Then, in July, on the cusp of a summer storm, along the street of storytellers, Qissa Khawani, I fought my last fight. I should have known that my father would pass through, walking the bustling market roadway where he often bought books. A black sky and gathering winds warned of the coming ten-day deluge. People crowded the bazaar, stocking up on last-minute supplies: batteries, kerosene, flour, and basmati rice. Or in my father’s case: paperbacks, magazines, and American movies.
I was standing in a side street between apartment blocks. It was so damp outside that it felt as though we were living inside a heavy cloud. Flocks of black crows congregated, perched on rails and on rooftops, lining the criss-cross of electrical wires by the dozen. They were cawing about something in an eerie chorus. Their relentless racket was enough to drive a person to madness, and some of the boys took to shouting back at the birds, called them loudmouthed infidels, kicked them from their perches, picked a few off with slingshots. Right then, I knew something was wrong. My sister would have called that scene an omen; my mother would have said what was to happen was written—maybe they were both right.
My adversary was a thuggish Afghan with arms like hams, sent on a mission, he said, to take me down. I assumed he was a member of a rival gang. He kept telling me about his coldblooded crew back at the refugee camp. We stood squared and stared into each other. I kept quiet, never blinked—my usual routine. Then, just as the birds started up that melee of squawking again, I pulled back my fist and shot it out into the breach— one-two. Nothing but air. Maybe he flinched; I was too stunned to notice—he just stood there grinning. I pulled my fist back again and stepped right into a harder punch—one-two. Glancing blows, my fists never finding full purchase. One-two, again. This time, I connected solidly, but I felt my knuckle crack like a wishbone. I might as well have slugged a brick wall.
My turn to take a hit came fast—his arm hammered back, and a second later my world blurred. Within minutes, it was like fighting underwater. A single thunderclap and the rain came, falling as though the sky had torn open, releasing a warm sea down over Peshawar. I could barely see a thing. Somehow my opponent was all over me, and I felt the ground hit my back. We were on the pavement, fighting like dogs. Then the Afghan used his weight to keep me down, and no matter how I squirmed he had me cinched. My forearms were up, shielding my face, and I felt the wound along my head scrape against the wet ground, but the scabbed skin held fast. The birds were all lifting away, black forms spreading out into the darkening sky, over which they scattered like flak. For a moment, I registered the sheer beauty of those fleeing birds and the senselessness of what I was doing. One breath later and I was back at it—I had his hair clenched in my fists.
It was then that my father happened to pass, stop, and stare down the road. He might have heard the gathering crowd shouting under awnings and umbrellas along the perimeter. I turned my head to the side, and our eyes locked. He had a set of paperback books cradled under his arm, protecting them from the elements. Momentarily, I thought he was not my father in the flesh but a manifestation of my humiliation—somehow conjured, not because I was fighting so soon after the brick incident, but because I was in danger of losing the fight. Methodically, my father shoved his books into his satchel and then put the sack on the ground. The thug had me straddled and fixed, but as my father cut through the line of bystanders and entered the scene, I found a split-second maneuver and swiftly turned the tables. All it took was one quick jab into his eye socket. Stunned and struck temporarily blind, he reeled. Then I shoved hard, arched my back, and hurled him over. Now I was on top of the Afghan, clawing desperately at his eyes with my hooked thumbs—that’s when I felt a pair of big hands on my shoulders heave me straight up and away.
Despite appearances to the contrary—his clean, pressed shalwar kameez; the dignified roll of his head scarf; those long, elegant fingers and limbs—my father could be an aggressive man. For the first time in my life, I felt his raw physical power as he hauled me by the scruff, calling back to the bewildered boys that I was late for dinner. Then he dragged me by the collar straight up the street, stopping only to get his bag. I didn’t get a chance to look behind us, but part of me was relieved. I knew I’d come out on top. I could still hear the Afghan moaning.
