I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban (10 page)

I don’t know how they can live with their consciences when they see our people going hungry or sitting in the darkness of endless power cuts, or children unable to go to school as their parents need them to work. My father says that Pakistan has been cursed with
more than its fair share of politicians who only think about money. They don’t care if the army is actually flying the plane, they are happy to stay out of the cockpit and sit in business class, close the curtains and enjoy the fine food and service while the rest of us are squashed in economy.

I had been born into a sort of democracy in which for ten years Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif kept replacing each other, none of their governments ever completing a term and always accusing each other of corruption. But two years after I was born the generals again took over. It happened in a manner so dramatic that it sounds like something out of a movie. Nawaz Sharif was prime minister at the time and had fallen out with his army chief General Pervez Musharraf and sacked him. At the time General Musharraf was on a plane of our national airline PIA coming back from Sri Lanka. Nawaz Sharif was so worried about his reaction that he tried to stop the plane from landing in Pakistan. He ordered Karachi airport to switch off its landing lights and to park fire engines on the runway to block the plane even though it had 200 other passengers on board and not enough fuel to get to another country. Within an hour of the announcement on television of Musharraf ’s sacking, tanks were on the streets and troops had taken over the newsrooms and the airports. The local commander, General Iftikhar, stormed the control tower at Karachi so that Musharraf ’s plane could land. Musharraf then seized power and threw Sharif into a dungeon in Attock Fort. Some people celebrated by handing out sweets as Sharif was unpopular, but my father cried when he heard the news. He had thought we were done with military dictatorships. Sharif was accused of treason and only saved by his friends in the Saudi royal family, who arranged his exile.

Musharraf was our fourth military ruler. Like all our dictators, he started by addressing the nation on TV, beginning, ‘
Mere aziz hamwatano’
– ‘My dear countrymen’ – then went into a long tirade against Sharif, saying that under him Pakistan had ‘lost our honour, dignity and respect’. He vowed to end corruption and go after those
‘guilty of plundering and looting the national wealth’. He promised he would make his own assets and tax return public. He said he would only run the country for a short time, but no one believed him. General Zia had promised to be in power for ninety days and had stayed more than eleven years until he was killed in an air crash.

It’s the same old story, my father said, and he was right. Musharraf promised to end the old feudal system by which the same few dozen families controlled our entire country, and bring fresh young clean faces into politics. Instead his cabinet was made up of the very same old faces. Once again our country was expelled from the Commonwealth and became an international black sheep. The Americans had already suspended most aid the year before when we conducted nuclear tests, but now almost everyone boycotted us.

With such a history, you can see why the people of Swat did not always think it was a good idea to be part of Pakistan. Every few years Pakistan sent us a new deputy commissioner, or DC, to govern Swat, just as the British had done in colonial days. It seemed to us that these bureaucrats came to our province simply to get rich, then went back home. They had no interest in developing Swat. Our people are used to being subservient because under the wali no criticism was tolerated. If anyone offended him, their entire family could be expelled from Swat. So when the DCs came from Pakistan, they were the new kings and no one questioned them. Older people often looked back nostalgically to the days of the last wali. Back then, they said, the mountains were all still covered in trees, there were schools every five kilometres and the wali sahib would visit them in person to resolve problems.

After what happened with Safina, I vowed that I would never treat a friend badly again. My father always says it’s important to treat friends well. When he was at college and had no money for food or books many of his friends helped him out and he never forgot that. I have three good friends – Safina from my area, Sumbul from the village and Moniba from school. Moniba had become my best
friend in primary school when we lived near each other, and I persuaded her to come to our school. She is a wise girl, though we often fall out, particularly when we go on school trips. She comes from a large family with three sisters and four brothers. I think of her as my big sister even though I am six months older than her. Moniba sets down rules which I try to follow. We don’t have secrets from each other and we don’t share our secrets with anyone else. She doesn’t like me talking to other girls and says we must be careful of associating with people who are badly behaved or have a reputation for trouble. She always says, ‘I have four brothers, and if I do even the slightest thing wrong they can stop me going to school.’

I was so eager not to disappoint my parents that I ran errands for anyone. One day our neighbours asked me to buy some maize for them from the bazaar. On the way a boy on a bicycle crashed into me and my left shoulder hurt so much that my eyes watered. But I still went and bought the maize, took it to my neighbours and then went home. Only then did I cry. Shortly after that I found the perfect way to try to win back the respect of my father. Notices had gone up at school for a public speaking competition and Moniba and I both decided to enter. I remembered the story of my father surprising my grandfather and longed to do the same.

When we got the topic, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was ‘Honesty is the best policy’.

The only practice we’d had was reading out poems at morning assembly, but there was an older girl at school called Fatima who was a very good speaker. She was beautiful and spoke in an animated way. She could speak confidently in front of hundreds of people and they would hang on her every word. Moniba and I longed to be like her and studied her carefully.

In our culture speeches are usually written by our fathers, uncles or teachers. They tend to be in English or Urdu, not in our native Pashto. We thought speaking in English meant you were more intelligent. We were wrong, of course. It does not matter what language
you choose, the important thing is the words you use to express yourself. Moniba’s speech was written by one of her older brothers. She quoted beautiful poems by Allama Iqbal, our national poet. My father wrote my speech. In it he argued that if you want to do good, but do it in a bad way, that’s still bad. In the same way, if you choose a good method to do something bad it’s still bad. He ended it with Lincoln’s words: ‘it is far more honourable to fail than to cheat’.

