The young woman in a fluorescent lime green tracksuit and white high sole sneakers with the orange laces marches back and forth in the gymnasium. She is quick to point out where any of the gymnasts are making mistakes.

“Stand straight. Look up. Take care of your posture. Be stable,” she tells one little girl standing on one leg.

“I said cartwheel,” she raises an eyebrow while reminding another one, who has missed some part of her instruction to make a back bridge instead.

She stresses on warming up and stretching, taking care of when to breathe in and when to breathe out. “Careful! Don’t strain your wrist there,” she calls out to the girl now doing the cartwheels.

She also tells all the gymnasts not to be mindful of their facial expressions.

Once Pakistan’s top female gymnast received help from people who believed in her ambitions. Now she is inspiring younger versions of herself at a gymnastics camp

“Why are you looking so serious?” she asks a tall gymnast in cheerful bumblebee yellow leotards. “Don’t look serious or stressed while performing,” she says more loudly for all to hear.

The girls in the yellow leotards are from Khel in Machhar Colony, the girls from Kiran Foundation are in black leotards and the Army girls are in no specific colours. All are there to attend Pakistan’s top female international gymnast Maryam Keerio’s gymnastics workshop. Maryam is also known as the ‘Queen of Gymnasts’ here.

Maryam was called in to conduct a three-day gymnastics workshop by the Imkaan Welfare Organisation, which works with the stateless Bengali and Burmese children of Machhar Colony through its Khel group.

“It’s the first camp of its kind here,” Imkaan’s founder and director Tahera Hasan tells Eos. “It is good for both the young gymnasts as well as our coaches. The gymnasts have also, till now, only been trained by male coaches. A woman coach can help them more,” she adds.

“Maryam has taken part in several international championships. She has had the exposure that I wish for my kids. She has first-hand knowledge of international rules and regulations also,” says Tahera. “I want her to continue guiding us,” she adds.

Imkaan sent out invitations to the Kiran Foundation and Pakistan Army to send their female gymnasts here also. The young gymnasts of Lyari, which include the gymnasts of Machhar Colony, have already done their organisations proud by winning many inter-school and inter-city or national events. Now they are looking forward to international challenges, too.

After a tough morning to afternoon session on the first day of the workshop, Maryam sits down with the kids for a relaxed session of getting to know each other better. She starts by telling them about herself and how she got to be a world-class gymnast — once the only female gymnast representing Pakistan.

In between, Tahera opens up several bottles of water to add big soluble Vitamin C tablets to them before distributing them among the kids.

“I was only five when my father, Mohammad Wazir Keerio, first saw the great gymnast Nadia Comaneci of Romania on the big screen at a circus he had gone to watch in Lahore in 1986 or 1986. [Comaneci achieved the first perfect 10 score at the Olympics in Montreal in 1976.] He was really impressed and wanted one of his children to learn gymnastics to be able to perform like Nadia,” she begins her story.

“Nadia while doing gymnastics had made it all look so easy and effortless that he thought he could teach anyone at home with enough flexibility to do the same. He found what he was looking for in me. I was little with soft bones and a flexible body,” she says.

“The first thing that my father did was to make practice mats for me. He made three 6ft by 6ft mats out of jute sacks that he filled up with wheat grain and rice husk. That done, my practising to become a gymnast started at home.”

Stopping to glance around the gymnasium then, Maryam turns to look at the kids again. “You children are lucky to have so much equipment at your disposal. I had nothing then. I only had my father, who had plenty of dreams for me.

“Things didn’t go according to plans at first. My father was not a gymnastics coach, so I ended up injuring myself. First I dislocated my right arm, and then I cracked my left wrist. Then he got really afraid. He stopped training me,” she says.

“But as his favourite Comaneci says, ‘Don’t run away from a challenge because you are afraid. Instead, run towards it’, and my father also didn’t give up. When he went to see the circus again, he approached the gymnasts’ coach there to help train me.

“We are a very traditional family, where girls and womenfolk hardly ever step out of the house. My father brought the circus guy home. He told him he wanted me to be just like Nadia but, being a simple government officer, working with the Sui Southern Gas Company, he lacked the resources for getting me the proper facilities,” she says before going a little silent.

It was with the help of the new coach from the circus that Maryam’s father was able to build a balance beam. She was also taught new techniques, though her coach was more of an acrobat than a gymnast.

“But he knew the basics at least,” argues Maryam. “He knew the things I would need for practice. We didn’t have a springboard, so we made one from a tractor tire. With a beam, tire and jute mattresses, I worked hard, practising for two hours, three hours and even eight hours a day.

“But my big break really came when the late Prime Minister Mohtarma Shaheed Benazir Bhutto went to China in 1993. Before that, there was nothing for female gymnasts in Pakistan. Gymnastics was not even considered a women’s sport here,” Maryam says.

“Mohtarma Shaheed was impressed by a demonstration presented in her honour in China, in which little Chinese girls had performed gymnastics. She wanted to see something like that in Pakistan, too. Suddenly there were letters being sent out to educational institutions, there were advertisements in the newspapers to encourage young girls to learn gymnastics. But who could teach them? There were male gymnasts, who could coach them, but then people were also not comfortable sending their little girls to them.

“Meanwhile, to entertain politicians, kids like me, who knew some techniques, were taught an acrobatics routine of jumping through rings of fire, making back bridges to lift things with our mouth, etc.,” she both shrugs and smiles at the memory.

It was like this when they came to perform their acrobatics in Jamshoro one day. After watching the talented girls perform, someone asked two professionals from the Sindh University’s sports department, Dr Yasmeen Iqbal Qureshi and Mohammad Mustaqueem, to teach them proper gymnastics.

“At the time, we were only one girl from Punjab and five girls from Sindh. The lone girl from Punjab, Hina, was an army officer’s daughter and she only knew backward rolling, forward rolling and dive rolling. Some big shots had their say in the matter — they said that since there are no girls who have gymnastics talent in the Punjab, the government programme to train us was set aside,” says Maryam. “Still we were receiving training at the Sindh University thanks to Dr Yasmeen and Sir Mustaqueem, who was also a student there.

“Then after a little while, we had three gymnastics trainers from Bosnia in Pakistan — Amla, Sabina and Nadia. Two of them, Amla and Sabina, visited Sindh University in Jamshoro. They saw our floor and equipment and decided to train us themselves for two months.

“They were able to correct several of our mistakes. That’s how, in 1997, we represented Pakistan in the Islamic Countries Women Sport Solidarity Games in Tehran, Iran.” Pakistan ended up coming third out of 24 participating countries.

By 1999, gymnastics was included in the National Games with several departments entering their female gymnasts. Maryam, also, has represented various departments and won medals for them. She earned four gold medals in the Sindh Games in 2002. She has also represented Pakistan in the World Uniset Games in Bangkok, Thailand in 2007.

Perhaps with her guidance, more girls can represent Pakistan abroad too.

The writer is a member of staff.
She tweets @HasanShazia

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 12th, 2023