Out of the bazaar, my father released my ruined collar but kept his hand clasped to my shoulder as we dovetailed into the river of pedestrians. If he said anything, I don’t remember it, but there wasn’t much we could say to each other. I was still catching my breath. All of that interrupted rage suddenly had nowhere to go and it circled my mind like a trapped animal, leaving me out of sorts for a time. A rickshaw pulled over, and I heard my father utter an address that was not our home as we slid into the covered seat, heavy rain slapping our faces. My father sat back and looked at me then, studied my face, which, despite the savagery of the match, barely had a mark on it. He took my beat-up hand and scanned the row of bruises, found a cloth in his pocket, and wiped away smears of blood. Then he reached into the sack burrowed behind his feet. Muttering under his breath, shielding his precious used paperbacks from the storm that spit at us from all sides through the flimsy tarp covering, he pulled out a book— frayed covers, cracked-up spine. A single name stood out—Plato —second only to Socrates as his favorite among the ancient Greek philosophers. My father thumbed through pages until he found what he was looking for and tapped a line with his index finger.
“For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.”
Confused, I had to look away from him. In my father’s resolute calm, I saw my own shame. “Are you angry, Baba?”
“No, not yet. I’m looking for a solution.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“I’m taking you to a place where you’ll finally get to fight your own demons instead of all those useless hooligans out there. Inshallah, we will make something of you yet, Genghis Khan.”
*
Even seen through sheets of pouring rain, the sports complex, which included a stadium and several other large structures, was massive and imposing. Because of the downpour, no one was outside in the wide cement quadrangle or crossing the many walkways, and I feared that my father was taking me to a juvenile prison or to sign me up at a school for delinquents. He still hadn’t told me precisely what he had in mind. I’d only ever kicked a soccer ball across open plains years before. At my age, most boys had already chosen and honed a sport. So far, I’d only fallen into street fighting. It was time, my father said, for a change.
Inside the main building, all the fluorescent lights were on, but the huge foyer was empty except for one man sitting back in a chair at the far end, reading a newspaper. Every time a thunderclap hit, the lights flickered. At first, I thought the man was fast asleep, because he didn’t so much as twitch, despite the interruptions of the violent weather; but then he looked up and smiled as we approached. The man had a friendly face, big smile, white teeth that made me think of American television shows, and he waved us over. He stood up and had a look at me from head to toe, and then walked over to one side and had a brief conversation with my father. I heard the words “strong,” “brave,” “boy,” “fist fights,” and “twelve years old.” Then the man approached and studied my bashed-up hands; he motioned to the jagged scab along the back of my skull and looked up at my father. Rain-soaked and pummeled, I was a sight to behold. They shared a laugh.
“So, you’re a pretty strong kid. How would you like to lift weights?”
I thought about the idea for a moment, looked over at my father, who nodded and crossed his arms.
“Okay—why not?”
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Genghis Khan.”
“Ah, the Great Khan.” He laughed out loud, his head going way back. “Perfect.”
From the start, I was a natural. It turned out that the man sitting in the chair was the center’s weightlifting coach, and he was short a few boys for his provincial team. One look at my mu
scled arms, strong hands and frame and he knew I’d have the right kind of prowess—the strength to lift loaded barbells and the gift of stubborn tenacity. The next day, my father signed me up with my older brother, Taimur.
Until I took up weightlifting, Taimur and I had spent very little time together—he was four years older and always out studying with his high school friends. But once my father brought me to the sports complex, we trained together almost daily. My father didn’t trust all the sweaty men exercising at the gym and worried that I could be caught out as a girl. It was Taimur’s job to make sure that didn’t happen; it was also a chance for us to cement our relationship. The only reason he was there lifting weights at all was to watch over me. But if he was annoyed at having to join the team, he never once showed it. My quiet, dutiful brother never showed much emotion, but he took his task seriously. Everywhere I went, he was my unfailing shadow.
