A Different Kind of Daughter

by Maria Toorpakai

  At the squash academy, I jumped off the bike still in a glide and pushed it right through the front doors. I took the Sohrab with me, clattering and scraping against the walls all the way to the courts. One of the boys I knew was there on the bench. He looked over at the bike I’d left against the wall, then at me, said something before trailing off. The blood had left my face, I could feel it, and I asked him to play. He nodded, got up from the bench, and offered a towel. I was soaking wet—cold sweat, the kind that gives you chills right down to the bone.

  Hours later, fear exorcised in a long, burning game, hypnotizing drills, and logistics for the next tournament, I hauled my bicycle out of the building. In the sanctuary of the court, I had convinced myself that I’d simply made myself believe things. On the way out, I swung the racquet bag over my back—nothing and no one had gotten to me before. Outside, I walked past a large group crowded around a car with a flat tire; boys cycled about like a flash from another time. Two empty jingle buses flew past, all their bells silent. I got on my bike, joined the patchy traffic. A woman in a burqa scuttled across the road, tripped at the curb, and cried out. A blind man clattered along with his cane, though I could have sworn his dead eyes moved over me. Even as I observed all those things, I was storing them away like stills from a movie. Looking back, I realize that heightened awareness itself was a warning. Taking a different route home, I kept looking behind me—quick glances over the shoulder—sideways down the side streets as I passed them. Pedaling past our old house, I slipped into Little FATA and through the empty blocks. Up ahead, I could see the roofline, the torn blue shade in an upstairs window, the dead tip of a juniper. I kept the roof in my sights, as though at any moment I might lose my way and never make it. Already I could see the front door in my mind, feel the cool quiet of the interior. Off the bike and walking the last few feet, I looked back one more time—nothing—and I wanted to laugh. I was thinking about the pomegranate from Taimur, how sometimes you could only know you’d missed a thing when it reappeared. I wondered if we would ever live in beautiful fruit-laden FATA again.

  Then, up ahead, I saw movement. Beats of a bird’s wings as it shot out of a canopy of leaves. My eyes shifted—a man just rounding the corner. Instantly, I traded every thought for reflex— barely one second before, there had been nothing but open street. The glimpse of a dark profile, the slow lift of one sandaled foot, the last flutter of his clothes, and he vanished round the bend. I told myself that he was just a man like any other, and hurried over the last steps to the house. I put the bike against the wall at the side. Immediately, the air seemed to thicken—warm and slightly sweet—an acrid whisper that hovered like a visitation. Key at the ready, I stepped around the corner toward the front door. From the crumbling cement slab, pale tendrils of smoke curled upward. My hand flew to my face. Unmistakable. I didn’t have to see the source, but my panicked eyes went straight for it—the thing tossed to the ground like an afterthought. Still smoldering, it crackled and hissed as though the serpent’s soul was still inside it. I put my foot down hard and crushed the scorpion reefer, and then I went inside. Father and Taimur were home ten minutes later. A car bomb ripped half a block out of the other end of the city, so far away we never heard a thing.

  *

  Once again, I was a guest at the Army House with my father. Same set up as before: tents outside, twilight chitchat, right down to men carrying trays—even a menu. I tried the cake. This time I wasn’t there as a member of a medal-winning team, but to receive the Salam Pakistan award from President Musharraf, along with several other athletes in other sports. It was described as an award for excellence, and my father repeated the phrase to me many times, looking at my hands, which he so liked to touch—they were evidence, he told me, of a life of purpose. When the ceremony started, I walked onto a makeshift stage outside under the glaring lights, and took a seat behind the podium. The president made a speech about sports in Pakistan. I heard nothing of what he said, was too busy scanning the crowd, assembled on folding chairs, for my father. He was three rows back and looking at me, eyes twinkling. I noticed that there was more security than the last time—three times as many guards on the roof and manning the tents. Officers searched our bags several times, checked and rechecked our identity cards.

