Taboos knocked out by Karachi’s mother-daughter boxing duo
karachi — Slim, powerful, and with an unwavering gaze, 19-yearold Razia Banu jabs at the face of her opponent — her own mother, a widow inspired to join her daughter in smashing taboos in Pakistan’s sultry port city Karachi.
Mother and daughter are both dressed in loose athletic gear, with scarfs wrapped around their heads instead of helmets, as they punch one another in an exhibition bout at the Pak Shaheen Boxing Club in Lyari, Karachi’s most restive — and sporty — neighbourhood.
Banu was drawn into the ring last year, after watching the grand funeral of legendary boxer Mohammed Ali.
He was “my favourite personality”, she told AFP after “losing” to her mother, pointing with a smile to a small framed poster hung on a pillar that read Ali’s famous “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”.
She went to her mother to seek permission to join the club, started just last year, the first for women in all of Pakistan.
Haleema Abdul Aziz worried about her daughter’s request. There were financial considerations — her husband had passed away five years back, and she was struggling to afford even school fees for her children. And then there was Pakistani society. Deeply conservative, it has seen women fight for their rights for decades — and, sometimes, in a country where acid attacks and honour killings are still commonplace, their lives. The violence weighs on Haleema. “I believe that all the males become beasts when a woman goes out alone from her home,” the 35-yearold single mother says.
“But I did not disappoint her (Banu) because I wanted her to be successful in her life.”
Her passion — and penchant for practising at home — soon inspired her mother also, who followed her daughter in joining the club. Banu leaves home early every morning for her job as a receptionist in a school, before going on to college, where she studies commerce.
She reaches the boxing club in the evenings. There she drills: punching bags and balloons, skipping rope, then practise bouts with some of the other 20 young girls who make up the club. —