I always think about solutions to problems so I thought maybe I could go down to the reception of the hospital and ask for a phone to call my mother and father. But my brain was telling me, You don’t have the money to pay for the call nor do you know the country code. Then I thought, I need to go out and start working to earn money so I can buy a phone and call my father so we can all be together again.
Everything was so mixed up in my mind. I thought the teddy bear Dr Fiona had given me was green and had been swapped with a white one. ‘Where’s the green teddy?’ I kept asking, even though I was told over and over there was no green teddy. The green was probably the glow of the walls in the intensive care unit but I’m still convinced there was a green teddy.
I kept forgetting English words. One note to the nurses was ‘a wire to clean my teeth’. It felt like something was stuck between them and I meant floss. Actually my tongue was numb and my teeth were fine. The only thing that calmed me was when Rehanna came. She said healing prayers and I started moving my lips to some of them and mouthing ‘Amin’ (our word for ‘amen’) at the end. The television was kept off, except once when they let me watch Masterchef which I used to watch in Mingora and loved but everything was blurred. It was only later I learned that people were not allowed to bring in newspapers or tell me anything as the doctors were worried it could traumatise me.
I was terrified that my father could be dead. Then Fiona brought in a Pakistani newspaper from the week before which had a photograph of my father talking to General Kayani with a shawled figure sitting at the back next to my brother. I could just see her feet. ‘That’s my mother!’ I wrote.
Later that day Dr Javid came in with his mobile phone. ‘We’re going to call your parents,’ he said. My eyes shone with excitement. ‘You won’t cry, you won’t weep,’ he instructed me. He was gruff but very kind, like he had known me for ever. ‘I will give you the mobile and be strong.’ I nodded. He dialled the number, spoke and then gave me the phone.
There was my father’s voice. I couldn’t talk because of the tube in my neck. But I was so happy to hear him. I couldn’t smile because of my face, but it was as if there was a smile inside. ‘I’ll come soon,’ he promised. ‘Now have a rest and in two days we will be there.’ Later he told me that Dr Javid had also ordered him not to cry as that would make us all sadder. The doctor wanted us to be strong for each other. The call did not last long because my parents did not want to tire me out. My mother blessed me with prayers.
I still presumed that the reason they weren’t with me was because my father didn’t have the money to pay for my treatment. That’s why he was still in Pakistan, to sell our land in the village and also our school. But our land was small and I knew our school buildings and our house were rented, so what could he sell? Perhaps he was asking rich people for a loan.
*
Even after the call, my parents were not completely reassured. They hadn’t actually heard my voice and were still cut off from the outside world. People who visited them were bringing conflicting reports. One of those visitors was Major General Ghulam Qamar, head of military operations in Swat. ‘There is good news coming from the UK,’ he told my father. ‘We are very happy our daughter has survived.’ He said ‘our’ because now I was seen as the daughter of the nation.
The general told my father that they were carrying out door-to-door searches throughout Swat and monitoring the borders. He said they knew that the people who had targeted me came from a gang of twenty-two Taliban men and that they were the same gang who had attacked Zahid Khan, my father’s friend who had been shot two months earlier.
My father said nothing but he was outraged. The army had been saying for ages that there were no Taliban in Mingora and that they had cleared them all out. Now this general was telling him that there had been twenty-two of them in our town for at least two months. The army had also insisted Zahid Khan was shot in a family feud and not by the Taliban. Now they were saying I had been targeted by the same Taliban as him. My father wanted to say, ‘You knew there were Taliban in the valley for two months. You knew they wanted to kill my daughter and you didn’t stop them?’ But he realised it would get him nowhere.
The general hadn’t finished. He told my father that although it was good news that I had regained consciousness there was a problem with my eyesight. My father was confused. How could the officer have information he didn’t? He was worried that I would be blind. He imagined his beloved daughter, her face shining, walking around in lifelong darkness asking, ‘Aba, where am I?’ So awful was this news that he couldn’t tell my mother, even though he is usually hopeless at keeping secrets, particularly from her. Instead he told God, ‘This is unacceptable. I will give her one of my own eyes.’ But then he was worried that at forty-three years old his own eyes might not be very good. He hardly slept that night. The next morning he asked the major in charge of security if he could borrow his phone to call Colonel Junaid. ‘I have heard that Malala can’t see,’ my father told him in distress.
‘That’s nonsense,’ he replied. ‘If she can read and write, how can she not see? Dr Fiona has kept me updated, and one of the first notes Malala wrote was to ask about you.’
Far away in Birmingham, not only could I see but I was asking for a mirror. ‘Mirror,’ I wrote in the pink diary – I wanted to see my face and hair. The nurses brought me a small white mirror which I still have. When I saw myself, I was distraught. My long hair, which I used to spend ages styling, had gone, and the left side of my head had none at all. ‘Now my hair is small,’ I wrote in the book. I thought the Taliban had cut it off. In fact the Pakistani doctors had shaved my head with no mercy. My face was distorted like someone had pulled it down on one side, and there was a scar to the side of my left eye.
‘Hwo did this to me?’ I wrote, my letters still scrambled. ‘What happened to me?’
