A Different Kind of Daughter Read online

  For every woman and child of war and oppression

  the world over, struggling to play and learn in peace.

  May these pages help to light your dark paths to freedom.

  Contents

  Prologue: A Prophecy

  1. Between the Mountains

  2. The Mullah

  3. An Unlikely Bride

  4. Genghis Khan

  5. Bhutto’s Muse

  6. The Wall

  7. The City of Guns

  8. Deities, Temples, and Angels

  9. Out of the Tribal Lands

  10. The Capital of Empires

  11. I Am Maria

  12. Playing Like a Girl

  13. Smoking Scorpions

  14. Rupees for My Mother

  15. The Giver of Treasure

  16. Number One

  17. In the Crosshairs

  18. Purdah

  19. Breakbone Fever

  20. Liberty Bell

  Epilogue: One Thousand Marias

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  A Letter about MariaToorpakai.org

  List of Illustrations

  Prologue: A Prophecy

  They send girls like me to the crazy house—or simply stone us to death. Lucky girls might get married off to a rival clan, in the hope of tainting the tribe’s blood. I am the product of one of those punitive tribal marriages. In a sentence meant to damn them both, my maverick mother married my renegade father having never laid eyes on him until their wedding. The tribal elders did not foresee the instant love match or the combined force of my parents’ courage and shared ideals. They certainly did not foresee me. And they could not stop our brazen family of Pashtun rebels from multiplying.

  Even among my own, I was considered a different kind of daughter. I hated dolls, was miserable wearing fancy dresses, and rejected anything remotely feminine. My ambition would never come to life in a kitchen, or flourish within the four walls of our home. Just to stay sane, I needed to be outside, under the open sky and running free—the very thing that tribal law forbade.

  When I was still very little, my father borrowed an old Zenith television set and VCR and came home from the local bazaar with a used video about the hunting tactics of lions. Buried in that video, as in everything my father showed us, whether on television screens or in old books, was a life lesson that we had to search to find. Sitting on the cool clay floor of our living room, we watched a lion in the heart of the hot African plains stalk a herd of gazelles. The lion is actually a very slow predator, yet it hunts some of the fastest creatures on earth. From the outset, the lion was physically outmatched. Still, hungry as he was, he lounged like a lazy king in swaying grasses, casually surveying his surroundings. Every now and then he got up, stretched, and inched closer to his prey. As the gazelles looked over, he simply stared back with a devil-may-care attitude, betraying nothing of his intent. The gazelles’ placid confidence came from the fact that they could so easily outrun the lion, but that false faith in their ability would be their undoing. The lion possessed two game-changing talents—a cut-throat patience and a phenomenal ability to conceal itself. I remember well how the graceful beast leapt out from the grass and dug its teeth and claws into the exposed neck of a stunned gazelle that had been unaware of him sitting there all the while. How stupid the gazelle was, I thought, and how cunning the cat.

  *

  Just before my fifth birthday, I complained to my father that I could not suffer another suffocating dress and would prefer to wear loose clothes like the boys I’d watched playing outside in the dirt. He laughed and then told me not to worry. It might have been the yellow T-shirt and shorts he bought for me at the bazaar that set everything in motion. I didn’t heed his warning to wear them only within the high walls of our property. And in my part of the world, for a girl to venture out uncovered was haram— forbidden, a sin against God.

  On the day I wore my yellow outfit, the panorama of peaks and valleys past our front iron gates lured me. It was the first time I’d been alone outside the house, ready to run out under the open sky. With my clean dark hair all coiled and done up in a rainbow of ribbons, I slipped into the blaze of noon, the shirt already sticking to my back, braids and skin dripping sweat. The sun heating my limbs, I stopped for a moment in the courtyard, held out my arms, and experienced a great rush of freedom. I looked down at my legs, seeing the smooth landscape of my own limber form, so often concealed and already going pink. Then I pulled back the latch, pushed open the heavy gate, and bolted. Coming back unobserved, I never told a soul what I’d done.

