No one knows exactly when Sidra Qasim was born. Her mother’s best guess is three or four days before a famous 1986 cricket match in which Pakistan defeated India by one wicket. So in a harbinger of how she would define her life, Qasim chose her own birthday.
As one of six siblings growing up outside of the small city of Okara, Pakistan, next to farms of mustard leaves, oranges, and mangos, she always asked why things couldn’t be different. Why, for starters, were millions of girls like her expected to stay home, to raise a family, and to have their lives dictated by the men around them?
Qasim kept asking why, again and again, until she finally met her own expectations. What did that look like? Her company, called Atoms, cofounded with her husband, Waqas Ali, and bringing in $12 million a year; sneakers made by that company on the feet of Reddit cofounder (and Atoms backer) Alexis Ohanian at the Met Gala, one of fashion’s most coveted red carpets; and a 13,000-square-foot warehouse in Brooklyn as HQ for that company—one with its own art gallery, and massive windows out of which, one warm afternoon, she would look out across the East River, to Manhattan’s skyline and beyond.
Not on the day she was born—nor the day she chose—would the conservative Muslim community around her have imagined how far she would go, and how little she’d let her mind drift to her small hometown half a world away. “It’s hard,” she says, “to come back.”
QASIM DOESN’T KNOW why she grew up challenging everything; it wasn’t like her family encouraged it. But her questions took on a particular urgency when she was 17, and her mother invited a matchmaker over to their home.
After protesting, eventually Qasim pinned her dupattas to cover her head, and agreed to see the guest—who judged and interrogated her. Qasim knew she was supposed to keep her That visit was the first of many matchmaking attempts, which infuriated the young Qasim—so much so that her mother, Shamshad Akhtar, speaking from Pakistan through a translator, recalls that after one long drive to meet a prospective groom’s family, “Sidra said, ‘You can take me all around the world. I’m just not getting married.’”
