Imagine a country of twenty-four million people, where a girl’s dreams of becoming an athlete are dashed by flooded basements, her trophies are sold for a few pence, and her hanging from pull-up bars gives anyone on the street permission to criticize her without cause.
This is not just another dystopian Hollywood film; for many girls in Pakistan, the reality is that deep-seated and misinterpreted stereotypes about femininity, fitness, and personal preferences clash with their aspirations to be athletes.
I’ll tell you a story now.
When I was younger, I used to get really excited when I heard the tale of “Roll No. 1,” which is an identification number that can be given to a student either during admissions or after registration.
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Saeed was a champion badminton player in her adolescence, having won titles for both the Lahore Division and District.
Up to the age of 18, when she was married, she participated in lawn tennis, cycling, track and field (discus, javelin, shot put, long jump, 100 and 400 meters), bar and trampoline gymnastics.The principal, whose home was directly across from the college building, once summoned Saeed into her office after noticing that she was often doing sports for hours after the school day ended. She was informed that a close watch would be kept on my mother’s performance, which eased her greatest concern—my mother was playing far too much. Later, she learned that Roll No. 1 had won her class.
If I knew that my mother’s sports medals were in sacs in her basement—a place reserved for storage—I would be enthralled. They were kept secure for a few years, but later, when the monsoon rains, which are notorious for flooding basements of ancient buildings, flooded the basement, they were presumably sold to a street scrap dealer. This was probably done more out of a sense of what good those trophies were by then than with malice.