  On a sweltering afternoon, I sat kneeling by a low windowsill, chin cupped in my hand, staring out over the wide river plain behind our house. My mother had put me in a new dress, constellations of beads and silk threads embroidered all over the heavy fabric. It confined me head to toe like a coffin. From outside, I could hear rippling laughter as a group of boys played, running and kicking up clouds of dry dirt that blotted out my view of the serrated horizon. I heard the constant thud of feet kicking a ball, and I felt, as I watched and listened, a sudden fist of intense heat punch at my gut. There were ten of them at least, all dressed in loose clothes, kicking a soccer ball around between the low projections of rock. The ball zigzagged between their nimble feet and I panicked as I sat in the house, suddenly understanding my own fate as though reading my future in a book—embalmed for life in pretty clothes, doomed to either go to school or stay home. In that moment, my heart went to stone. There was no in-between for girls like me who wanted to run outside and play games and sports in the open air. Suddenly I was aware that, despite all my liberal father’s efforts, his myths and big maps of the continents, and everything about the wider world he’d tried to teach me, I would never truly be free. In our culture girls remained indoors, quiet and veiled for life.

  I didn’t think about what I did next. I simply got up, backed away from the sill into cool shadow, tearing off the dress, ripping at the seams, clawing at the arms. Then, in a quiet rampage through the house, I pulled every one of my dresses out of the closets and into the garden. One by one. They were so heavy, it took an entire hour.

  The cooking pit under the tree outside was shallow, just four bricks and a few sticks of wood set under a grill, but I knew where my mother kept the kerosene and matches. In a cabinet on a shelf in the kitchen. I moved fast, before I could change my mind, knowing full well that if I allowed myself to think too much, I would stop. Hauling down the full can of kerosene, I dragged it with both hands slowly across the floor without spilling so much as a drop, then out the back door, cutting a long track in the dirt leading straight to the pit. I had already stacked the dresses in a pile—one atop the other—over the cooking bricks, their ornaments reflecting facets of sunlight, fabrics almost leaden. Even when the wind gusted through the garden, the garments remained as still as corpses. Staring at the heap, I hesitated for only a second: it was a shame to incinerate that beauty, and yet to ignore what I knew was to seal my own death sentence. I soaked the clothes in kerosene clear as water and I struck a match. Standing back, I watched the flame fly at my command like a small shooting star.

  In a sudden burst, all the air around me raced up, rushing through my hair and stealing my breath, and the stack of dresses suddenly disappeared before me, behind a wall of flames. All those beads and crystals sparked, destroyed in an explosion of hot red embers rising straight into the blue sky, billowing with black smoke. All that bright silken color disintegrated within minutes into browns and blacks. I ran into the house and found my brother’s shirt and pants, an outfit we called a shalwar kameez, and slipped them on. Then I went to the kitchen and found a sharp knife. In a moment
, I was hacking away big chunks of my black hair, tossing the clumps into the flames, which turned them instantly to ash.

  My father stood there a long while, watching, though I hadn’t seen him, his gaze going from his wild, dancing child to the lifeless heap of dresses. I learned much later that on that hot afternoon, he’d seen another girl in me—the sister he’d failed to save so many years before. From an upstairs window, he’d glimpsed her figure hauling a pair of heavy galvanized buckets full of water across the family courtyard. Then she stopped suddenly and stood strangely still. He saw the first bucket drop, then the second. Spilled river water streamed over the hot stones as the buckets rolled past her feet, the hem of her dress dripping. He heard his sister gasp just once in pain and watched her body fall as though a bolt of lightning had struck her.

  By the time he got to her, she was on the ground, the clear sky reflected in the domes of her wide open eyes. She was dead. People in the village said she’d had damaged arteries or some other defect that made her heart stop beating. My father believed she’d died from nothing more than the great weight of her many sorrows. His sister had been just like me—strong, androgynous and hot-tempered. A tomboy simply could not survive in the cage our culture expected girls to live in.

