A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  In minutes, he joined me, and with a ringmaster’s flourish rolled out a giant map of the world, unraveling its four corners over the ground and weighting them down with earthenware cups. Then he turned on a bright overhead light.

  “Our planet—full of countries, full of people. Allah has a plan and a place for them all.”

  And he put a pin into Pakistan.

  We studied the many borders surrounding our landmass, crooked ink lines veining out—the printed names of places I might never see. Afghanistan to the west. India to the east. Iran next to Iraq. China eating up terrain all the way to a coastline that ran to a trio of overlapping seas; beyond those, the Pacific, spanning the globe past island chains to the wild continents of the Americas. Billions of human beings living and dying.

  “I am a devout Muslim, but I am an academic, and academics like to ask questions. Where did we come from, Genghis Khan— where will we go? Why are we here at all? I don’t actually care, because I have my own faith. The pure wonder is the thing I love best about being alive in the first place.”

  Side by side, we stood together over the map, peering down at our pinprick. Then he chanted the words that had only just danced through my memory: “Namo Gurubhya, Namo Buddhaya, Namo Dharmaya, Namo Sanghaya . . .”

  “Yes, Baba, that’s it. She said it again and again like a sura while the Afridi woman fed Sangeen. But she is Saraiki, not Buddhist, and follows Islam as we do. It was a strange house, full of books and pictures. The whole room was like a holy place, but it was just a room. If it wasn’t holy, then why would I remember it so well?”

  “Ah, you were in the home of a religious scholar, an academic like me who has as many questions as she has books in her house. The Saraiki follow many religions, mostly Islam. No matter. She was reciting a Tibetan chant—‘I take refuge in the Spiritual Masters, my Gurus; I take refuge in the Awakened One, the Buddha; I take refuge in the Truth, the Dharma; I take refuge in the Spiritual Beings, Sangha’—it is like a thread that leads a Buddhist to their truth, what we would call the Straight Path. Our truth as Muslims is in the single phrase: it is written.”

  “But in truth I don’t know anything.”

  “Yes, you know much. Maybe what you’re reaching for is still too high, like fruit way up in a tree. You can’t get to it unless you climb or it falls and hits you on the head—that’s how Newton discovered gravity.”

  “Now you’ve only given me more questions, Baba, instead of answers.”

  “Yes—almost there, keep going. You’re about to reach the highest form of all human knowledge.”

  “What is that?”

  Just then, Ayesha’s thin shadow spread over the map. She had a leather-bound Quran tucked under one arm; I could see the green ribbon from her page marker poking out from the gold-leafed pages. She spent hours each week at the mosque studying, while I roamed outside. Ayesha looked down at the pin, and I wondered if she felt our place in the world reduced to the infinitesimal, as I did. She laughed.

  “Uncertainty—am I right, Baba? The thing that binds us all together.”

  “Yes. Uncertainty—it’s a wonder. It lets you live and love with abandon. It doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in our one god, Allah—my Muslim faith is how I reach beyond myself. I also know that many people have many ways to reach one God. Just like the Saraiki woman, I like to know what they are. Every person must find the way for themselves or they will be lost. Now, Ayesha, tell your brave-heart brother here how many religions there are scattered like seeds all over our oblivious planet.”

  “Well, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, more than twenty—including ours. It’s almost as though there are more than twenty gods, but that can’t be true.”

  My father chuckled. “Why not one god given many names by many people?”

  My father reached over and took Ayesha’s copy of the Quran. He held it, flipping back and forth, a fan of soft paper opening and closing between his big palms. I knew he had nearly every line within it memorized, 114 chapters, the suras, told in poetic verses and written in order of decreasing size. As the eldest son of a blue-blooded Pashtun family, my father had spent his youth studying the Quran in order to make himself worthy of his full inheritance of landholdings, wealth, and esteem. On his father’s death he would have become the representative of one of the most powerful families in FATA, but he gave up a life of prestige so that our entire family could live as equals and experience the world for what it is—a wonder.