  It was August. I sat on the stage, sweating, blazing hot in my blazer; Musharraf’s shirt revealed the ridges of the armored vest underneath. I heard him say my name and look over; our eyes met and I knew to get up. While I was crossing the stage, it all came into focus that I wasn’t getting a medal for a single match or a tournament—I’d been singled out as an athlete. I heard my father’s voice say it again—award for excellence—and the ripple of applause swept over me, but I saw only my father there watching. Swimming inside his proud eyes, at that moment I felt more like a champion than I ever had—or ever would again.

  My father had told me even before we got there that we would leave right after the award ceremony. In the bus on the way back, dead of night, he turned to me as I stared out the window. Passing headlights going the other way. And beyond those, nothing but night.

  “You’re the number one player, Maria?”

  I looked over at him and laughed. “Yes, Baba. National champion.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe a year.”

  “You never said.”

  “You never asked.”

  A belly laugh. “And you were the first girl to play in shorts and a T-shirt.”

  “Yes—that I didn’t know, Baba.”

  He nodded, caressed his new beard. In just a week it had grown half an inch. “Of everything I could be proud of—that’s the thing I’m most proud of.”

  If I could go back, if there was one thing I would change, it would be having my picture taken—or being there at all—using my name. When my brother showed me the picture in the paper, I studied it for absurd imperfections: my eye looked small; nose too big; didn’t like my hair. I didn’t know it was a death sentence.

  *

  There was a man standing outside the complex when I entered. Then later, when I came back out—same man, same look: red-rimmed eyes staring right at me. I rode past him and kept going. The streets smelled of rain. Not a soul in them for several blocks. Up ahead a glut of traffic, pairs of tail lights. Police checks. Lately, they happened everywhere and all the time. I veered into a side street and took many more.

  Living in Little FATA had suddenly come to mean living inside a bull’s-eye. The Taliban had their sights on the Pashtun, on their own cousins, to make us pay for disloyalty—though they’d enjoyed our hospitality when they hid away, plotting in our villages. Scared and moving swiftly along my serpentine route, I felt that I needed to get home faster. A labyrinth of stops set up like an obstacle course. Sirens and horns blared. I asked myself what day it was. Not Friday. Nowhere near a mosque. Men were shouting. A car backfired and I swallowed a scream. I was on edge in a way that made me feel dizzy, but I told myself it was the heat and stopped to take a drink. Too many bad things had happened to me over too many years—and now bad things were happening to everyone all the time. The crowds on the streets were thick, hot, and angry.

  People lined up outside the movie theater on the next block: all young men in their teens. They leaned back at angles that made it look as if they were holding up the walls. I wondered which movie was showing and tried to read the marquee, but it was still too far away. That’s when the white hatchback cut me off. Two men inside it—one at the wheel, another in the back. Beads dangled from the rearview mirror. As the car went by, the driver looked at me—eyes glazed, teeth yellow, several missing; the other man was slumped over, head pushed against the front seat at a strange angle. Ahead of me, the car pulled up to the movie theater and stopped, slamming into the curb. The line moaned as one; a few people stepped out of it to get a better look. I was already passing, and something told me things were all wrong—the checkpoints, the crowds, the sirens. The white car sat th
ere, the engine revving. I looked back, pumping hard, could see how badly he’d parked. A man came out of the theater, shouting and pointing at the tire still up on the sidewalk under the marquee. Somehow I knew I shouldn’t linger so I turned the handle-bars and moved right across the thoroughfare, braving angry oncoming traffic. On the other side, I headed for the next turn and took it on a tear.

  It wasn’t long, maybe five seconds, before I heard it—a booming roar that made the ground under my feet quake. As though it had been making chase since the squash courts, a wallop of soot and wind rushed up behind me. Pulverized cement and metal rained down into the alley. There was the hot smell of fresh ash. Immediately, I thought of the young men lined up at the movie theater. I remembered a face, full of acne, thin mustache, the way he leaned against the wall in a stupor of heat. He looked to be about Taimur’s age, standing with two dozen or more just like him lined up like dominoes. Maybe they all hoped it would be cool inside. Hot dust billowing out all around me, my lungs burned as I breathed. I pedaled furiously, thinking only of getting away and nothing else. In the immediate aftermath there seemed to be minutes—years—of a strange, eerie stillness, everything deaf and mute. Then a woman shrieked as though breaking a glass jar in which the world had been turning, and behind me on that street, chaos erupted like a second bomb.