  By the time my father was a man, he’d seen many girls die of their own hand to escape—cousins who poisoned themselves to avoid arranged marriages, others who simply stopped eating until they perished from hunger. Often girls doused themselves in kerosene before lighting a match. Once he’d watched a girl in the village go up like a human torch. When it was over, he’d seen what was left of her charred body. Other girls had done the same, though more often it was done to them, in bride burnings over dowry disputes or as a sentence meted out for some unpardonable sin.

  “My sister, was just like you, Maria—strong and different, born of the lion—and they would not let her be.”

  Then my father approached the burning pit and stepped up to me, laughing. He ran his fingers all through my massacred hair.

  “My new son must have a name befitting a great warrior and the battle just won without blood. We will call you Genghis Khan.” Then he leaned down and repeated the name into my left ear—and into my right, he recited the holy azan. And Maria was gone.

  1. Between the Mountains

  Breathtaking mountain chains framed my childhood home, a boundless vista known only as “the Abode of God.” They were massive daggers of rock, full of light the color of fire. Nestled between the peaks, hidden in soft pockets, flowed rivers edged with villages made of mud and stone. And above it all, a big blue dome of clear sky stretched out with no end. Across the valleys, where corn grew and sheep grazed, there was sometimes no human in sight. No sound. A person could walk for days across the plains and not see a soul and yet feel God’s touch everywhere.

  For me, that quiet and beautiful land is heaven. Still, when the world thinks of my home, they envision an outpost of hell. South Waziristan is one of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northwest Pakistan, but in reality it governs itself through an ancient system of tyrannical tribal laws. Ax-shaped, its 2,500 square miles of territory cut into the lawless and blood-soaked border of Afghanistan, and it is the present-day headquarters of the Taliban. My native land is considered the most dangerous place on earth, but it lives in my mind as the tribal home I would go back to without a second thought if I could —if no one there wanted me dead.

  In the afternoons of my childhood, a steady breeze blew and the dancing gusts shifted from warm to cool and back again. But as the weather changed, before a storm or as the seasons slid one into the next, a new wind would steal over the mountains, rushing through the peaks with long strips of cloud and wrapping the ranges as though in thick reams of gauze. The nameless foreign scents and, as I imagined, whole invisible worlds carried on that sweet wind dared my mind to roam far beyond our quiet place between the mountains.

  That same breeze blew on the day I was born, November 22, 1990, in a village like all the others, quiet and small, an insignificant speck nestled in a wide green valley. My mother, Yasrab, was twenty-six years old and had no help in giving birth to me—not a hospital or a doctor, and no medication of any kind. Neighboring women came and went with cups of cool water, quick whispers, and strips of clean cloth. Men left to pray at the mosque, eat mangoes picked from the wild groves, suck on sugar cubes, and stayed well away. The birthing room was kept dark and no one could hear a sound through the locked door. When it was over, it would not really matter to the clan whether my first cries were hearty or whimpering, or if I was born alive or dead. I came into this world like my sister, Ayesha Gulalai, four years before me—a girl, a blemish on the face of our tribe.

  My father, Shams Qayyum Wazir, not yet thirty himself, was a liberated man of noble blood, which meant that he was a renegade among Pashtun men. Shams never once made my sister and me feel inferior to our brother, Taimur Khan, who was born five years before me, or to the twin boys, Sangeen Khan and Babrak Khan, who came as a double blessing when I was four. Unlike in other Pashtun families, where the females were subservient to the males, we all lived within our large mud-brick home as carefree equals. Together, we adhered to our Muslim faith, observing feasts and fasts and praying five times each day, but my father taught us that people the world over found many ways to reach God. My family were freethinkers, and it was that quality that would eventually make us outcasts within our conservative tribe, at the same time as it liberated us.

