I Am Malala

by Malala Yousafzai

  When I got home that afternoon I was sleepy, but the next day was Pakistan Studies, a difficult paper for me. I was worried about losing even more marks so I made myself coffee with milk to drive away the devils of sleep. When my mother came she tried it and liked it and drank the rest. I could not tell her, ‘Bhabi, please stop it, that’s my coffee.’ But there was no more coffee left in the cupboard. Once again I stayed up late, memorising the textbook about the history of our independence.

  In the morning my parents came to my room as usual and woke me up. I don’t remember a single school day on which I woke up early by myself. My mother made our usual breakfast of sugary tea, chapatis and fried egg. We all had breakfast together – me, my mother, my father, Khushal and Atal. It was a big day for my mother as she was going to start lessons that afternoon to learn to read and write with Miss Ulfat, my old teacher from kindergarten.

  My father started teasing Atal, who was eight by then and cheekier than ever. ‘Look, Atal, when Malala is prime minister, you will be her secretary,’ he said.

  Atal got very cross. ‘No, no, no!’ he said. ‘I’m no less than Malala. I will be prime minister and she will be my secretary.’ All the banter meant I ended up being so late I only had time to eat half my egg and no time to clear up.

  The Pakistan Studies paper went better than I thought it would. There were questions about how Jinnah had created our country as the first Muslim homeland and also about the national tragedy of how Bangladesh came into being. It was strange to think that Bangladesh was once part of Pakistan despite being a thousand miles away. I answered all the questions and was confident I’d done well. I was happy when the exam was over, chatting and gossiping with my friends as we waited for Sher Mohammad Baba, a school assistant, to call for us when the bus arrived.

  The bus did two trips every day, and that day we took the second one. We liked staying on at school and Moniba said, ‘As we’re tired after the exam, let’s stay and chat before going home.’ I was relieved that the Pakistan Studies exam had gone well so I agreed. I had no worries that day. I was hungry but because we were fifteen we could no longer go outside to the street, so I got one of the small girls to buy me a corn cob. I ate a little bit of it then gave it to another girl to finish.

  At twelve o’clock Baba called us over the loudspeaker. We all ran down the steps. The other girls all covered their faces before emerging from the door and climbed into the back of the bus. I wore my scarf over my head but never over my face.

  I asked Usman Bhai Jan to tell us a joke while we were waiting for two teachers to arrive. He has a collection of extremely funny stories. That day instead of a story he did a magic trick to make a pebble disappear. ‘Show us how you did it!’ we all clamoured, but he wouldn’t.

  When everyone was ready he took Miss Rubi and a couple of small children in the front cab with him. Another little girl cried, saying she wanted to ride there too. Usman Bhai Jan said no, there was no room; she would have to stay in the back with us. But I felt sorry for her and persuaded him to let her in the cab.

  Atal had been told by my mother to ride on the bus with me, so he walked over from the primary school. He liked to hang off the tailboard at the back, which made Usman Bhai Jan cross as it was dangerous. That day Usman Bhai Jan had had enough and refused to let him. ‘Sit inside, Atal Khan, or I won’t take you!’ he said. Atal had a tantrum and refused so he walked home in a huff with some of his friends.

  Usman Bhai Jan started the dyna and we were off. I was talking to Moniba, my wise, nice friend. Some girls were singing, I was drumming rhythms with my fingers on the seat.

  Moniba and I liked to sit near the open back so we could see out. At that time of day Haji Baba Road was always a jumble of coloured rickshaws, people on foot and men on scooters, all zigzagging and honking. An ice-cream boy on a red tricycle painted with red and white nuclear missiles rode up behind waving at us, until a teacher shooed him away. A man was chopping off chickens’ heads, the blood dripping onto the street. I drummed my fingers. Chop, chop, chop. Drip, drip, drip. Funny, when I was little we always said Swatis were so peace-loving it was hard to find a man to slaughter a chicken.

  The air smelt of diesel, bread and kebab mixed with the stink from the stream where people still dumped their rubbish and were never going to stop despite all my father’s campaigning. But we were used to it. Besides, soon the winter would be here, bringing the snow, which would cleanse and quieten everything.

