A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  If I remember anything about that first tournament, it’s how quickly it ended. The Wing Commander had told me about the prize money just before my first match. As soon as I heard the amount—1,400 rupees—I was flat-out determined to take it all. It was more than the trip had cost, which meant I’d be taking home a profit—a dream so unfathomable I’d never dared to think it. I played a series of games, each lasting bare seconds. My raw, lumbering strength was too much for those small-framed girls. Every time I stepped into the box, I sent my opponent to the ground right behind a lightning-rod shot. If I didn’t win a match through a hard serve, I won within a minute of it. None of them saw me coming. Some of them left the court in tears. Others asked again and again if I truly was a girl. I had great compassion for all of my opponents and didn’t want to damage what might be the first genuine friendships I ever had. We were all so new to the game. The matches were no more enjoyable for me than for them, so quick you could barely call them matches at all—but I had no choice. I played to win.

  On the way home, I had the envelope full of cash tucked into my shirt, arms folded over my chest. I must have checked that envelope a dozen times. Sitting next to me, the Wing Commander grinned. After the team bus dropped us off, he made sure to take me all the way home by rickshaw, watched me go up to the door as Taimur opened it. My tall brother swatted me on the arm, made a funny remark about me wearing his clothes again, looked over my shoulder, and waved. I remember reaching for the rumpled envelope and pulling it out of my shirt. I held it high as the Wing Commander called out a cheer. Then his rickshaw pulled out into the street toward Bara Road, insects swarming behind it in the descending dusk. I found my mother at the kitchen table, hunched over papers, marking math tests, her weariness softly amplified in the dim light. She looked up when I came in, squinting. I was one full day early.

  “My Gulgatai, you’re back.”

  She hadn’t called me that—her rosebud —in a long while. I remember telling her so.

  Before she could get up, I moved over her and looked down at the dozens of sheets of paper fanned out. She still had a red pen in her hand. The young and timid handwriting stood out from the papers as though it were a living thing—each sheet a girl out there in the tribal lands who simply wanted to learn. It struck me then that I was about to do what Pashtun daughters never got a chance to do—with the exception of my own mother, who was at that time an equal breadwinner in our family. It was because of her job teaching for the government education board that we had a nice home in a clean colony in Bara Gate. Looking at me, my mother asked me how I’d done in Wah Cantt, if I’d placed at the tournament. Saying nothing, I opened the envelope, pulled out the rupees, and let them fall like leaves over the papers she’d hauled in a satchel all the way from the tribal lands.

  My mother gasped. Then she gathered the money into a small pile and counted. I already knew that she and my father would set aside a portion of my winnings for the poor in an act of charity called zakat that is the obligation of every Muslim. Her hands shook and she stared. Her eyes shone, shedding so much worry. She asked me how I’d done it and started laughing. Fourteen hundred rupees wasn’t much—maybe thirty US dollars. To our family it was a whole week or more of food. To her it was serenity—she had done well by me, her wayward Gulgatai, after all. To me, it was the whole world.

  “How, Maria? How did you do this when you’ve never even played in a proper tournament before?”

  I sat down next to her and smiled. We were both looking at the rupees piled up under the lamplight.

  “But you already told me many times, Aami—it is written.”

  15. The Giver of Treasure

  At barely seven, my twin brothers were a force of nature. Born minutes apart—which twin came first was long forgotten—I used to say that one came as lighting and the other as accompanying thunder. When Sangeen and Babrak were home, dishes flew off counters, furniture capsized, doors slammed, and pounding feet seemed to loosen nails. What my small, unbridled brothers needed, at barely twelve years old myself, I could not offer: sweeping valleys, climbing trees, stepping-stone rooftops, the winding Indus from which they came. And so my patience was as boundless as the blue sky I wished to give them—until they broke the one thing I prized and seemed to set off a long spell of bad luck.

