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ixteen-year-old Farida Khan is in the dressing room. She has just gotten into a pair of baggy, shiny boxer shorts. It's the first time in her life that she's wearing anything that doesn't reach till her ankle, like a gown or a voluminous salwar-kameez.... Given a choice her aunt, with whom she lives in Calcutta's cramped Khidderpore slum, would cover her up in a burqa. And now here she is, prancing around in an outfit that "would give Chachi a heart attack".Under her breath, Farida mutters a mantra her coach has taught her: "If you fear, you can never be a boxer." And there is nothing she wants more than to be a boxer. She picks up her boxing mittens, dashes out the door and charges into the boxing ring where an opponent waits—another girl her age, called Zugra Fatima. Also from one of the city's squalid slums. Also from an orthodox Muslim family.
Farida and Zugra are among a group of Calcutta girls, all of them from poor Muslim families, determined to bust stereotypes and conventions, and show the world they too can pack a mean power punch. The grandly titled Khidderpore School of Physical Culture, in Ekbalpore's Nawab Ali Park, is actually little more than a makeshift boxing ring in a crumbling, cemented courtyard. There are a couple of rooms on the side, one of which is marked 'dressing room'. The club, comprising mostly local youngsters, presently has 13 girls. Get there around 5 any evening, from Monday to Saturday, and catch them arriving one by one in their demure salwar kameezes, heads covered in dupattas, and then emerging from the changing room, transformed, in their shorts or track suits.
"My family doesn't know I come here," says Farida. "I tried to tell Chachi, but she wouldn't hear of it. She says, 'Is this any sport for a girl to play?' She thinks I will break my nose and become so ugly no one will marry me. Besides, she thinks no Muslim boy would want a bride who might punch him in the nose on the wedding night! But who wants to marry anyway?" She waves dismissively, then throws a shadow upper cut in the general direction of her home.
Farida, who lost both her parents in an accident when she was a toddler, says her dearest wish is to be independent. She cannot afford to go to school, but she has learnt to sew, and now works in a tailoring shop to support herself and her aunt, who brought her up. And not only does she religiously pay the 10-rupee club membership fee every month, she also makes sure she never misses practice.
