I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban (36 page)

Mr Zardari told the high commissioner to give my father a post as education attaché so he would have a salary to live on and a diplomatic passport so he would not need to seek asylum to stay in the UK. My father was relieved as he was wondering how he would pay for things. Gordon Brown, in his UN role, had also asked him to be his adviser, an unpaid position, and the president said that was fine; he could be both. After the meeting Mr Zardari described me to the media as ‘a remarkable girl and a credit to Pakistan’. But still not everyone in Pakistan was so positive. Though my father had tried to keep it from me I knew some people were saying he had shot me, or that I wasn’t shot at all, and we had staged it so we could live overseas.

The new year of 2013 was a happy one when I was discharged from hospital in early January finally to live with my family again. The Pakistan High Commission had rented two serviced apartments for us in a building in a modern square in the centre of Birmingham. The apartments were on the tenth floor, which was higher than any of us had ever been before. I teased my mother, as after the earthquake when we were in a three-storey building she said she would never again live in an apartment block. My father told me that when they arrived she had been so scared that she had said, ‘I will die in this lift!’

We were so happy to be a family again. My brother Khushal was as annoying as always. The boys were bored cooped up waiting for me to recover, away from school and their friends, though Atal was excited by everything new. I quickly realised I could treat them how I liked and I wouldn’t get told off. It was a cold winter, and as I watched the snow falling outside through the big glass windows I wished I could run around and chase the snowflakes like we used to back home. Sometimes we went for walks to build up my strength though I tired easily.

In the square was a fountain and a Costa coffee bar with glass walls through which you could see men and women chatting and mixing in a way that would be unthinkable in Swat. The apartment was just off Broad Street, a famous road of shops, night clubs and stripbars. We went to the shops though I still did not like shopping. At nights our eyes were all out on stalks at the skimpy clothes that women wore – tiny shorts almost like knickers and bare legs on the highest heels even in the middle of winter. My mother was so horrified that she cried, ‘
Gharqa shoma!’
– ‘I’m drowning’ – and begged my father, ‘Please take me to Dubai. I can’t live here!’ Later we laughed about it. ‘Are their legs made of iron so they don’t feel cold?’ asked my mother.

We were warned not to be out late on Broad Street on weekend nights as it could be dangerous. This made us laugh. How could it be unsafe compared to where we had come from? Were there Taliban beheading people? I didn’t tell my parents but I flinched if an Asian-looking man came close. I thought everyone had a gun.

Once a week I Skyped my friends back in Mingora, and they told me they were still keeping a seat in class for me. The teacher had brought to class my Pakistan Studies exam from that day, the day of the shooting. I had got 75 out of 75, but as I never did the others, Malka-e-Noor got first in class. Though I had been getting some schooling at the hospital, I worried that I was falling behind. Now the competition was between Malka-e-Noor and Moniba. ‘It’s boring without you to compete with,’ Malka-e-Noor told me.

I was getting stronger every day, but my surgery wasn’t over. I still had the top of my skull missing. The doctors were also concerned about my hearing. When I went for walks I could not understand the words of my mother and father in a crowd. And inside my ear was a tinny noise which only I could hear. On Saturday, 2 February I was back in QEH to be operated on – this time by a woman. Her name was Anwen White. First she removed the skull bone from my tummy, but after looking at it decided not to put it back as it had not kept well and there was a risk of infection. Instead she did
something called a titanium cranioplasty (I now know lots of medical terms!) and fitted a specially moulded titanium plate in my head with eight screws to do the job of a skull and protect my brain.

While I was in surgery Mr Irving, the surgeon who had repaired my nerve, also had a solution for my damaged left eardrum. He put a small electronic device called a cochlear implant inside my head near the ear and told me that in a month they would fit the external part on my head, and then I should be able to hear. I was in theatre five hours and I’d had three operations, but I didn’t feel like I’d had major surgery and was back in the apartment within five days. A few weeks later when the receiver was fitted behind my ear, my left ear heard
beep beep
for the first time. To start with, everything was like a robot sound, but soon it was getting better and better.

We human beings don’t realise how great God is. He has given us an extraordinary brain and a sensitive loving heart. He has blessed us with two lips to talk and express our feelings, two eyes which see a world of colours and beauty, two feet which walk on the road of life, two hands to work for us, a nose which smells the beauty of fragrance, and two ears to hear the words of love. As I found with my ear, no one knows how much power they have in their each and every organ until they lose one.

I thank Allah for the hard-working doctors, for my recovery and for sending us to this world where we may struggle for our survival. Some people choose good ways and some choose bad ways. One person’s bullet hit me. It swelled my brain, stole my hearing and cut the nerve of the left side of my face in the space of a second. And after that one second there were millions of people praying for my life and talented doctors who gave me my own body back. I was a good girl. In my heart I had only the desire to help people. It wasn’t about the awards or the money. I always prayed to God, ‘I want to help people and please help me to do that.’

A
talib
fires three shots at point-blank range at three girls in a van and doesn’t kill any of them. This seems an unlikely story, and people say I have made a miraculous recovery. My friend Shazia,
who was hit twice, was offered a scholarship at Atlantic College in Wales so has also come to the UK for schooling, and I hope Kainat will too. I know God stopped me from going to the grave. It feels like this life is a second life. People prayed to God to spare me, and I was spared for a reason – to use my life for helping people. When people talk about the way I was shot and what happened I think it’s the story of Malala, ‘a girl shot by the Taliban’; I don’t feel it’s a story about me at all.