  He often told us that taking up his position as a tribal elder would have given him far less influence than the honor of sending open-minded children out into the world. To the Pashtun, honor is the greatest wealth; unlike his forebears, who found it in war, he found it in fatherhood. In that sacrifice alone, he lived closer to the Muslim faith than most any man. Every day, he made us recite a new sura—by the Day of Judgment, we’d have each one committed to our hearts—and yet he could see sacred truths in the beliefs of others. Tolerance was the greatest gift he would ever give me. There were millions of people the world over who knew nothing of our book, and I might know nothing of theirs, if they had one. It didn’t matter; we were all going to the same place on different paths. Maybe all a Buddhist had was the Lotus Sutra. Maybe others had nothing more than life itself. Shams closed the covers, whispered a prayer, and handed the book back to Ayesha. That afternoon, I understood for the first time what it meant to have faith in my god: Allah anchored me to my own soul—and to everyone else.

  I went to a fruit bowl that sat on the table and took three jamuns for us all to eat, leaving the pomegranate for my brothers. I missed the days when we had a proper garden and grew peppers and beans and every month my father would come home with meat to cook over the bricks in the fire pit. In Darra we had to buy everything at the market and cook all of our meals indoors. When I gave my father the piece of fruit, he kissed my hands.

  “God never speaks directly to people. He sends angels, both good and bad, to teach us. The woman who fed Sangeen all that time ago was your divine messenger, and you are mine. Inshallah, may you never run into the other kind.”

  I went to sleep that night with my father’s words and the day’s events playing out in my mind, lulling me into a deep ocean of vivid dreams—Sangeen and Babrak running through a strange land of shooting stars. Trying to keep up, I chased after them stumbling over stones as the earth began to quake. My dream turned quickly to a nightmare as the ground before me tore open, cracking apart like a great dropped tile. We all fell into a cold abyss in which I could see and hear nothing. As I tumbled down through the blackness, the air thinned until I was struggling for every breath. Then in the midst of that terror, I felt the heat from a beam of light swell behind me. Somehow, I turned to see a tall man sitting on a stone with his hands held out to me. Through that dim hollowed out world, I found my way to him. Then I placed my head on his knees and wept for my lost brothers. I still remember the man’s voice, which was as sure as a thunderclap. Again and again he said to me—“do not be afraid.” With a strange certainty that can only come in dreams, I knew he was Jesus Christ. Then behind him I saw that there was a long line of other prophets waiting. When I woke I could still feel warm hands on my head, and hear the sound of his voice that I held onto like a life ring in the cold sea of night.

  Not long after, God sent me two angels, one that belonged in heaven—and one who would have been cast out of it. Ayesha was carrying the same leather-bound Quran under her arm that my father had leafed through in the kitchen. As Genghis Khan, I could take my sister anywhere she pleased, but the only places she asked to go were to school or to the mosque. Ayesha studied in a prayer room several times each week with a group of girls, all of them draped in veils. I was not sure what she learned there that she could not ask of our father. My job was to wait around until the lesson was finished and come back with my sister and a pail full of fresh water. We had no plumbing in Darra, but the mosques required water so that every Muslim man, woman, and c
hild could complete their ablutions and enter the immaculate state of wudu before kneeling down in the segregated halls. In hot weather, I went back and forth to our mosque and waited in long lines for water several times each day.

  Galvanized bucket at my side, Quran by my sister’s, we walked together. I could see the dome of our prayer hall from a distance: a giant pearl rising from a brown sea of flat rooftops, towering minaret, from which the muezzin made his beautiful calls. The sight of the mosque in the dingy midst of Darra always gave me hope—hope for what exactly, I don’t know. All around us, men fired their killing machines for sport and with thoughts of jihad—or with no thought at all. The only thing that stopped the bullets was the azan call to prayer.

  Inside the mosque, the cool air thinned and no sound entered from the exterior. Marble tiles lined the walls and floor. Our footfalls were amplified as we walked the long main hallway, and even our breaths echoed. A whisper uttered in a mosque would soar from one end to the other—no one could keep a secret from Allah in there.