  The bus turned right off the main road at the army checkpoint. On a kiosk was a poster of crazy-eyed men with beards and caps or turbans under big letters saying wanted terrorists. The picture at the top of a man with a black turban and beard was Fazlullah. More than three years had passed since the military operation to drive the Taliban out of Swat had begun. We were grateful to the army but couldn’t understand why they were still everywhere, in machine-gun nests on roofs and manning checkpoints. Even to enter our valley people needed official permission.

  The road up the small hill is usually busy as it is a short cut but that day it was strangely quiet. ‘Where are all the people?’ I asked Moniba. All the girls were singing and chatting and our voices bounced around inside the bus.

  Around that time my mother was probably just going through the doorway into our school for her first lesson since she had left school at age six.

  I didn’t see the two young men step out into the road and bring the van to a sudden halt. I didn’t get a chance to answer their question, ‘Who is Malala?’ or I would have explained to them why they should let us girls go to school as well as their own sisters and daughters.

  The last thing I remember is that I was thinking about the revision I needed to do for the next day. The sounds in my head were not the crack, crack, crack of three bullets, but the chop, chop, chop, drip, drip, drip of the man severing the heads of chickens, and them dropping into the dirty street, one by one.

  PART FOUR

  Between Life and Death

  Khairey ba waley darta na kram

  Toora topaka woranawey wadan korona

  Guns of Darkness! Why would I not curse you?

  You turned love-filled homes into broken debris

  21

  ‘God, I entrust her to you’

  AS SOON AS Usman Bhai Jan realised what had happened he drove the dyna to Swat Central Hospital at top speed.

  The other girls were screaming and crying. I was lying on Moniba’s lap, bleeding from my head and left ear. We had only gone a short way when a policeman stopped the van and started asking questions, wasting precious time. One girl felt my neck for a pulse. ‘She’s alive!’ she shouted. ‘We must get her to hospital. Leave us alone and catch the man who did this!’

  Mingora seemed like a big town to us but it’s really a small place and the news spread quickly. My father was at the Swat Press Club for a meeting of the Association of Private Schools and had just gone on stage to give a speech when his mobile rang. He recognised the number as the Khushal School and passed the phone to his friend Ahmad Shah to answer. ‘Your school bus has been fired on,’ he whispered urgently to my father.

  The colour drained from my father’s face. He immediately thought, Malala could be on that bus! Then he tried to reassure himself, thinking it might be a boy, a jealous lover who had fired a pistol in the air to shame his beloved. He was at an important gathering of about 400 principals who had come from all over Swat to protest against plans by the government to impose a central regulatory authority. As president of their association, my father felt he couldn’t let all those people down so he delivered his speech as planned. But there were beads of sweat on his forehead and for once there was no need for anyone to signal to him to wind it up.

  As soon as he had finished, my father did not wait to take questions from the audience and instead rushed off to the hospital with Ahmad Shah and another friend, Riaz, who had a car. The hospital was only five minutes away. They arrived to find crowds gathered outside and photographers and TV
cameras. Then he knew for certain that I was there. My father’s heart sank. He pushed through the people and ran through the camera flashes into the hospital. Inside I was lying on a trolley, a bandage over my head, my eyes closed, my hair spread out.

  ‘My daughter, you are my brave daughter, my beautiful daughter,’ he said over and over, kissing my forehead and cheeks and nose. He didn’t know why he was speaking to me in English. I think somehow I knew he was there even though my eyes were closed. My father said later, ‘I can’t explain it. I felt she responded.’ Someone said I had smiled. But to my father it was not a smile, just a small beautiful moment because he knew he had not lost me for ever. Seeing me like that was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. All children are special to their parents, but to my father I was his universe. I had been his comrade in arms for so long, first secretly as Gul Makai, then quite openly as Malala. He had always believed that if the Taliban came for anyone, it would be for him, not me. He said he felt as if he had been hit by a thunderbolt. ‘They wanted to kill two birds with one stone. Kill Malala and silence me for ever.’

