Let Her Fly

by Ziauddin Yousafzai

  I went onstage and made my excuses. Another friend took a call. Malala had been hurt. I have told the story of that day many times in the past six years, but it never gets any easier. Oh my God. Oh my God. I rushed in my friend’s car to find Malala at the hospital lying on a bed. “Oh, my brave daughter, my brave Malala, my brave, brave girl.” I said these words as I kissed her forehead, which had been wrapped in a bandage and was now wet with blood. I could not cry. I could not shed one tear. I think I was beyond crying. The only way I can describe it was like being sucked into a deep black hole. I was out of the frame of space and time. I was like a stone, utterly blank. A helicopter was summoned to take her to a much bigger hospital in Peshawar. I ran beside the stretcher as it was taken to the helipad in Mingora less than a mile from our home. It feels odd to watch the television footage of this now. As we flew over the landscape, I was indifferent to it. Malala was beside me vomiting blood. “Please God, please God, let her survive.” I begged. At home, on her prayer mat, Pekai, after hearing the news, began reciting from the Quran. “Do not cry,” she told the many women who had flocked to our house. “Pray.” When Atal came through the door, he switched on the television and saw the footage. He began weeping and called for Khushal. Together they watched the news ticker running along the bottom of the television broadcasts, preparing for the words “Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai declared dead.” We had all watched this happen with Benazir Bhutto in 2007.

  Three days later, after lifesaving surgery at Combined Military Hospital Peshawar, and then more care in the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology in Rawalpindi, at 5 a.m. on Monday, October 15, Malala was taken in an ambulance under armed escort to Rawalpindi airport, to a waiting private UEA plane. The roads were closed and snipers lined the streets. Her stretcher was wheeled on board and she was soon in the skies again, being flown far away to a hospital, the Queen Elizabeth, in an unknown city called Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. This hospital was to provide her with the vital care that, if we were very lucky, might limit the damage the bullet had inflicted on her brain.

  As we waited to leave Pakistan to follow her, Khushal burst into tears at the table and shouted, “We were five and now we are four!” It had not been written anywhere on our walls that our family would always be five, just as we had had no need to write down, “We are all equal,” but it was a truth. We had always been five. And then we were not.

  The boys’ kites are still there in Mingora, in a box, their strings intact, along with Malala’s bed and her school trophies, certificates, awards, books, and reports, proof of the education she fought to keep.

  Our family home is now rented by another family. One room has been allocated for our possessions, packed up for us in our absence, relics of the happy life we had there.

  The Beautiful Changes

  When I was a boy, playing cricket on the muddy roof of our shack, my father would call my name, “Ziaaaaaaaaaa—udina!” And before he had even finished the last syllable, I was down by his side. I would just be there before him, so obedient, like an army soldier to the call of his officer shouting, “Attention!” But as my sons became teenagers in the West, I did not see that automatic obedience in either of them and I will admit that I wanted it. I needed it.

  I would call up the stairs that dinner was ready only for my calls to be met with silence. Had they not heard me? Often I would climb the stairs of our house in Birmingham, which felt so strange with its marble surfaces and empty rooms, and open the doors to their bedrooms to find both boys hunched over their computer screens, in a cloud of blue light. “Did you not hear me?” I would ask. Sometimes they would not even look at me. And I would tell this story of my childhood again and again: “When I was a boy, playing cricket…” It made no difference. “Why are you not like the son I was to my father?” I would say to Khushal, who I felt was old enough to understand that I deserved respect.

  It was always computers, Xboxes, Game Boys, phone apps. I did not understand these gadgets, let alone know how to use them. My first experience on a computer was when I was thirty-five.

  “Why are you ignoring me?” I would say angrily to the boys. I was so frustrated. Khushal seemed to be growing up fast.

  Where had the liberal Ziauddin gone? The father who saw the error of his ways back in Pakistan and believed in equality and freedom and in encouraging his sons to express themselves? Where had the Ziauddin gone who craved a new, softer, freer upbringing for his boys? For about two and a half years, that Ziauddin could not be found anywhere. I could not find him.