  I left my bucket on the bench leading to the ablution rooms and headed back out. First I stopped a moment and watched my sister cross the corridor to her study hall, resplendent in the brilliance of her white chador, which never once showed any blemish, even after we’d just walked block after block through a haze of Darra dust. Then I made my way back out into the welter of town; the noise of the streets slapping my ears after the stillness of the mosque. I held a hand flat over my eyes and scanned the crowd, looking for my gang. Wherever we moved, I made friends easily. I was strong and brazen and always attracted a wily group of colorful characters. Sometimes we fought in the dirt, but most of the time we just ran amok looking for things to do— tossing a ball, chasing each other, shooting things with slingshots, sometimes smacking each other around; more than once, a firm friendship had started with a punch. To them I was all boy—no one would have guessed otherwise—and not just because of my cropped hair and masculine clothes. It was a way I had about me. At home every member of my family called me Genghis—we all accepted one another as we were. Just as there was more than one way to reach God, I decided that there was more than one way to be a girl. Luckily, I never had to explain myself to anyone—I’m not sure that I could have.

  In Darra Adam Khel, my friends were all boys people referred to as street urchins and rats—they went everywhere together in a pack. If they had homes, I didn’t know it and didn’t care. Slingshot in my pocket instead of the Makarov, I’d find them lurking in the backstreets behind the mosque or roving the hillsides. They’d call out from behind a car, a dumpster, or down a dark laneway. I always heard them before they came into sight. One after the other, a parade of boys with loose grins and cheap pistols would emerge from a side alley and wave to me.

  We’d slap shoulders and then make our way on foot out of town. Usually I led my ramshackle gang up craggy foothills, the boys swarming around, kicking up dust until we were all coated, issuing insults, exchanging banter. No one ever came close to touching me—they’d heard about the Makarov and they’d seen the muscles in my arms. I could lift two of them at once if I wanted to. The occasional scuffle broke out—bloody noses, a broken finger, lost teeth—nothing serious. It wasn’t about friendship; we were killing time, killing life, letting our childhoods go. There wasn’t much of anything to do, but I was in love with my freedom too much to care. I don’t remember the substance of what we talked about, though we spent hours in close company; no one had a television or VCR, there were no books, no magazines—unlike me, none of them had ever seen a video or a movie. Not one had learned to read a map, seen a globe, seen their names spelled out—whatever they were—learned the alphabet. The very fact that we all found one another with any regularity in the absence of phones or addresses, even a clock or any kind of plan, was a strange miracle—and yet we did, all over Darra.

  One of the boys I knew didn’t seem to have a name at all; after I heard the story of how he got to Darra, I called him “Batoor”—the Pashto word for brave. He’d come alone all the way from the city of Peshawar, traveling the Indus Highway on foot—more than twenty-five treacherous miles through barren valleys and along the high passes. It took him weeks—he had no idea how many—to get to where he was sure to find steady work. It was strange to hear of someone running away from the big city, since people trying to get away from anything usually went straight for it.

  Batoor had no money, but he had wits and kept them about him; he drank water from streams, talked farmers out of ears of corn, talked women out of naan, talked Allah into keeping him going. He found wild fruit, he nibbled on bugs. Watching the boy sit back on his elbows in the dirt, I thought he must be part animal. A quiet savagery lurked beneath his skin, in the eyes, and in his slinking gait. You could tell just by looking that the boy had seen things—and I wanted to know what. Lounging on rocks, doling out roasted almonds he’d lifted from one of the half-blind merchants who pushed their carts up the market street, Batoor regaled us with stories about the labyrinthine city from which he’d come: so many people you could lose yourself there, and that’s what he’d done—for longer than he cared to talk about, it seemed. Batoor left Peshawar to get away from something—I guessed that much.