Taimur and I didn’t meet the other boys on the team; all of them trained one at a time with our coach, but my brother and I were given an exception because we were siblings. I often looked over to see my brother standing off to the side, tall, quiet, and sure, his eyes roving the crowded weight room, back and forth. I knew that if anyone bothered me, my nearly six-foot, soft-eyed, sixteen-year-old brother would pound them inside out. I remember thinking that what little Sangeen and Babrak were to me, I was to him—precious things to be protected at any cost. Having him there with me felt good.
In the sport of weightlifting, a competitor has to master two basic lifts with finesse—the snatch and the clean and jerk. It wasn’t just about getting the barbell off the ground—that was the last thing I had to contend with. The first was to figure out how to prepare both physically and mentally. In the snatch, the lifter must raise the barbell from the floor to an overhead position in a single explosive motion. It requires a sudden detonation of raw strength, and the move came to me as though by instinct. I had a mercurial temperament already, and I simply forced that reserve of wild emotion into synchronized bolts of power. Somehow, when I centered all of my fury and executed the maneuver in perfect form—stance, breathing, and movement—a weight that should have crushed my bones was briefly under my command.
The clean and jerk required two motions: cleaning the barbell up from the floor to shoulder level, a short pause, and then a powerful thrust to a full overhead position. It was that short pause that made the lift far more physically challenging. At first I struggled to get the bar up past my clavicle. I tried for days, always dropping it to the floor. When at last I stood in the middle of the weight room with the barbell held high, I felt transformed.
From that moment of victory, I discovered the linchpin of athletics—winning or losing starts in the brain and travels by a single command to the rest of the body. When faced with a stacked barbell at my feet, I would tell myself that I could execute a full lift, and my muscles would naturally agree with me. If I allowed even a sliver of doubt to infiltrate my mind, I would grab the bar and fail fast. I told myself that I was invincible, and somehow my body believed it. I got to know every muscle fiber along my limbs and learned to communicate with each one as though by telepathy. And for the first time, I actually understood that I was a material being, a skeletal frame encased in a living armor of taut muscle, and I believed that I was tougher than any other kid my age—girl or boy.
I’d get a chance to prove it at my first tournament, in Lahore, capital of the province of Punjab and one of the most densely packed cities in the world. Our team, representing the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region, traveled more than three hundred miles along the AH-1 Grand Trunk Road in a blue and white PAF bus. Taimur sat up front with me, staring out of the wide, bug-spattered windshield. The highway was long and smooth, and the sky above it clouded-over and limitless. Being strong finally meant going somewhere—just stepping onto the bus with my gym bag, wearing a new team shirt, I was already a lifetime away from the pitted back alleys of Peshawar. My family of intrepid Wazirs had traveled the treacherous lengths of our wild tribal lands, but we’d never gone so far into the populated depths of Pakistan proper. There were so many towns and cities along the route: Rawalpindi, Talagang, Kallar Kahar, Bhalwal, Pindi Bhattian, Sheikhupura. On that six-hour drive over rolling verdant hills, I fell in love with my country, my Pakistan—so vast and beautiful, only a god could have made it.
Lahore made Peshawar look like a ragtag hamlet with its high-rises and minarets, hundreds of domed temples and churches, museums and mausoleums, colonial forts, university campuses, and hospitals, miles of flowering parkland scattered between. Lahore has a millennium-long history as a basin of power—from the Ghaznavid Empire of the eleventh century, through the Mughals in the sixteenth, who established the city’s many fabled gardens, to the Sikh realm of the nineteenth century and finally the British Raj, when Lahore became the capital of Punjab.
But I was in Lahore to compete and win, and I thought of little else. Weightlifting wasn’t a big competitive sport in Pakistan like hockey, squash, or cricket, and tournaments were few and far between. It would be another year before I’d get a chance to compete like that again. To me, weightlifting wasn’t about beating the other boys; first and foremost it was about finding the full depth of my strength. I wanted to go home and tell my father that I’d done as Plato had advised—fought and conquered myself—and in the capital of empires.