  He was very afraid but he didn’t cry. There were people everywhere. All the principals from the meeting had arrived at the hospital and there were scores of media and activists; it seemed the whole town was there. ‘Pray for Malala,’ he told them. The doctors reassured him that they had done a CT scan which showed that the bullet had not gone near my brain. They cleaned and bandaged the wound.

  ‘O Ziauddin! What have they done?’ Madam Maryam burst through the doors. She had not been at school that day but at home nursing her baby when she received a phone call from her brother-in-law checking she was safe. Alarmed, she switched on the TV and saw the headline that there had been a shooting on the Khushal School bus. As soon as she heard I had been shot she called her husband. He brought her to the hospital on the back of his motorbike, something very rare for a respectable Pashtun woman. ‘Malala, Malala. Do you hear me?’ she called.

  I grunted.

  Maryam tried to find out more about what was going on. A doctor she knew told her the bullet had passed through my forehead, not my brain, and that I was safe. She also saw the two other Khushal girls who had been shot. Shazia had been hit twice, in the left collarbone and palm, and had been brought to the hospital with me. Kainat had not realised she was hurt to start with and had gone home, then discovered she had been grazed by a bullet at the top of her right arm so her family had brought her in.

  My father knew he should go and check on them but did not want to leave my bedside for a minute. His phone kept ringing. The chief minister of KPK was the first person who called. ‘Don’t worry, we will sort everything out,’ he said. ‘Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar is expecting you.’ But it was the army who took charge. At 3 p.m. the local commander arrived and announced they were sending an army helicopter to take me and my father to Peshawar. There wasn’t time to fetch my mother so Maryam insisted she would go too as I might need a woman’s help. Maryam’s family was not happy about this as she was still nursing her baby boy, who had recently undergone a small operation. But she is like my second mother.

  When I was put in the ambulance my father was afraid the Taliban would attack again. It seemed to him that everyone must know who was inside. The helipad was only a mile away, a five-minute drive, but he was scared the whole way. When we got there the helicopter had not arrived, and we waited for what to him felt like hours inside the ambulance. Finally it landed and I was taken on board with my father, my cousin Khanjee, Ahmad Shah and Maryam. None of them had ever been on a helicopter. As it took off we flew over an army sports gala with patriotic music pounding from speakers. To hear them singing about their love of country gave my father a bad taste. He normally liked singing along, but a patriotic song hardly seemed appropriate when here was a fifteen-year-old girl shot in the head, an almost dead daughter.

  Down below, my mother was watching from the roof of our house. When she heard that I had been hurt she was having her reading lesson with Miss Ulfat and struggling to learn words like ‘book’ and ‘apple’. The news at first was muddled and she initially believed I’d been in an accident and had injured my foot. She rushed home and told my grandmother, who was staying with us at the time. She begged my grandmother to start praying immediately. We believe Allah listens more closely to the white-haired. My mother then noticed my half-eaten egg from breakfast. There were pictures of me everywhere receiving the awards she had disapproved of. She sobbed as she looked at them. All around was Malala, Malala.

  Soon the house was full of women. In our culture, if someone dies women come to the home of the deceased and the men to the hujra – not just family and close friends but everyone from the neighbourhood.

  My mother was astonished to see all the people. She sat on a prayer mat and recited from the Quran. She told the women, ‘Don’t cry – pray!’ Then my brothers rushed into the room. Atal, who had walked home from school, had turned on the television and seen the news that I had been shot. He had called Khushal, and together they joined the weeping. The phone did not stop ringing. People reassured my mother that although I had been shot in the head, the bullet had just skimmed my forehead. My mother was very confused by all the different stories, first that my foot had been injured, then that I had been shot in the head. She thought I would think it strange that she hadn’t come to me, but people told her not to go as I was either dead or about to be moved. One of my father’s friends phoned her to tell her I was being taken to Peshawar by helicopter and she should come by road. The worst moment for her was when someone came to the house with my front door keys, which had been found at the scene of the shooting. ‘I don’t want keys, I want my daughter!’ my mother cried. ‘What use are keys without Malala?’ Then they heard the sound of the helicopter.