  Batoor came with me when I went to pick up Ayesha at the mosque. He stood while I filled my bucket, his eyes darting around. Then he moved to the long row of sinks, washed himself; methodically he rinsed off his grime, as though he’d been to that place to bathe a thousand times already. Occasionally all of the street boys I knew seemed impossibly clean, though they slept on the floors of gun shops and ran helter-skelter through the dirt. They lived in a world of filth, and yet often their skin was so pristine that it shone. Watching Batoor at the sink, I realized that they all must have gone to the mosque regularly to make use of the plentiful soap and clean water, but in all my trips to fill the family bucket, I’d never seen a single one of them—not once.

  It wasn’t just their bodies that were immaculate, which I put down to simple piety. From time to time, one or two would disappear for days on end, no word from the others as to why. When I made casual inquiries about the whereabouts of this boy or that one, I’d get a bitter laugh or a long stare, maybe they thought I should know better than to ask—which I did only once or twice. Eventually, the missing would come back again like newer versions of themselves—haircuts, nail beds white as crescent moons, clean clothes, full bellies. When they’d eaten well, they talked about the food for hours, as if they’d been on a journey halfway around the world—though they couldn’t have gone far. An invisible line existed between us: there were things about my friends—not just their real names—that I didn’t know. Maybe it was because he was so clean that day that I invited Batoor home to meet my father, who I was sure would coax the boy’s mysteries out of him. The faucet at the mosque ran for uninterrupted minutes, the soap foamed, but Batoor couldn’t quite wash off that sheen of savagery—there wasn’t enough free water in the Indus for that. Ayesha didn’t so much as blink when she saw him standing in the polished marble hall like a dark prophet. She nodded her head underneath her chador and held the Quran tight.

  We entered the front door and in five steps or less were right in the kitchen, where my father sat, head cupped in his hand, fingers drumming. Music crackled from an old radio he’d put together piece by piece after scavenging for parts. I looked at my friend, who just gawked at the machine, eyes twitching. For a moment, I thought he might cry. My father said nothing, didn’t even glance at us, didn’t even know we were there. He took a long breath and sighed—there was opera in Darra Adam Khel. Then, as though sensing a shadow in the room, my father took one look at Batoor and switched off the radio.

  “Who have we here, Genghis Khan?”

  “This is Batoor.”

  “Yes, yes, I can see that he is.”

  My father gave Batoor our best, and he never tried to coax a thing out of him—not the name of a father or a mother, not a home, not his age or rea
l name. Asked him nothing in fact, though that was what I had been waiting for. He simply nodded and looked from the boy to me again and again. They talked a little about Peshawar, about Batoor’s long journey up the highway—how cold the streams were at night, though warm as a bath during the day. Batoor had had to veer many times from the main roadway to keep well away from the police checkpoints. Boys caught on the road were sometimes put into prison, simply because there was nowhere else.

  When we’d all talked awhile in the kitchen, my father let Batoor mess about with the radio. He removed the back panel and showed him the guts. It amazed us both how nimble the boy was with his cut-up fingers. Working in different gun shops, he’d had to learn fast to use his hands—you could see it. Shams took apart the pieces and lined them up in a row. Batoor reassembled the radio in two minutes flat. Then we flipped around stations, adjusted the antenna, and lost ourselves in music again for a time. While Batoor was in our kitchen, I felt rich; we gave him cashews and pistachios and kebabs of roasted meat. My father told him that there were schools just for making things like radios and that Batoor could make a start before he even learned to spell his name—though he took a moment to teach him that too. Batoor listened between stations, his hands deep inside the workings of another machine my father had scrambled together, fiddling. Silently, he nodded and looked around at our small, two-room house as though it were a palace. His gaze softened in the lamplight, and I thought he’d caught sight of a dream he’d long let go and was just then reeling back in.

  My father offered to ask a mullah at the mosque for help in finding the boy a school to start in. Then Batoor pulled his hands quickly from the machine. He got up from his chair and said it was time for him to leave—the way a boy who was late getting home might. He never responded to my father’s offer—it was as though he hadn’t heard it at all. And he never gave my father the chance to make it again—just opened the front door, both of us trailing him, and ran out into the purple veil of night.