On the day only eight or nine boys and girls turned up. Moniba spoke well – she was very composed and her speech was more emotional and poetic than mine, though mine might have had the better message. I was so nervous before the speech, I was trembling with fear. My grandfather had come to watch and I knew he really wanted me to win the competition, which made me even more nervous. I remembered what my father had said about taking a deep breath before starting, but then I saw that all eyes were on me and I rushed through. I kept losing my place as the pages danced in my shaking hands, but as I ended with Lincoln’s words, I looked up at my father. He was smiling.

When the judges announced the results at the end, Moniba had won. I came second.

It didn’t matter. Lincoln also wrote in the letter to his son’s teacher, ‘Teach him how to gracefully lose.’ I was used to coming top of my class. But I realised that, even if you win three or four times, the next victory will not necessarily be yours without trying – and also that sometimes it’s better to tell your own story. I started writing my own speeches and changing the way I delivered them, from my heart rather than from a sheet of paper.

6

Children of the Rubbish Mountain

A
S THE KHUSHAL
School started to attract more pupils, we moved again and finally had a television. My favourite programme was
Shaka Laka Boom Boom
, an Indian children’s series about a boy called Sanju who has a magic pencil. Everything he drew became real. If he drew a vegetable or a policeman, the vegetable or policeman would magically appear. If he accidentally drew a snake he could erase it and the snake would disappear. He used his pencil to help people – he even saved his parents from gangsters – and I wanted that magic pencil more than anything else in the world.

At night I would pray, ‘God, give me Sanju’s pencil. I won’t tell anyone. Just leave it in my cupboard. I will use it to make everyone happy.’ As soon as I finished praying, I would check the drawer. The pencil was never there, but I knew who I would help first. Just along the street from our new house was an abandoned strip of land that people used as a rubbish dump – there is no rubbish collection in Swat. Quickly, it became a rubbish mountain. I didn’t like walking near it as it smelt so bad. Sometimes we would spot rats running through it and crows would circle overhead.

One day my brothers were not home and my mother had asked me to throw away some potato peel and eggshells. I wrinkled my nose as I approached, swatting away flies and making sure I didn’t step on anything in my nice shoes. As I threw the rubbish on the mountain of rotting food, I saw something move and I jumped. It was a girl about my age. Her hair was matted and her skin was
covered in sores. She looked like I imagined Shashaka, the dirty woman they told us about in tales in the village to make us wash. The girl had a big sack and was sorting rubbish into piles, one for cans, one for bottle tops, another for glass and another for paper. Nearby there were boys fishing in the pile for metal using magnets on strings. I wanted to talk to the children but I was too scared.

That afternoon, when my father came home from school, I told him about the scavenger children and begged him to go with me to look. He tried to talk to them but they ran away. He explained that the children would sell what they had sorted to a garbage shop for a few rupees. The shop would then sell it on at a profit. On the way back home I noticed that he was in tears.

‘Aba
, you must give them free places at your school,’ I begged. He laughed. My mother and I had already persuaded him to give free places to a number of girls.

Though my mother was not educated, she was the practical one in the family, the doer while my father was the talker. She was always out helping people. My father would get angry sometimes – he would arrive home at lunchtime and call out, ‘Tor Pekai, I’m home!’ only to find she was out and there was no lunch for him. Then he would find she was at the hospital visiting someone who was ill, or had gone to help a family, so he could not stay cross. Sometimes though she would be out because she was shopping for clothes in the Cheena Bazaar, and that would be a different matter.

Wherever we lived my mother filled our house with people. I shared my room with my cousin Aneesa from the village, who had come to live with us so she could go to school, and a girl called Shehnaz whose mother Sultana had once worked in our house. Shehnaz and her sister had also been sent out to collect garbage after their father had died leaving them very poor. One of her brothers was mentally ill and was always doing strange things like setting fire to their clothes or selling the electric fan we gave them to keep cool. Sultana was very short-tempered and my mother did not like having her in the house, but my father arranged a small
allowance for her and a place for Shehnaz and her other brother at his school. Shehnaz had never been to school, so even though she was two years older than me she was put two classes below, and she came to live with us so that I could help her.

There was also Nooria, whose mother Kharoo did some of our washing and cleaning, and Alishpa, one of the daughters of Khalida, the woman who helped my mother with the cooking. Khalida had been sold into marriage to an old man who used to beat her, and eventually she ran away with her three daughters. Her own family would not take her back because it is believed that a woman who has left her husband has brought shame on her family. For a while her daughters also had to collect rubbish to survive. Her story was like something out of the novels I had started reading.

The school had expanded a lot by then and had three buildings – the original one in Landikas was a primary school, and then there was a high school for girls on Yahya Street and one for boys with a big garden of roses near the remains of the Buddhist temple. We had about 800 students in total, and although the school was not really making money, my father gave away more than a hundred free places. One of them was to a boy whose father, Sharafat Ali, had helped my father when he was a penniless college student. They were friends from the village. Sharafat Ali worked at the electricity company and he would give my father a few hundred rupees whenever he could spare them. My father was happy to be able to repay his kindness. Another was a girl in my class called Kausar, whose father embroidered clothes and shawls – a trade our region is famous for. When we went on school trips to visit the mountains, I knew she couldn’t afford them so I would pay for her with my pocket money.