Maria Toorpakai grew up in a lawless tribal area of Pakistan where the Taliban rules and her future was pretty much set – she’d stay at home and get married. She’d have no education, no career, no way out. But Toorpakai wanted out and she found a way. She cut her hair, dressed in her brother’s clothes, and pretended to be a boy when she was a child. As a teenager, she stopped pretending to be a boy, but she still rebelled. Despite threats from the Taliban, she eventually became an elite athlete and the country’s top ranked female squash player. Toorpakai tells her remarkable life story in a new memoir called A Different Kind of Daughter: The Girl Who Hid from the Taliban in Plain Sight.
KCRW