Outwardly, I wasn’t concerned about the fact that during the three-day tournament I’d be sleeping among boys in a crammed hostel room. I refused to think about the fact that someone might discover my true gender. It was a fear so great that, like the edge of a cliff, I didn’t want to go near it. Taimur made sure I took a cot in the far corner and placed himself in the one right next to mine. Even though he was competing at the tournament in a different division, he saw his primary job there as making sure I didn’t get found out. Meanwhile, I got to know my male teammates, who came from all parts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in the usual way—we roughhoused, told jokes, and traded good-humored insults. Five times each day, at the melodic call of the muezzin, we became as one in our faith while so far from home, and knelt down together to pray.
The entire time I was there, Taimur lurked on the periphery, my lumbering and steadfast bodyguard. He was polite to the others, exchanged the occasional banter, but most of the time he stood around the room like an imposing pillar. He made sure I changed clothes in the communal bathroom alone and stood sentry outside the door, arms folded. Regardless, I didn’t have to worry about a boy coming in while I was using the restroom. Modesty and cleanliness are tenets of our Muslim faith, and none of those boys would have dared to relieve themselves at a urinal or in a stall while another person was anywhere near. I was comfortable in my disguise and told Taimur many times to relax and enjoy our cross-country adventure. At twelve years old, I’d been living as a boy for nearly eight years, and Genghis Khan had become my second skin. I almost knew him better than I knew myself. Even Taimur hadn’t called me Maria in years.
The athletics stadium was near the old walled city, and we walked to it from the hostel as a team on registration day, gym bags slung over our broad shoulders, taking long swigs now and again from our water bottles. We’d bonded the night before, roaming around Iqbal Park, eating kebabs from street vendors, and racing one another around the tall pillar of Minar-e-Pakistan, which rose up into the night lit up like a jeweled dagger. Built to commemorate our country’s independence of 1947, it was often likened to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I’d only ever seen it in books, and I remember looking up into its high cascades of electric light, mesmerized, and thinking that for the first time in my life, belonging to a group outside my family didn’t mean getting into fights. When we entered the stadium to register, a group of officials led us to a huge gymnasium crowded with boys from all over the country. I joined one of the many lines leading up to a row of long tables, and put my sack at my feet. The mood in the room was electric. I looked around and checked out the competition. Some o
f the boys were small and wiry, and I paid them no mind, but others were built like oaks. I met a few of their eyes; already we were staring each other down, just like in the streets. All of us were lightheaded and slightly savage from hunger, as we hadn’t eaten since the night before in order to keep our registration weight in the lowest category possible. In matches where competitors fell within the same body-mass category, lifting the heaviest weight in combination with using the proper technique determined the winner. After the weigh-in, the official would divide our teams into classes. In matches where competitors successfully lift equal weight, body mass alone determines the winner—the lighter athlete wins. My coach had already set our weight classes back in Peshawar, but I had to have an official measurement taken just before the competition.
I thought nothing of the process and stood nonchalantly with Taimur and other members of our team. We made plans to go out to eat that night and explore the walled city afterward. Then, as I got closer to the front of the line, I noticed that after signing in, each team was sent into another room. I could just see the row of scales through the open door. Then I watched as the boys inside removed their clothing, placing their shorts and T-shirts on a table before stepping onto the scale dressed only in underwear. I took in their exposed bodies and felt something inside me slip. Beads of sweat gathered along my forehead. I turned to Taimur, who must have seen the same thing—we exchanged a panicked glance but remained quiet. Back in Peshawar we’d always weighed in fully clothed. The air in the room was suddenly heavy, and I sucked it down as though I could not get enough oxygen. Our team was already at the front. Taimur touched my shoulder and whispered
“Don’t do it.”
A Different Kind of Daughter Page 15