EPILOGUE

One Child, One Teacher, One Book, One Pen . . .

Birmingham, August 2013

I
N MARCH WE
moved from the apartment to a rented house on a leafy street, but it feels as if we are camping in it. All our belongings are still in Swat. Everywhere there are cardboard boxes full of the kind letters and cards that people send, and in one room stands a piano none of us can play. My mother complains about the murals of Greek gods on the walls and carved cherubs on the ceilings watching her.

Our house feels big and empty. It sits behind an electric iron gate and it sometimes seems as if we are in what we in Pakistan call a sub-jail, a kind of luxury house arrest. At the back there is a large garden with lots of trees and a green lawn for me and my brothers to play cricket on. But there are no rooftops to play on, no children fighting with kites in the streets, no neighbours coming in to borrow a plate of rice or for us to ask for three tomatoes. We are just a wall’s distance from the next house but it feels miles away.

If I look out, I see my mother wandering around the garden, her head covered by a shawl, feeding the birds. She looks as if she is singing, maybe that
tapa
she likes: ‘Don’t kill doves in the garden./ You kill one and the others won’t come.’ She is giving the birds the remains of our dinner from the night before and there are tears in her eyes. We eat much the same here as we did back home – rice and meat for lunch and dinner, while breakfast is fried eggs, chapatis and sometimes also honey, a tradition started by my little
brother Atal, though his favourite Birmingham discovery is Nutella sandwiches. But there are always leftovers. My mother is sad about the waste of food. I know she is remembering all the children we fed in our house, so they would not go to school on empty stomachs, and wondering how they are faring now.

When I came home from school in Mingora I never found my house without people in it; now I can’t believe that I used to plead for a day of peace and some privacy to do my school work. Here the only sound is of the birds and Khushal’s Xbox. I sit alone in my room doing a jigsaw puzzle and long for guests.

We didn’t have much money and my parents knew what it was like to be hungry. My mother never turned anyone away. Once a poor woman came, hot, hungry and thirsty, to our door. My mother let her in and gave her food and the woman was so happy. ‘I touched every door in the
mohalla
and this was the only one open,’ she said. ‘May God always keep your door open, wherever you are.’

I know my mother is lonely. She was very sociable – all the women of the neighbourhood used to gather in the afternoons on our back porch and women who worked in other houses came to rest. Now she is always on the phone to everyone back home. It’s hard for her here as she does not speak any English. Our house has all these facilities, but when she arrived they were all mysteries to her and someone had to show us how to use the oven, washing machine and the TV.

As usual my father doesn’t help in the kitchen. I tease him, ‘
Aba
, you talk of women’s rights, but my mother manages everything! You don’t even clear the tea things.’

There are buses and trains but we are unsure about using them. My mother misses going shopping in Cheena Bazaar. She is happier since my cousin Shah came to stay. He has a car and takes her shopping, but it’s not the same as she can’t talk to her friends and neighbours about what she bought.

A door bangs in the house and my mother jumps – she jumps these days at the slightest noise. She often cries then hugs me’.
‘Malala is alive,’ she says. Now she treats me as if I was her youngest rather than eldest child.

I know my father cries too. He cries when I push my hair to the side and he sees the scar on my head, and he cries when he wakes from an afternoon nap to hear his children’s voices in the garden and realises with relief that one of them is still mine. He knows people say it’s his fault that I was shot, that he pushed me to speak up like a tennis dad trying to create a champion, as if I don’t have my own mind. It’s hard for him. All he worked for for over almost twenty years has been left behind: the school he built up from nothing, which now has three buildings with 1,100 pupils and seventy teachers. I know he felt proud at what he had created, a poor boy from that narrow village between the Black and White Mountains. He says, ‘It’s as if you planted a tree and nurtured it – you have the right to sit in its shade.’

His dream in life was to have a very big school in Swat providing quality education, to live peacefully and to have democracy in our country. In Swat he had achieved respect and status in society through his activities and the help he gave people. He never imagined living abroad and he gets upset when people suggest we wanted to come to the UK. ‘A person who has eighteen years of education, a nice life, a family, you throw him out just as you throw a fish out of water for speaking up for girls’ education?’ Sometimes he says we have gone from being IDPs to EDPs – externally displaced persons. Often over meals we talk about home and try to remember things. We miss everything, even the smelly stream. My father says, ‘If I had known this would happen, I would have looked back for a last time just as the Prophet did when he left Mecca to migrate to Medina. He looked back again and again.’ Already some of the things from Swat seem like stories from a distant place, like somewhere I have read about.

My father spends much of his time going to conferences on education. I know it’s odd for him that now people want to hear him because of me, not the other way round. I used to be known as his
daughter; now he’s known as my father. When he went to France to collect an award for me he told the audience, ‘In my part of the world most people are known by their sons. I am one of the few lucky fathers known by his daughter.’

A smart new uniform hangs on my bedroom door, bottle green instead of royal blue, for a school where no one dreams of being attacked for going to classes or someone blowing up the building. In April I was well enough to start school in Birmingham. It’s wonderful going to school and not having to feel scared as I did in Mingora, always looking around me on my way to school, terrified a
talib
would jump out.

It’s a good school. Many subjects are the same as at home, but the teachers have PowerPoint and computers rather than chalk and blackboards. We have some different subjects – music, art, computer studies, home economics, where we learn to cook – and we do practicals in science, which is rare in Pakistan. Even though I recently got just forty percent in my physics exam, it is still my favourite subject. I love learning about Newton and the basic principles the whole universe obeys.