  Separated from our culture, from our family, from a support structure full of my friends and Toor Pekai’s friends, people who might well have been mentors to our children, I really struggled with the boys. They were living a Western life in the UK that I did not recognize. I, a Muslim father from South Asia, had a fear in my heart that I was going to lose my sons. This is not uncommon among Asian parents and I understand it.

  I saw that the gap between us was becoming so much bigger than the gap between my father and me had ever been. For all my modernizing as a young man, I had remained obedient and respectful. Although I had learned English and understood the importance of equality, the bridge between my father and me was our faith, our love of the great Urdu and Pashto writers, and ultimately that I had never challenged his authority. My mission had been about giving Malala power, not taking power away from my father with disrespect.

  Did I revert to an authoritarian type of fathering in fear? Or was it that the boys, now exposed to a society with different values, were less inclined towards obedience and my final word? “You crazy boys,” I’d say to them. “You don’t listen to me.” And I was not joking. But the boys were not living the life I had led at their age, nor even the life they would have led had we stayed in Pakistan. They were forging, or trying to forge, their own paths in a new world.

  There was a different problem at the beginning. When we arrived in Britain, the boys were traumatized, particularly Khushal. Dr. Fiona Reynolds, the Birmingham intensive care pediatrician who by coincidence had happened to be in Pakistan when Malala was attacked and who had helped save her life, remembers the first time she saw the boys. They were in bunk beds in Rawalpindi, while we waited to be flown to the UK. Atal was fast asleep, but Khushal, she told me later, was the most terrified child she had ever seen.

  The boys did not go to school in the UK until well into the year following our arrival. They spent most of their time on computer games, first in the hospital hostel and then in the apartment on the tenth floor of a block in the middle of Birmingham. There was nothing for them to do. They were bored. Toor Pekai and I talked only of Malala’s treatment, her recovery. For us, there was nothing else to talk about.

  Khushal was thirteen and would shout at the computer screen. He broke eight controllers. I cannot remember how we came to have eight controllers. Atal played computer games, too, and ate sweets. Neither of them understood anything about their lives. They were frightened boys.

  “I was just following everyone else. I didn’t know what I was doing. Everything was hardening” is how Atal explained it to me later. On one occasion at the hospital, at a time when Malala was suffering dreadful headaches and brain fluid was leaking out of her ears, he shouted, “Give me my passport. I demand my passport. I am going home to Pakistan.”

  We were all crying.

  As if helping to save Malala’s life was not enough of a blessing, Dr. Fiona, along with her husband, Adrian, began taking the boys for outings to integrate them slowly into the Western way of life. They went to the cinema in Birmingham’s Bullring, which the boys could hardly believe, and to Warwick Castle, that time with Malala, too. The bullet had made Malala deaf in one ear and cut a facial nerve that caused one side of her face to droop. However, miraculously, it had not affected her memory or her brain or any of her limbs. As Malala started to recover, she joined the boys in these outings. They went bowling, for example, and to Nando’s, where they all ate fried chic
ken.

  I should have seen that everything had changed, and that the boys needed to respond to that change in their own way, Instead, after about a year in the UK, my relationship with Khushal started to deteriorate. He had not settled in at school as well as Malala and Atal, and he was still without a close friend, which the other two had found. He missed his life in Pakistan so much, his old friends, his kite, his life the way it used to be. To be honest, I missed Pakistan, too. Toor Pekai missed Pakistan. Malala missed Pakistan. The only person who did not was Atal, who quickly lost the memories that flooded the rest of us.

  Khushal was also old enough to understand what had happened to his sister. He is a deep thinker and an emotional boy, and he recognized the Taliban’s hatred. Atal, our sharp bright arrow, was too young. Luck had spared him from being on the bus that fateful day. Surrounded by his new friends, he picked up English with no problems at all. Soon, it was as if he had been born in Britain.