I also wrote ‘Stop lights’ as the bright lights were making my head ache.
‘Something bad happened to you,’ said Dr Fiona.
‘Was I shot? Was my father shot?’ I wrote.
She told me that I had been shot on the school bus. She said two of my friends on the bus had also been shot, but I didn’t recognise their names. She explained that the bullet had entered through the side of my left eye where there was a scar, travelled eighteen inches down to my left shoulder and stopped there. It could have taken out my eye or gone into my brain. It was a miracle I was alive.
I felt nothing, maybe just a bit satisfied. ‘So they did it.’ My only regret was that I hadn’t had a chance to speak to them before they shot me. Now they’d never hear what I had to say. I didn’t even think a single bad thought about the man who shot me – I had no thoughts of revenge – I just wanted to go back to Swat. I wanted to go home.
After that images started to swim around in my head but I wasn’t sure what was a dream and what was reality. The story I remember of being shot is quite different from what really happened. I was in another school bus with my father and friends and another girl called Gul. We were on our way home when suddenly two Taliban appeared dressed in black. One of them put a gun to my head and the small bullet that came out of it entered my body. In this dream he also shot my father. Then everything is dark, I’m lying on a stretcher and there is a crowd of men, a lot of men, and my eyes are searching for my father. Finally I see him and try to talk to him but I can’t get the words out. Other times I am in a lot of places, in Jinnah Market in Islamabad, in Cheena Bazaar, and I am shot. I even dreamed that the doctors were Taliban.
As I grew more alert, I wanted more details. People coming in were not allowed to bring their phones, but Dr Fiona always had her iPhone with her because she is an emergency doctor. When she put it down, I grabbed it to search for my name on Google. It was hard as my double vision meant I kept typing in the wrong letters. I also wanted to check my email, but I couldn’t remember the password.
On the fifth day I got my voice back but it sounded like someone else. When Rehan
na came in we talked about the shooting from an Islamic perspective. ‘They shot at me,’ I told her.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she replied. ‘Too many people in the Muslim world can’t believe a Muslim can do such a thing,’ she said. ‘My mother, for example, would say they can’t be Muslims. Some people call themselves Muslims but their actions are not Islamic.’ We talked about how things happen for different reasons, this happened to me, and how education for females not just males is one of our Islamic rights. I was speaking up for my right as a Muslim woman to be able to go to school.
*
Once I got my voice back, I talked to my parents on Dr Javid’s phone. I was worried about sounding strange. ‘Do I sound different?’ I asked my father.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You sound the same and your voice will only get better. Are you OK?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but this headache is so severe, I can’t bear the pain.’
My father got really worried. I think he ended up with a bigger headache than me. In all the calls after that he would ask, ‘Is the headache increasing or decreasing?’
After that I just said to him, ‘I’m OK.’ I didn’t want to upset him and didn’t complain even when they took the staples from my head and gave me big injections in my neck. ‘When are you coming?’ I kept asking.
By then they had been stuck in the army hostel at the hospital in Rawalpindi for a week with no news about when they might come to Birmingham. My mother was so desperate that she told my father, ‘If there is no news by tomorrow I will go on a hunger strike.’ Later that day my father went to see the major in charge of security and told him. The major looked alarmed. Within ten minutes my father was told arrangements would be made for them to move to Islamabad later that day. Surely there they could arrange everything?
When my father returned to my mother he said to her, ‘You are a great woman. All along I thought Malala and I were the campaigners but you really know how to protest!’
They were moved to Kashmir House in Islamabad, a hostel for members of parliament. Security was still so tight that when my father asked for a barber to give him a shave, a policeman sat with them all the way through so the man wouldn’t cut his throat.
At least now they had their phones back and we could speak more easily. Each time, Dr Javid would call my father in advance to tell him what time he could speak to me and to make sure he was free. But when the doctor called the line was usually busy. My father is always on the phone! I rattled off my mother’s eleven-digit mobile number and Dr Javid looked astonished. He knew then that my memory was fine. But my parents were still in darkness about why they weren’t flying to me. Dr Javid was also baffled as to why they weren’t coming. When they said they didn’t know, he made a call and then assured them the problem was not with the army but the civilian government.
Later they would discover that, rather than do whatever it took to get my parents on the first plane to Birmingham to join their sick daughter, the interior minister Rehman Malik was hoping to fly with them so they could have a joint press conference at the hospital, and it was taking some time to make the arrangements. He also wanted to make sure they didn’t ask for political asylum in Britain, which would be embarrassing for his government. Eventually he asked my parents outright if this was their plan. It was funny because my mother had no idea what asylum was and my father had never even thought about it – there were other things on his mind.
When my parents moved to Kashmir House they were visited by Sonia Shahid, the mother of Shiza, our friend who had arranged the trip to Islamabad for all us Khushal School girls. She had assumed they had gone to the UK with me, and when she found out they were still in Pakistan, she was horrified. They said they had been told there were no plane tickets to Birmingham. Sonia brought them clothes as they had left everything in Swat and got my father the number for President Zardari’s office. He called and left a message. That night the president spoke to him and promised everything would be sorted out. ‘I know what it’s like to be kept from one’s children,’ he said, referring to his years in jail.