  Inside my house, I heard the static of the radio. Feet shuffling. The loud bangs of drawers opening and shutting. When I moved, my hair and body released flurries of dust. My legs twitched from the frenzied pedaling. Unable to stop, I rewound the last hour in flashes: people running toward me, every mouth open, every pair of eyes white with fear. Then to the car, sliding along the road, one front tire rising up against the curb. The driver, passing in a strange slowing of time. The way he stared right through me, already half dead—just one thing left to do. The man in the back, head cranked to the side, gaping holes where his eyes should have been. I knew, looking back to that surreal millisecond glimpse, that he must have been dead. And over and over again, the boys with their backs against the movie theater wall, in what I think of now as an execution line. I wondered if any made it out. I moved upstairs to the washroom and closed the door softly. Cold water. Lots of it. Downstairs, I could hear Taimur’s voice twine into my father’s, and one thought brought me to my knees—I’m still alive and so are they.

  *

  Time stopped in Peshawar. The population seemed to live within a long, interminable second. I don’t remember that period of Taliban terror attacks as a series of days or weeks or months—it just was. All over the city, people mouthed prayers as they passed one another and up to the sky when it bled smoke. Wails of sirens were a death knell we felt in our bones—though more often than not, we heard nothing of casualties or even of incidents. Officials, mullahs, teachers, neighbors went missing, into a void of forgotten souls, and no one asked after them. The vanished became frantic whispers at the corner, in our living room, and in the sleepless dark. On the news, in the papers, we heard nothing. Men grew long, reverent beards, burqas proliferated, and only the brave hearts went to the movies anymore. Still, I played squash, rode the red Sohrab—avoiding the main streets, on the lookout for a lone car, driver hunched in a lethal narcosis. I thought I saw them everywhere. On the roadsides, like solitary lamp posts, there were always men watching—me or someone else, I couldn’t be sure. Vagrants who stared out from their squalor like spiders in a web were suddenly suspects. And always the one man outside the squash complex, tucked under a tree by the wall. Sometimes it was the same figure for a solid week or more, then another, as though they took shifts in some factory of fear. I remember thinking the Taliban had found out about my win as Genghis Khan in Lahore.

  In a corner, my father sat, shades drawn against the beating sun. The interior of the house felt like a catacomb, so little light coming in, full of the damp smells of a leak he couldn’t seem to fix. Drops of water falling from the faucet upstairs were the only sound. When I saw him there, I knew he was waiting for me, just by the turn of his head. He motioned, hand rising and falling as I went in. Several days each week, he still braved the drive into FATA, taking great care to choose his route well ahead of time. He’d grown a bushy beard that concealed half his face, and wore a labyrinthine turban made of starched cotton, sacred beads garlanding his hands. Anyone looking into the windows as the pick up passed would think one thing—a holy man—and put down their gun. Whether he was teaching or not, he never said. We knew he worked at something, probably ways to get another college back on its feet. FATA occupied his life like a newborn. It was a time of long silences and few details in our family history. We all tried to continue our routines: kids at school, Ayesha in college, parents working, me playing squash—all of it in survival mode. Heavy lidded, my father sat with a piece of paper between his palms that had been folded over many times—and I knew.

  “Sit down and talk, Maria. There is trouble.” About serious matters, my father never minced words.

  Turned out, neither did the Taliban.