  After I won the under-thirteen championship in Wah Cantt, I trained at the academy every morning and right through the afternoon. But the demands of home came first, and I was always back early when it was my turn to care for Sangeen and Babrak. On those afternoons, the boys came hurtling home from their public grade school up the road, crashing through the front door, rucksacks upended in cascades of papers and books, sandals strewn into the corridor, hats tossed. Demands for drink, for food, which I gave to them only after they’d washed their hands, said a prayer, and told me one thing they’d learned that day and one kindness they’d given. Taimur, Ayesha, and I took shifts tending to them; my older siblings often needed days to recuperate from whatever catastrophe had transpired on their watch. I understood the wildness of the twins in a way the others couldn’t. We spoke the same unspoken language, harbored the same rampant urge to move, to hit, to play—to win.

  When I waited on the road in Bara Gate, I could see them coming home from school at a distance, in a billowing cloud of kicked-up dust, their jubilant shouts preceding them. Pedestrians moved out of the way as they careened down the lane, racing each other, pushing and shoving, always grinning ear to ear and calling out my name. The day I saw Sangeen skulking toward me, school bag weighing his body down to one side as though his shoulders were a scale, I knew right away there was trouble. Sangeen lifted one feeble hand to wave at me; in the other he held a folded slip of pink paper. Then he shrugged, looked to his shoes, the laces undone and dragging—whatever had happened to Babrak, it had nothing to do with him. I was in a rush that afternoon, packing for a trip to Lahore to compete in the Asian Junior Games trials. It was an important tournament, and I’d been training with a medal in my sights for weeks; making it through the first round would secure me a place on the national team and propel my fledgling career: free lodging, real training, transportation, and food. My father was coming with me, and we had to take a bus straight after dinner to make it to my first match the next morning. We couldn’t afford a hotel. He still hadn’t told me where we would spend the night after the six-hour journey. Maybe he didn’t know. If there was one time I needed my twin brothers to cooperate, it was that afternoon. I’d told them so that very morning as I sliced up their boiled eggs and filled their cups with goat milk.

  When Sangeen stood before me, he dropped the bag at his feet, face still low. In my cupped hand, I took his chin, which buckled when I lifted it.

  “Where is your other half, Sangeen?”

  “Babrak was taken to Madam’s house as a punishment.”

  Then he handed me the note with the teacher’s name and the address and little more.

  “What did he do?”

  “A simple game of leapfrog, Maria.”

  “It can’t have been that simple.”

  And it wasn’t. The leapfrog game, brainchild of Babrak, took place at the closing bell, when the teacher left the room. Eager to get out of school ahead of the others, he hopped onto the teacher’s desk and scanned the crowd. The clearest way out was along the empty row of desks that stretched before him like a series of stepping-stones. Babrak leapt from one desktop to the next and to the next, all the way around the class—never once looking back at the mess of tossed papers, books, and upended chairs he left in his wake. Reaching the last desk before the door, he hurled his body off the surface and soared right across the threshold— slamming into his teacher, who was just coming back inside.

  “You have to save him now, Maria. Our teacher tied him to a chair in her kitchen, and he’s just sitting there.”

  “That is a crazy idea. How do you know?”

  “She’s done it before. I heard the story and she took him by the ear.
I watched them go.”

  Sangeen turned and pointed.

  My father came up the walkway just as I stepped on the Sohrab. Shaking his head as Sangeen repeated his story, not bothering to come into the house, he turned back up the road to fetch Babrak. While he was gone, my mother packed his bag and I folded my clothes for the tournament. Then we all waited. When my father came home, he was hauling a whimpering Babrak. Over his tea, he chuckled through a description of the peculiar scene at the teacher’s house. Shown into the kitchen by a dutiful Pashtun son, my father stood in the threshold only to find his own boy red-faced on a stool against the wall, feet dangling— hands indeed tied behind his back. Staring straight ahead and blinking fast, Babrak was repeating multiplication tables, tears running down his cheeks. My father heard the teacher say, “When you know those tables like the back of your hands, only then will I set your hands free.” She was sitting at the table right next to Babrak, grading papers. Shams checked the knots, which were so loose around Babrak’s wrists they might as well have been oversized bangles. Then he spoke to the teacher, who was unfazed to see her errant pupil’s father standing in her kitchen. She offered him a cool yogurt drink and gave a blow-by-blow description of Babrak’s antics. When she was done, she untied the boy. My father only nodded and told his son to make amends to his madam. Free at last, Babrak apologized and offered to stay after school for a week to clean the classroom. Then he followed in our father’s shadow, cap in one hand, the rope he’d taken a fancy to coiled up in the other. Within a day, he used it to tie his twin to their bed while he slept.