  Schoolwork seemed a low priority. Khushal was always playing those addictive games. I’d hear him through the door talking to somebody, but nobody was in there with him, and then shouting, and I thought, “What is he doing? What will become of this boy?” I found it so unacceptable, and I was scared I was losing him. I wanted him to be a boy who was focused on his studies and learning and giving at least some time to his books. I kept thinking, “When is he going to get fed up with this computer stuff?” It brought out the worst in me.

  Teenage boys need a mentor with whom they can explore who they are without fear of judgment or expectation.

  In Pakistan, it had been easy for me to be a father to the boys. They were younger then, and they were exposed to a bigger community of people who shared their culture. They used to go to the mosque. They went to their friends’ houses and met their cousins in Shangla. We had people around us, talking, cooking, praying, debating ideas.

  The change to our family in leaving Pakistan was revolutionary, a 180-degree turn. We had gone from living with a household full of our friends and family to being largely on our own. As Atal told me, we were no longer in a culture where boys immediately ran to get their father a glass of water. The boys were surrounded by children who had different relationships with their parents. There was not this automatic obedience, this emphasis on authority. Away from Pakistan, I saw that I was a Pashtun father. Where I had run from the roof at the very sound of my father shouting “Ziaaaaaaa-udina!” my sons did not come when I called.

  I was so sad about this. I blamed myself.

  When I was at the exact age Khushal was during this difficult period—around thirteen or fourteen years old—I had a few mentors who guided me away from hatred, away from a dangerous path. One of them had been Toor Pekai’s elder brother, and through gentle conversation he brought me back to safety when my beliefs were going astray.

  The cleric who was providing me with Islamic instruction believed in jihad and I was being radicalized very successfully. For a very brief period, I wanted a war with the infidels and I wanted to die fighting. I wanted to be a martyr, because this was what I was being taught with the same passion and conviction that I have taught in my life, only in the direction of love.

  I look back now and think of Toor Pekai’s brother and other progressive friends in my life and my own kind father, and I say to myself, “Ziauddin, without this guidance you could have become a suicide bomber with a belt strapped to your chest!”

  I needed a way of being with Khushal, and at the moment I lost faith, Dr. Fiona stepped in again. She was our mentor.

  “I am really in trouble,” I told her. “Khushal likes you. You like my sons. Please tell me what I can do.”

  There is no shame in parents asking for help. We talked together and she said, “These changes come in adolescents and you should be ready to cope with this situation in a noble or wise way. Do not lose your temper and try not to be hard on him.

  “He is a good boy,” she said. “It’s a difficult time. He’ll be okay. He’s bright, he’s clever, he’s handsome. It will be all right. He is a wonderful boy.”

  “You are right,” I told her. “You are right.”

  And after that I just gave in. I gave in. I stopped talking about schoolwork, and I stopped expecting obedience. I trusted Dr. Fiona, but I also began to question myself. I wanted to be a good father, a kind father. My way was not working. It was very unfair that I should want the boys to live a life like mine. I felt clear that I wanted to maintain the importance of our family values, those of equality and truth and justice, but anything that I wanted for them beyond this I recognized as being about me and what I wanted for them. Why should I decide if they went to university or read a certain book? Or pursued a certain career path? They were living in a different age and in a different culture.

  I had been looking for the kind of obedient son I had been to my father, and Dr. Fiona helped me see that I was searching for the wrong thing. My son was wonderful for who he was, not for how much like me I could make him.