  Death threats are direct: the muzzle of a gun, a knife blade held against the throat, the rattle of a snake’s tail, or a note left on the windshield of the pick up. My Pashtun name, as printed in the newspapers or read out in the sports news—Wazir—branded me as tribal, not a regular Pakistani female squash player. My picture standing with Musharraf—Enemy Number One—was what had tipped the scales. I remembered just then how my mother told me the Taliban always sent a written warning before they blew up a school. So far, they’d incinerated four in Darra Adam Khel, and scores more elsewhere. Sometimes my mother was able to salvage odd things—desks, whole blackboards, boxes of pencils—to bring to the next building the board assigned. She’d work there a few weeks or months and then the warning would come—a note tacked to the door or scrawled across a blackboard. As my father leaned over and unfolded the paper one crease at a time, I knew I was about to hear mine.

  “In a nutshell, if I don’t stop you from playing, you will suffer severe consequences.”

  “What do they mean by ‘severe consequences’—not killing?”

  He was folding up the paper again, methodically. When my father thought hard, it showed in every muscle of his face. Just then, he looked like a man in pain.

  “Not right away, no. Unless there is no other choice.”

  “It’s just squash.”

  My father let out a sound, not quite a laugh. I’ve never heard it since. “The Quran is just a book. You are just a girl. FATA is just rock and soil.”

  “Do I stop?”

  He looked at me then, eyes squared, and crushed the paper in his fist. “Will I stop going to the mosque Fridays? Will I throw out your mother’s jean jacket? Will I take Ayesha out of university, place her in purdah, and marry her off to an old man? Will we never listen to music again?”

  I had my answer.

  *

  Taimur came with me on his bike—both pickup and drop-off— on his way to and from the markets. We took a different route each day. Up and down the side streets, past the black craters where buildings used to be—remnants of another mosque, roof on the ground in pieces like a dropped porcelain bowl. We avoided landmarks and hospitals, schools, and the vendors who catered to women. When he dropped me off, I glanced over my shoulder. He was always still right there, standing over his bike, arms folded and looking around. I remember thinking the note was a ruse—a competing player with an ax to grind—not the Taliban. Why would they bother with me?

  When I came back out, Taimur was still there, off to one side, his bicycle leaning on a bench, a sack of rice next to him, his face against the bark of a poplar tree, white and tired looking. We walked our bikes together up the shaded walkway, past two men standing where the paving forked. They were clean shaven and had on squash gear, tracksuits that looked brand-new, leather racquet bags, Ray-Bans. So well kitted out they might as well have been professional players, but I’d never seen them before. One of them looked right at me and grinned. For al
l the well-heeled newness about him, he was missing a tooth, right up front.

  “Hello, Maria Wazir. How are you?”

  I should not have looked, but I did—saw the eyes, all pupils, black as onyx, and the square hole in his mouth that reduced every handsome thing about him to a lie—should not have held my breath, and almost choked on it. I could see that his hands and the hands of the other man were empty, clean. Safe. They were just standing there, standing sentry to my fate, letting me know it belonged to them.

  We got to about ten feet away, already on our seats and about to pedal, when I heard it, voice low, swimming under the breeze and the din of traffic so that I had to strain to make out words.

  “Is that the older brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “No matter.”

  My father was reading to Sangeen in the kitchen when we got home—about the Trojan War—and I sat awhile, listening. He was only at the very beginning of the ancient Greek story, when the goddess of discord, Eris, tossed a golden apple on which she’d inscribed “to the fairest” into a wedding feast of the Gods. Taimur put away the sack of rice, put on water to boil, and busied his hands. I looked over at my father; his beard had grown past his neck and had spread out in an unruly shape. Half his face was hidden, except for the eyes, which on him were the whole man. The electricity was off again, so a kerosene lamp sat flickering on the table, wick coiled like a snake inside the glass base, sucking up fuel. Watching him read to his sleepy son in that weak light, his mouth burrowed in that wild nest, I saw it—the purple gash to his bottom lip. Blood scabbed over it, and I noticed that when he touched his lip slightly as he turned a page, he winced. Barely. Taimur had his back to me still, making our tea, the spoon clinking as he stirred.