  After our family meal, in which Sangeen and Babrak sat, for once, in abject silence, I went to finish loading my duffel. Babrak came into the room not long after me, walking as though the weight of Pakistan proper sat on his coat-hanger shoulders. Stopping before me, he sighed heavily, holding out the palm-sized squash trophy I’d won in Wah Cantt. Made of cut glass, it was a dainty version of the weightlifting cup, and we kept them together on a table in the living room. I often held it like a talisman, wishing for good luck before going to the courts. Cherubic and sullen, Babrak apologized for creating drama before a big tournament. Then he asked to bring the trophy to school to prove that he really did have a squash player for a sister. Within seconds, Sangeen walked in. Saying nothing, he scampered up to the bed I shared with Ayesha and started jumping. I explained to Babrak that the trophy was far too precious a thing for him to take, and offered the tournament certificate in its place. Listening in the background, Sangeen jumped higher, the coils inside the mattress squealing. Behind me, he asked to see the trophy and held up his hands. Just as I turned to tell him to get off the bed, Babrak tossed my prize in an arc right over my head. In the periphery of my vision, I saw the glinting orb pass under the light. High off the bed, Sangeen leapt sideways, but missed the catch by bare millimeters. He hit the floor just as the trophy hit the wall and splintered in two big chunks.

  From the threshold, Ayesha saw it all and gasped. In a moment, we were side by side and picking up the pieces. I turned from the bed with an expression I’m sure my brothers did not know me capable of. Each one pointed at the other. I pointed at the door. Then Babrak, his face a knot of guilt and tears, turned and said the thing that seemed to curse me all the way to Lahore and beyond.

  “Is it a sign, Ayesha—an omen—a bad one for Maria?”

  *

  I’d been asleep, head resting on my Baba’s soft shoulder, for most of the three-hundred-mile journey to Lahore. As soon as we took our seats on the coach, every part of my body ached from within. My father told me to drink from my water bottle and he rubbed my tired, cracked hands—“Never trust the soft palmed or the loose tongued, Maria.”

  It was nearly midnight. All around, slumbering passengers sat motionless, sacks in their laps. I looked out at the city, past the market streets and minarets I hadn’t seen since I lifted weights as Genghis. I felt him out there in the darkness, the crowd still cheering him on. I smiled; I had trained as hard as I ever had in my life to make the trials. If I made it onto the national team, I wouldn’t be going back with my father. The idea didn’t frighten me—it made me proud.

  Bus journey over, I wobbled through the streets, bleary-eyed, next to my father. To save money, we took a rickshaw only part of the way, and the rest we ambled through the dark quiet, hauling our bags, everything closed. It was a long walk along the old, walled city and through the high archway of Bhati Gate. When I asked him where we were going, he breathed deeply and said one word—“Heaven.” Then he pointed.