  I believe that parenting never stops, and because of that, it requires change or certainly an openness to adaptation. Dr. Fiona talked to Khushal for hours, calmly waiting for him to calm down if he was angry. She listened to him, but she also pointed out the obvious. There are not many students who do well in school without putting in any effort. If Khushal wanted to get good grades in his GCSEs, he was going to have to start working. Because I had stopped caring about the computer games, very quickly Khushal got bored of them and stopped playing them. These days, it is my own phone that is always ringing and pinging with messages. When once I asked Khushal what he would change about me, he said, “Aba, why this dependence on the phone? Stop looking at it when we have guests! It is so rude!” I said to him, “Khushal Khan, you are right. I am sorry. I cannot help it.” He took it out of my hand and threw it down the back of the sofa. It is a funny reversal, I think, given how anxious I was in the past about their devices. Now, aged eighteen, it is Khushal who is confiscating my phone rather than the other way around.

  With time I also began to understand more about the UK education system. My sons were becoming critical thinkers. And they were not always on the computer just to play. Often, they were doing their homework. I had not understood this.

  I stopped worrying and I just loved them. It was such a relief.

  As I let go of my expectations of them and my old view of what a son should be, they became my friends. My best friends. I learned that they will find their happiness in a kind of life that is different from what I have known but still informed by all the values of love and kindness and equality that we had in Mingora. Understanding that made my life easy. And it set us free.

  You Say Burrito, I Say Burrita

  It is rare that I enjoy anything other than Pakistani food, but during one of my recent trips to America, the former communications director of the Malala Fund, Eson Jordan, bought me the most delicious food, a flour tortilla with a filling, which I thought he said was called a burrita. I ate it for breakfast in the back of the taxi as we traveled back to the airport.

  The next time I was in America, we were all together in Los Angeles, and I was out in a market with the boys. I spotted a Starbucks coffee shop, and, feeling hungry, I announced, “I’m going in there to buy a burrita.”

  “Aba,” they pleaded, “please do not do this. It is a big mistake. Do not ask for this here.”

  But I ignored them. “Please, let me check. Maybe they do have one.” I was very persistent.

  In I went and I said to the manager, “Do you have a b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b—” I became very stuck, very badly stuck, on this word, as I often do with hard sounds. The woman at the counter was so patient. She did not laugh at all. Finally, I managed to get it: a b-b-b-b-b-b-b—burrita! I was triumphant.

  The boys were laughing so hard behind me they could hardly stand up straight. The poor manager kept her composure, but she had to tell me kindly that, no, sir, there was no such food sold in Starbucks.

  As we l
eft the shop, Atal said to me, “Aba, you made three mistakes.” And I said, “How?”

  He said, “Number one, you are asking for Mexican food in Starbucks. This you will never find. Number two, it is not burrit-a, it is burrit-o. And number three, your stammer meant that you could not even say this word! You ruined the word twice.”

  They were laughing so much, and when we rejoined Malala and Toor Pekai, they joined in. Soon after, they set up a Snapchat group among them with the title “burrit-a,” and I joined as an honorary member. I enjoyed this teasing, and I shared the story with many of our friends. I enjoyed my children laughing at me. We had discovered how to love one another, and because of this, I was laughing, too.

  I think when you laugh at yourself, you become more human and you tell your children that it is okay in life to have weak moments and to accept them as normal. I think it is important to have a sense of humor. If I had been the old Ziauddin, claiming authority and demanding respect, I would have been offended by the burrita teasing and gone off into another room and thought, “I am a father and you are children. Show me some respect!” They would have laughed at me behind my back. Now I do not see the teasing as showing a lack of respect for me. Instead I see it as an embarrassing moment for me that provided a funny story we all enjoyed.

  The Class of Malala

  School exams can be a stressful time for a parent, never mind the student!

  In the run-up to Khushal’s GCSEs two years ago, I said nothing about the importance of studying. I had learned my lesson and trained myself not to measure him by how much work he appeared to be doing.

  Three months before Khushal’s exams, he became very serious. He spread his books over the sitting room sofas. Here was chemistry on one, biology on another, computer science and religious studies. When guests came, there was nowhere to sit. He used to say to the guests, “Let’s go to the sitting room because this sofa is going to get an A and this sofa is going to get an A.” And we all used to laugh.