  *

  Every inhabitant of Waziristan, North and South, is known as a Wazir; but Wazir is also a name that refers to a sprawling Pashtun tribe among the many that exist in our region, connected by the same Pashto tongue and governed by our Pashtunwali code of honor, the ancestral laws that settle our many blood feuds and rivalries. Though the Wazir are splintered into clans, we come together as one at the hint of a foreign threat. No outside power, however mighty, whatever their modern weaponry, has ever succeeded in subduing the Wazir, or even occupied our ancient territory for a single day. British imperialists, with their experience in conquering and colonizing, unleashed legions of soldiers in uniform over the heart of Waziristan, only to encounter fearless Wazir warriors who forced them back, massacring four hundred British soldiers in a single afternoon, as my father once told me with great smiling pride. To a guest in their home, Pashtuns will offer up their every precious possession, but insult them once and they’ll have your severed head in a sack before you so much as blink.

  During my childhood, I saw no people but those of my blood, whom I could recognize from just a glance. Even if they could get there, tourists never visited my small thicketed-away portion of the world. Foreigners wouldn’t manage a step onto our land before catching every dark Wazir eye. Wazir people are heavyset and tall, with strong limbs and powerful wide hands. In protecting their own, Wazir women are fearless, and their voices thunder up and shake from deep inside their bodies. They used to say that when a Wazir woman spoke, you had better listen. According to one legend, our people are descendants of a famous Pashtun leader called Suleiman and his son, Wazir. From their progeny, many tribes flourished and spread out in vast human tributaries, consuming masses of land where they settled.

  On a map, Waziristan appears like a patch sewn to the tattered edges of Pakistan and straddling the Afghan frontier across the Preghal mountain range. Shared bloodlines and an interwoven past, which began in the ancient valleys of Afghanistan, spill across the border straight through the Khyber Pass, part of the Silk Road. No boundary carved into stony ground by any man with the muzzle of a rifle, or painted onto paper with the blood of thousands, could ever cut deep enough to tear apart the tapestry of our common lineage. Everywhere I went, my land, my people, my father reminded me that I was a full-blooded Wazir. I am Wazir before all else.

  Every memory I have of our first house, with its mud-covered pucca bricks, begins the same way: a slow film opening in the silent morning, warm sunshine thick over everyt
hing. In my home there seemed to be a magic in the way the day was born, though it was always the same routine, like a family anthem of activity playing out in every home and in every village. All Pashtun mothers woke very early, before the first crow of the rooster. A tribal mother required no alarm or even much forethought to go about her day. Her duty—to set in motion the rhythm of the family—was as sacred and inborn a task as the beating of her heart, and its momentum pried open her eyes, however tired she might have been from the tedious domestic labor of the previous day. In everything a Wazir mother did, she followed in the long, rutted path of the mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers who came before her. She was permitted no other way. She had no access to television or newspapers or magazines, and even radios were scarce. Knowledge itself was a stranger, not to be trusted—or even invited in.

  I grew up with the accepted practice that a Pashtun woman remained in the home and only ventured out enveloped in head-to-toe garments called abayas or burqas, or big shawls called chadors and with a male—even just a young boy—watching at her side. To confine a woman in such a way—duty-bound between four walls and hidden away inside her clothes—was known as having her live in purdah, the conservative Muslim custom of secluding women so that they may not be seen by men. This practice was never questioned, in the same way a person would never question the direction of the wind or the rising and setting of the sun. To outsiders, such a tradition seemed like imprisonment, but to me, at least at that time, the women never seemed unhappy dressed that way. There was a simple harmony in knowing what we were all meant to do, where we all belonged. And we did belong—to our station in the home and to our family’s position within the tribe. I believed this until I stopped belonging.

  I always imagined my mother’s waking imbued a living spirit into everyone who woke after her—my father, my sister, my brothers, even me. Before she rose to face her day, there was nothing at all but an infinite void: no sky, no ground, no river, no spooned-out mountain valley to see. My mother’s rising seemed to set the sun alight, just as she piled up wood and lit the fires for cooking and fanned the smoke.