully measured breaths, motioning with her hands, which fluttered in the air. Every now and then, she stopped as though meeting actual sets of eyes, reaching real human ears. I wanted to laugh but knew I should not, catching sight of my father watching from a folding metal chair off to one side, hands on his knees and eyes proud. The air was so still, the sun seemed to shine only for Ayesha. And so I listened.
“Today in this world, in the fight for the liberation of women, there can be no neutrality. And let me tell you this: the best hijab is in the eyes of the beholder.”
My father had hauled all the bricks from a nearby street in a rusted wheelbarrow, bought in exchange for two sacks of rice from a man who wanted to build an outdoor oven, but changed his mind at the last minute. I remember wondering what my father was going to do with all of those big crimson blocks piled like a second wall along the side of our house. I had no idea he was turning our backyard into a makeshift assembly of UN delegates. He was always making plans; sometimes he concocted wild notions, like letting one of his daughters live out in the open, wandering Taliban country as a boy, or having a wife who wore a jean jacket, read books, and held ambitions for a master’s degree. He still hadn’t shaved his sideburns.
From his flimsy chair, my father scrambled up, clapping. Making a quick study of the scene, he adjusted a brick or two like a stagehand. Then he turned to me.
“I see you there, eating the grass that makes honey without bees.”
And he slid a long stalk of sugarcane out from under my arm, bit a piece off the end, and held the reed out, pointing to the rows of bricks.
“Now, Genghis, listen to your sister as she addresses all the buffoons in the United Nations. They start wars with loaded guns and try to end them with empty words.”
“Those are just hard bricks Ayesha is talking to, Baba. Not people.”
“Yes, Genghis, you have it exactly. Now, bring out the big laundry basin, and I’ll take you on a trip around the world.”
In the kitchen, my mother sat at the table, scribbling over sheets and murmuring in a language I didn’t understand, a dictionary open, its corners frayed from frenzied thumbing, a half glass of mango juice next to her. As I passed the threshold, she silently held out an open palm, never once lifting her eyes from the white page, her other hand still scrawling with abandon. I placed a sweet reed in her hand and watched her slender, hennaed fingers curl around it, nails lacquered pink. She took my sugarcane and nodded as she bit down, a coy smile and the syrup coating her lips. She turned the pages fast and searched the printed columns. I knew she w
as writing Ayesha’s speeches; it was how they both learned English so well. And I learned it by osmosis, my ears alive on the periphery. Just by listening to my mother and sister speak it, I started to learn the language myself, one word at a time. My father always said that our family was like a factory, working to make intelligent human beings.
Without a word, I hurried to the corner and pulled the big metal basin down from a hook; it clanged like a steel drum beating against the floor. My mother turned, looked at me, eyed the basin that was nearly my height, and grinned.
“I see Phileas Fogg is about to take you around the world. Let us hope it doesn’t take him eighty days.”
Up and down the lawn, searching the flower beds, my father gathered rocks, and I filled the basin, upending buckets of water until the line reached two inches deep, no more. Beyond our walls, I heard the clack-clack of a man cleaning his rifle in a neighboring yard; the slow hum of another decorating his dhol drums. My father assembled his rocks around the basin, giving each a careful study, then placing them one by one in the water, each surface like an island projecting above the waterline.
“Now, Ayesha, the biggest rock is which continent—do you see it?”
“Asia. Africa over there is perfect, Baba. Even the horn. You should keep that one.”
“And Genghis, the smallest rock. What is it?”
“Antarctica, right there. Let’s not go there today. Too cold.”
“Yes, you both know your bearings—let me get my boat.”
The pitted, cleaned-out hull of an avocado served this purpose, and my father moved our great merchant ship by fingertip from one end of the world to the next. Storms over the Bering Strait rocked us back and forth. Sailors drowned. We were Vikings in Greenland, Marco Polo’s companions trading for spices in China, jade from Japan. Ayesha stood over the basin, which reflected bits of her hijab across the rippling water like the white chevrons of waves, reciting the names of leaders from the present down into the past, in and out through time, as we traveled from rocky shore to rocky shore in the basin.
A Different Kind of Daughter Page 6