Maria Toorpakai

First it was a fire.

A pile of dresses engulfed in flames, matching the anger of the young girl watching the red-hot blaze with an open bottle of kerosene nearby. Even at 4 years old, Maria Toorpakai knew. The blatant unfairness that surrounded her was all too obvious.

Boys outside. Flying kites. Playing marbles. Adventuring.

Then there were the girls. 

Inside. Cleaning with their mothers. Cooking dinners. Raising their siblings. Obedient.

The young Toorpakai fumed. She had too much energy to stay indoors. Too much vitality to clean dishes and scrub floors. Too much fire to succumb to her region’s norms. 

Call it wishful thinking. Call it stubbornness. Call it determination. Toorpakai sought the freedom of the boys and men. But in the Southern Waziristan District of Pakistan — a region on the western edge of the country near Afghanistan known as “the most dangerous place on earth” — women are allowed no such freedoms.

So Toorpakai gathered her dresses — the pink and the turquoise, those too tight and suffocating — and stormed into her backyard and broke tradition with the flick of a match.

She would take control of her freedom.

Soon, her parents arrived home. Her mother shrieked at her daughter standing near the flames. Her father saw Toorpakai dressed in her brother’s clothes, her hair shortened after a butchered attempt to cut it with her mother’s scissors. Standing there in a long silence, he understood.

From now on, he told her, we’re going to call you Genghis Khan.

As Toorpakai settled into her life as Genghis Khan, nicknamed after the Mongolian conqueror from the 1200s who built an empire the size of Africa, she found the freedoms she longed for. She spent her days picking berries or gathering wood in the mountains, racing to the wells for water, and spending nights around campfires hanging with the boys. 

Her guise as Genghis Khan allowed her to play sports. She became a powerful weightlifter with her fierce and aggressive attitude, rising to the second-ranked junior in the country. But she found her calling in squash, one of Pakistan’s most popular sports. Hitting a ball with a small racket against a wall allowed her to unleash her anger at the culture that treated women differently.

Toorpakai spent hours developing the skills that would eventually lead her to a third-place finish in the World Junior Squash Championship at age 16.

While squash gave her that outlet, it also led to the demise as Genghis Khan. When she was 12, she enrolled in a local squash academy and was forced to show a birth certificate. For the first time since she was 4, she was outed as a girl. 

Yet, she was met by a sympathetic and forward-thinking academy director who allowed her to join. By the time she placed bronze at Worlds, she had risen to the third-ranked squash player in the world for players under 19 and Pakistan’s best. But with her successes came harassment and bullying at her local academy from the boys who were angry they were playing against — and losing to — a girl.

And when Toorpakai received an award from then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for her finish at Worlds, so came death threats from the Taliban — to both her and her family.

Her father, Shamsul Qayyum Wazir, found a note on his car one day threatening dire consequences if he didn’t stop Toorpakai from playing sports. The letter said her involvement was a dishonor to Islam and against tribal conditions.

Waziristan is a Pakistani Taliban stronghold, known for suicide bombings and killings that plague much of the region. While the extremist group claims to preach an Islamic ideology, Toorpakai says it’s solely driven by power and money.

Men are allowed to travel freely throughout the region, while strict rules are placed on women to force them into a life of servitude and obedience towards men. Those women who wish to break tradition are harassed, threatened, or killed.

The gender roles for children are no different: boys are allowed to roam freely while girls are forced indoors with their mothers. Bombings at schools are also common as a scare tactic to drive girls away from education and boys into their ranks. 

Shamsul scoffed at such inequalities. Toorpakai said her father often described them to his children as a condition created by humans.

“He would always give this example that when a mother bird feeds her baby birds. She doesn’t feed the male first and the female later; she feeds whoever is hungry, whoever needs it. They’re fed equally,” Toorpakai says. “But we intelligent humans come up with all kinds of labels that men are different. Men are superior and women are inferior. Men deserve more, women deserve less. Women should stay home. Men should be the ones in authority.”