When I heard they would be in Birmingham in two days I had one request. ‘Bring my school bag,’ I pleaded to my father. ‘If you can’t go to Swat to fetch it, no matter – buy new books for me because in March it’s my board examination.’ Of course I wanted to come first in class. I especially wanted my physics book because physics is difficult for me, and I needed to practise numericals as my maths is not so good and they are hard for me to solve.
I thought I’d be back home by November.
It ended up being ten days before my parents came. Those ten days I spent in hospital without them felt like a hundred days. It was boring and I wasn’t sleeping well. I stared at the clock in my room. The changing time reassured me I was alive and I saw for the first time in my life that I was waking early. Every morning I longed for 7 a.m. when the nurses would come. The nurses and Dr Fiona played games with me. QEH is not a children’s hospital so they brought over a play coordinator with games. One of my favourites was Connect 4. I usually drew with Dr Fiona but I could beat everyone else. The nurses and hospital staff felt sorry for me in a far-off land away from my family and were very kind, particularly Yma Choudhury, the jolly director of operations, and Julie Tracy, the head nurse, who would sit and hold my hand.
The only thing I had with me from Pakistan was a beige shawl which Colonel Junaid had given to Dr Fiona as a present for me so they went clothes shopping to buy me things. They had no idea how conservative I was or what a teenage girl from the Swat Valley would wear. They went to Next and British Home Stores and came back with bags of T-shirts, pyjamas, socks and even bras. Yma asked me if I would like shalwar kamiz and I nodded. ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ she asked. Pink was, of course, my reply.
They were worried I wasn’t eating. But I didn’t like the hospital food and I was worried it was not halal. The only things I’d eat there were the nutritional milkshakes. Nurse Julie discovered I liked Cheesy Wotsits so brought me those. ‘What do you like?’ they asked me. ‘Fried chicken,’ I replied. Yma discovered there was a halal Kentucky Fried Chicken at Small Heath so would go there every afternoon to buy me chicken and chips. One day she even cooked me a curry.
To keep me occupied they brought me a DVD player. One of the first movies they got me was Bend it Like Beckham, thinking the story of a Sikh girl challenging her cultural norms and playing football would appeal to me. I was shocked when the girls took off their shirts to practise in sports bras and I made the nurses switch it off. After that they brought cartoons and Disney movies. I watched all three Shrek movies and A Shark’s Tale. My left eye was still blurry so I covered it when I watched, and my left ear would bleed so I had to keep putting in cotton-wool balls. One day I asked a nurse, ‘What is this lump?’ placing her hand on my tummy. My stomach was big and hard and I didn’t know why.
‘It’s the top of your skull,’ she replied. I was shocked.
After I started to speak I also walked again for the first time. I hadn’t felt any problem with my arms or legs in bed apart from my left hand which was stiff because the bullet had ended up by my shoulder so I didn’t realise I couldn’t walk properly. My first few steps were such hard work it felt like I’d run a hundred kilometres. The doctors told me I would be fine; I just needed lots of physiotherapy to get my muscles working again.
One day another Fiona came, Fiona Alexander, who told me she was in charge of the hospital press office. I thought this was funny. I couldn’t imagine Swat Central Hospital having a press office. Until she came I had no idea of the attention I’d attracted. When I was flown from Pakistan there was supposed to be a news blackout, but photographs were leaked from Pakistan of me leaving and saying I was going to the UK, and the media soon found out my destination was Birmingham. A Sky News helicopter was soon circling above, and as many as 250 journalists came to the hospital from as far away as Australia and Japan. Fiona Alexander had spent twenty years a
s a journalist herself, and had been editor of the Birmingham Post, so she knew exactly how to feed them material and stop them trying to get in. The hospital started giving daily news briefings on my condition.
People just turned up wanting to see me – government ministers, diplomats, politicians, even an envoy from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Most brought bouquets, some of them exquisitely beautiful. One day Fiona Alexander brought me a bag of cards and toys and pictures. It was Eid ul-Azha, ‘Big Eid’, our main religious holiday, so I thought maybe some Muslims had sent them. Then I saw the postage dates, from 10 October, 11 October, days before, and I realised it was nothing to do with Eid. They were from people all over the world wishing me a speedy recovery, many of them schoolchildren. I was astonished and Fiona laughed. ‘You haven’t seen anything yet.’ She told me there were sacks and sacks more, about 8,000 cards in total, many just addressed, ‘Malala, Birmingham Hospital’. One was even addressed, ‘The Girl Shot in the Head, Birmingham’, yet it had got there. There were offers to adopt me as if I had no family and even a marriage proposal.
Rehanna told me that thousands and millions of people and children around the world had supported me and prayed for me. Then I realised that people had saved my life. I had been spared for a reason. People had sent other presents too. There were boxes and boxes of chocolates and teddy bears of every shape and size. Most precious of all perhaps was the parcel that came from Benazir Bhutto’s children Bilawal and Bakhtawar. Inside were two shawls that had belonged to their late mother. I buried my nose in them to try and smell her perfume. Later I found a long black hair on one of them, which made it even more special.
I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban Page 24