  A huge dome of light up ahead cast hues of teal into the pitch darkness. It was like walking toward a fallen star. As my father and I stepped into the courtyard, acres of white marble met our tired feet like wet ice. I looked over the glistening expanse. Serenity itself—the center of a cloud. The shrine of Data Darbar, one of the most famous in Pakistan, South Asia, or the entire world, visited by thousands—Muslims and non-Muslims—felt holy without requiring any such designation. Everywhere, in mounds over the ground like stones in a lake, people bowed and prayed. Dead center at the far end, a white mausoleum rose majestic; to either side, towers built in the shape of brass bullets stood sentry. A jade-colored vault crowned the shrine as though a hand from the night sky had dropped an upended bowl on the roof. Underneath it, my father told me, were the remains of the saint for whom the shrine was made. Pilgrims were praying all around the tomb. Chanting, crying, and calling out to the dead man inside. Lights strung in the tens of thousands decorated pillars. We simply stood a long while. Eventually, it was the smell of food that lured us away—so hungry, I was already eating the air.

  The adjacent mosque was open all hours and served food on festival days to the faithful—whatever their faith. My father found a quiet spot, unrolled a mat, and I waited until he came back with bread and rice and bits of fruit. Then we sat together, watching as though sharing a dream. Scores of people came and went past us like servants in a palace. When we were finished eating, I leaned back against my father’s chest. He told me he would stay awake through the night, keeping watch and thinking, as that was the best place for it. I was so tired that my bones ached. In front of us, a group of men crossed the courtyard pounding drums, and all around them a crowd followed, dancing, twirling, and tossing blooms. As they reached the tomb at the far end, some grew wild in their fervor, bending down low and wailing. I felt my father shake his head over me.

  “Look at those fools, praying to marble and bones.”

  “What do they want, Baba?”

  “They come all the way here from all over the place to beg for blessings from the saint Ali Hajveri. He was known in his life as the Giver of Treasure, but he’s been dead for almost a thousand years.”

  “Is it wrong we came here to eat and sleep and nothing else? Maybe we should pray.”

  “We came here to nourish the bodies and souls God gave us. Getting down on our knees over there, Maria, will not make us more pious. Your brightest temple exists within you.”

  “I will go inside myself then and pray to win my games and be Asian Junior champion.”

  He laughed and held me tight. “Good luck.”

  “You don’t believe in luck.”

  “No. Believing in luck is a curse—I just believe. Besides, it is all already written.”

  A man whom my father would always describe with a single word—“good”—met us outside the squash hostel. Rahim Gul, the national team coach, had a tall, sure gait that brought to mind the Wing Commander. His deep, sonorous voice was like a musical instrument. When he talked with me outside, taking my father’s bag and asking about our journey, I felt at home. From the start, he looked after us, sharing his hotel room and his food with Shams. He admired my biceps, my rough hands, which he could see I’d had to tape just that morning to stop the bleeding. He never once made me feel ashamed about my old clothes. I don’t think he cared about anything but making sure I had what I needed, and he could see that I needed a great deal.
Mostly my body thirsted for rest, but it was too late for that. The first game was in less than an hour.

  When I glimpsed my opponent in the tank, I knew we were unevenly matched. At the far end of the court, she stood facing her coach. I watched as they took turns making dizzying hand gestures between them, lips moving in voiceless tandem with their talking fingers. I’d heard of sign language but had never seen it—had never met a deaf person in my life, or expected to on a squash court. Squash is a game of the senses. Tracking the ball starts with the eyes and continues with the ears. Often in the heat of a game you must gauge the position of the ball through sound alone. Right away, I felt at an unfair advantage. I thought then of Babrak splintering my trophy, which I would have caressed before leaving, had it been in one piece. It might have been a bad sign after all—that I would win without having earned it.

  From her serve, which shocked me with its precision, we set against each other in a rally that lasted longer than I expected. Immediately I had to change gears in my mind. Whatever her impediment, the girl made up for it in dogged control. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, she tossed me into a race around the tank like a mouse in a cage. When I got the ball, I nailed it. Most of the time, I was a millisecond behind. Best out of five, she tore through the third match in no time. Sensing defeat, I let out shouts and cries that she couldn’t hear. Somehow, she had me hog-tied in a full burnout of muscle and mind. The chance for a place on the team evaporated before me. In my growing panic, I played to new lows, diving and tripping over myself. I knew I’d lost long before I actually did.