Her parents — both teachers — cast aside those radical beliefs and instilled in their children that whoever is intelligent and capable, and whoever possesses the skill and ability, regardless of gender, can be in authority. 

In the documentary, Girl Unbound, which follows Toorpakai’s life, Shamsul told filmmakers that his beliefs were shaped after a trip to Europe as a young man.

“My father never put restrictions on us. He always supported me. He would always find a way to accommodate whatever we wanted,” Toorpakai says. “He always allowed us to follow our instincts and see it as a blessing rather than a problem.

“He doesn’t care, like a lot of parents, about ‘oh, it’s a shame for me’ or ‘it will bring dishonor to me.’ My dad is like, ‘I don’t care what people say about me, what they think of me. I care about my children, their health, their decisions.’”

Toorpakai went into hiding for more than three years as the threats grew more serious. Her father first brushed off the threat found on his car. But another followed, declaring the Taliban would bomb Toorpakai’s squash academy if she kept playing.

She received around-the-clock security from the Pakistani government at her home, where she continued practicing against the concrete walls in her room. While she worked to hone her skills, her depression deepened as she longed for the freedoms she once had.

Toorpakai sent dozens of emails daily to squash academies around the world, seeking refuge to play and freedom to embrace her true self.

Here, girls of my age are passing their lives in such a miserable condition. They have no facilities in education, health, and have no recreational activities. They’re restricted to four walls, despite having the desire to come out of the Stone Age and get assimilated with the rest of the world.

Her pleas went unanswered.

The wishful thinking, the stubbornness, the determination she once possessed smoldered into defeat. She had tasted the freedom she yearned for, then had it snatched away.

There are times when life feels like depression engulfs a dark room, draining any ounce of happiness or color within. But sometimes, when we least expect it, life has a way of igniting a fire that burns those feelings to ashes, leaving behind a bright, vivacious world where anything feels possible.

Toorpakai received such a spark.

Thousands of miles away, in Canada, Jonathon Power received an email with Toorpakai’s pleas. Once the top-ranked male squash player in the world, Power was now retired and opened the Power Squash Academy in Toronto. Power had traveled the world playing, including in Pakistan, and had a sense of the struggles Toorpakai faced. How could he say no to a person who possessed such skill in the face of such adversity? 

He paid for her to fly to Toronto and train with him, a journey that would not only change — but possibly save — her life.

Although Toorpakai found herself thousands of miles away from home, the threats against her family didn’t stop. While she kept in close contact with them, her father one day lied to the Taliban that he disinherited his daughter to end the threats.

After arriving in Canada, Toorpakai’s goal was to be the best squash player in the world — fitting, considering her coach. Though she was finally free of the Tailban threats, those against her family didn’t stop. She flourished under Power, climbing to 49^th in the world rankings, but Power says the threats against her family wore heavily on her.

“She and her squash suffered because of it,” Power says.

Toorpakai’s ambitions have since grown beyond the squash courts. She still calls Toronto home. She travels through the city, visiting restaurants and grocery stores or running in shorts through the parks. No one gives her a second thought. 

“This is my family. This is my home,” she says. “They taught me a lot about the humanity inside me. They’ve helped revive it in a sense.”

In a way, she’s found peace here that she never would in Pakistan. But her homeland is never far from her mind. She keeps in close contact with her family. Her parents continue teaching and preaching equality for all. Her sister, Ayesha, is breaking barriers in Pakistan as a religious scholar and a member of the National Assembly.

Now 33, Toorpakai runs the Maria Toorpakai Foundation in hopes of providing equal opportunities for girls in sports back home. Through her foundation, she’s raising money to build the Toorpakai Sports School for both girls and women in her hometown to provide an avenue to learn and play without the harassment or bullying she endured. 

 “We need to introduce sports so that we can keep children engaged in positive activities and keep their hopes alive,” Toorpakai says. “We need to encourage them to go to school, get an education, and keep learning. All these things are very important for our society.”

 Without sports in her life, she’s unsure who or where she would be today. She’s thankful for her journey — the highs and the lows — that all began with a fire.

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