Love of sport inspired Pakistani athlete to risk her life to play
World-renowned squash star hopes to blaze a trail for girls in her homeland
Growing up in an ultraconservative Taliban stronghold in northwest Pakistan, squash star Maria Toorpakai Wazir realized early in life she wanted only one thing: to be treated as an equal.
“Where I come from, girls are not allowed to play sports,” the 26-year-old said at the Calgary Winter Club, where she competed this week in the Calgary CFO Consulting Services Pro-Am.
She cut her hair short, put on her brothers’ clothes, and headed outside to start enjoying some of the freedoms boys had. She wasn’t yet seven years old.
“I just wanted to be free, and in my eyes the only way to freedom was in boys’ clothes.”
Despite the risks involved, her liberal father fully supported her bold stance.
At age 12, she fell in love with squash, a popular sport in Pakistan played by women, but not in the conservative tribal regions.
“Playing tournaments, I would dress up like boys, travelling on buses I would arrive at midnight sometimes and wait all night in front of squash clubs with stray cats and dogs,” Wazir said. “Eventually, the squash people knew (I was a girl). I had trouble with boys and men because they were uneducated and from village areas. They would stare and pass comments and rather than go for the ball, they would bump into me. I never looked like a girl at that age, so for them, they loved making me feel uncomfortable.”
Nothing made her or her family more uncomfortable than the day her father had a letter taped to his car from Taliban members, who also called her native Waziristan home.
“I was winning tournaments, and president (Pervez) Musharraf was very progressive towards women and awarded me a few national awards,” said Wazir, who stopped wearing boys clothing at age 16.
“That was a time when there were bomb blasts every day,” she said of the conflict in her area in 2006. “I thought, ‘Let’s not make trouble for my dad, he has been through a lot.’ It would be heartbreaking for me to cause trouble for my family. Also, if a bomb blast goes off in a squash court, there’s so much glass, many innocent kids can die, too.”
So she played sporadically for three years with the help of the Pakistani national squash federation, which provided snipers to secure her passage to and from the squash courts. Homeschooled as a child, she wrote letters around the world in search of a way out.
At 19, she won bronze at the world junior women’s championship and later received a reply from Canadian squash champion Jonathan Power, who offered to train her at his facility in Toronto. She’s been a Canadian resident since.
Her next stop is London, U.K., for the Human Rights Watch Festival, which will feature a documentary on her life, Girl Unbound: The War To Be Her. Her sister is the youngest parliamentarian in Pakistan, and Wazir doesn’t rule out joining her at some point to help effect more change. An obvious women’s rights advocate, she has set up a foundation back home encouraging families to educate girls and allow them to play sports, all of which is documented in her 2016 memoir, A Different Kind of Daughter: The Girl Who Hid from the Taliban in Plain Sight.
“I just want to help people — that’s all I care about,” said Wazir.