  The helipad was just a mile from our house and all the women rushed up to the roof. ‘It must be Malala!’ they said. As they watched the helicopter fly overhead, my mother took her scarf off her head, an extremely rare gesture for a Pashtun woman, and lifted it up to the sky, holding it in both hands as if it was an offering. ‘God, I entrust her to You,’ she said to the heavens. ‘We didn’t accept security guards – You are our protector. She was under Your care and You are bound to give her back.’

  Inside the helicopter I was vomiting blood. My father was horrified, thinking this meant I had internal bleeding. He was starting to lose hope. But then Maryam noticed me trying to wipe my mouth with my scarf. ‘Look, she is responding!’ she said. ‘That’s an excellent sign.’

  When we landed in Peshawar, they assumed we’d be taken to Lady Reading Hospital, where there was a very good neurosurgeon called Dr Mumtaz who had been recommended. Instead they were alarmed to be taken to CMH, the Combined Military Hospital. CMH is a large sprawling brick hospital with 600 beds and dates from British rule. There was a lot of construction going on to build a new tower block. Peshawar is the gateway to the FATA and since the army went into those areas in 2004 to take on the militants, the hospital had been very busy tending wounded soldiers and victims of the frequent suicide bombs in and around the city. As in much of our country, there were concrete blocks and checkpoints all around CMH to protect it from suicide bombers.

  I was rushed to the Intensive Care Unit, which is in a separate building. Above the nurses’ station the clock showed it was just after 5 p.m. I was wheeled into a glass-walled isolation unit and a nurse put me on a drip. In the next room was a soldier who had been horrifically burned in an IED attack and had a leg blown off. A young man came in and introduced himself as Colonel Junaid, a neurosurgeon. My father became even more disturbed. He didn’t think he looked like a doctor; he seemed so young. ‘Is she your daughter?’ asked the colonel. Maryam pretended to be my mother so she could come in.

  Colonel Junaid examined me. I was conscious and restless but not speaking or aware of anything, my eyes fluttering. The colonel stitched the wound above my left brow where the bullet had entered, but he was
surprised not to see any bullet in the scan. ‘If there is an entry there has to be an exit,’ he said. He palpated my spine and located the bullet lying next to my left shoulder blade. ‘She must have been stooping so her neck was bent when she was shot,’ he said.

  They took me for another CT scan. Then the colonel called my father into his office, where he had the scans up on a screen. He told him that the scan in Swat had been done from only one angle, but this new scan showed the injury was more serious. ‘Look, Ziauddin,’ he said. ‘The CT scan shows the bullet went very close to the brain.’ He said particles of bone had damaged the brain membrane. ‘We can pray to God. Let’s wait and see,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to operate at this stage.’

  My father became more agitated. In Swat the doctors had told him this was something simple, now it seemed very serious. And if it was serious why weren’t they operating? He felt uncomfortable in a military hospital. In our country, where the army has seized power so many times, people are often wary of the military, particularly those from Swat, where the army had taken so long to act against the Taliban. One of my father’s friends called him and said, ‘Get her moved from that hospital. We don’t want her to become shaheed millat [a martyr of the nation] like Liaquat Ali Khan.’ My father didn’t know what to do.

  ‘I’m confused,’ he told Colonel Junaid. ‘Why are we here? I thought we’d go to the civil hospital.’ Then he asked, ‘Please, can you bring in Dr Mumtaz?’

  ‘How would that look?’ replied Colonel Junaid who was, not surprisingly, offended.

  Afterwards, we found out that despite his youthful appearance he had been a neurosurgeon for thirteen years and was the most experienced and decorated neurosurgeon in the Pakistani army. He had joined the military as a doctor because of their superior facilities, following in the footsteps of his uncle, who was also an army neurosurgeon. The Peshawar CMH was on the front line of the war on the Taliban and Junaid dealt with gunshot wounds and blasts every day. ‘I’ve treated thousands of Malalas,’ he later said.