When I confided in Pekai about the need to cover the school’s expenses, fearing the school would be lost if I did not, she would say calmly, “God will never let your school go bankrupt if you do this good thing for these girls.” She passionately believed it, and it was true. The school never did go bankrupt.
When people think of our family, they think of Malala as one of the world’s most powerful activists for social change, because she is. And then after her, perhaps they think of me only because when she was a campaigning child, I was the one who was by her side. We continue to be active together in our girls’ education campaign. These days my job is being her father and I am so happy for that. But when I think about Malala and the foundations of her activism, I also think of Toor Pekai. I think of Malala’s mother. Toor Pekai’s activism is instinctive and spontaneous, built on a fierce moral strength. Her conviction to help others, to be a good person, stems from who she is, where she has come from, and her religious faith. I think we need many more activists like her.
In the early days, Pekai would not have called herself an activist, although she sees herself in that way now. Today, she helps support the families from Pakistan who have come to Birmingham after the Taliban attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar in which 132 children were shot dead along with their 7 teachers. One female teacher was set on fire in front of the children. Pekai is dedicated to supporting two surviving children now living in Birmingham, along with a third boy who is a survivor of another Taliban attack in Pakistan. She tries to make their lives easier with friendship and compassion. I think as human beings our kindness is what distinguishes us from other creatures in the world. We see dogfights and fierce animals tearing each other apart in the jungle, big fish eating smaller fish, but when human beings act with hatred and violence, like the Taliban did, it takes the rest of us to carry on, trying to live in a compassionate, loving way, throwing inhumanity into darkness.
I have since thought about the descriptions others give us, the labels that are used. Often, these labels come from the West. Toor Pekai and I were both “volunteers” before we knew about the concept of “volunteering,” a word I learned in America. And as I have said, I only came to know the word “feminist” after living in the UK. For more than forty years, I was living that word but not hearing it.
I do think of Toor Pekai as an early activist. Activism is what? It starts when your actions are about helping others. When Malala and the boys were small, they saw Pekai reaching out beyond our family to people she knew and even to those she did not know. She filled our home with her basic goodness. She was always helping people, feeding them, giving them somewhere to sleep, supporting them, even though she herself did not have much. Helping one person can be as important as motivating an army.
When I look back at those years now and I see how committed Toor Pekai was to securing an education for other girls like Malala, to helping others, I wonder if I myself should have motivated and helped Pekai to return to the classroom. One of the many questions asked of our family is “How can Malala and her father have been so passionate about education when Toor Pekai was illiterate?” I hope I can do Toor Pekai justice when I answer this question. I have asked Pekai this and she tells me, “I had all the freedoms I wanted. I loved you and I loved my children. I was happy. This was my choice.”
In Mingora, it is a sad fact that before the Talibanization, Pekai’s lack of formal education did not impact her life. Many women had not received an education. What made Pekai different was that she could exercise her intelligence through her freedom of movement. As a friend once told me, “Toor Pekai might not have an education, but she has an educated mind.” And then, following the Talibanization, not even schoolgirls were allowed to go to school, let alone women of Pekai’s age.
Like many mothers all over the world, the point in Pekai’s life when she felt ready to begin something new came when Atal went to school and there was more time in her day. In 2012, a few months before Malala’s attack, Pekai had begun to take lessons in reading and writing English with Miss Ulfat, a teacher at the primary level of the Khushal School.
When the Taliban first started to claim Mingora, Pekai had no experience of standing on a stage, or the confidence to express her ideas about the need to educate girls. Nor did she have Malala’s cultural boldness, but what she felt she could not do herself publicly, in front of television cameras or audiences, she was happy for Malala and me to do. We were the people speaking her heart and mind, and that is why she gave both of us her great support, never once imagining that the Taliban would come for her child.
When the Birds Stopped Singing
Today, once more, blood has been shed in my hometown.
A brother has committed an honour killing.
A brother has killed his sister.
He has followed in the steps of Cain,
who murdered his brother Abel out of jealousy.
Today, once more, society has opposed love.
Custom has opposed love, tradition has opposed love.
Today, once more, jealousy has overcome love.
And lovers are shocked.
Children are afraid.
People flee in terror.
Today, once more, blood has been shed in my hometown
and it has made the universe tremble.
It has made the birds stop singing
as brothers turn the weddings of their sisters into funerals.
Instead of sending them to their new families,
brothers send their sisters to their graves;
instead of following a bride, brothers follow a coffin;
instead of giving a dowry, brothers shed blood;
instead of love, there is killing;
instead of honour, there is shame.
Ziauddin Yousafzai, “Honour Killing,” 1994
(tr. by Qasim Swati and Tom Payne)
Twenty-four years have passed since I wrote this poem. It was prompted by a girl and her loved one in Mingora who were killed in front of the girl’s house. The murder of women in my community seemed to me to be the ultimate proof of society’s callousness towards them, the injustice of their lives. The impact these honor killings had on me as the years went on became even more intense because of how much I loved Toor Pekai and Malala. Such events were not a frequent occurrence, but there were enough of them for me to never allow myself to think they were a thing of the past. Every time an honor killing occurred, my resolve to be a new kind of man deepened.
Toor Pekai and I speak to our friends and relatives in Pakistan every day. Recently, we heard about a woman there who had found love outside her marriage. She had been married for twenty years to an older man, whom she had married when she was a young girl. She had been a replacement for his first wife and a new mother for his children. The woman went missing, and it became clear that she had run away. Her husband’s family hunted her down and brought her back to her husband. “Please, spare her. For me, she is clean. There is no shame,” he told the male members of the woman’s family. Toor Pekai heard about the woman at this point, when she had become her family’s shame.
For a brief moment, the woman’s future seemed uncertain. Her husband had asked for mercy, but the shame was not just his to dismiss. A meeting of elders was called.
I always say that if Toor Pekai has shed one hundred tears, ninety-five have been for others, not herself. Pekai was distraught. She mounted her own campaign to save the woman’s life. From our house in Birmingham, she phoned everybody she could think of who might help to prevent the outcome we feared. “Please do not let them do it,” I heard her saying. “They cannot make themselves honorable with this dishonorable thing. Don’t do it. It is inhuman. It is not honor.”
She asked me to make calls, too, which I did. I contacted somebody I knew who I thought might have some influence. I felt helpless, far away. Had I been there, I would have appealed directly to the family, but I could not do this living in Birmingham. “My hands are tied,”
my contact told me.
The next day, my phone rang. It was a contact in Pakistan. “It’s done,” he said. “She was killed last night.” The woman was strangled. By the time I took the call, preparations were being made to put her in her grave.
Toor Pekai and I cried for a week. We could not sleep. Apart from the attack on Malala, we have never been so traumatized by anything in our whole lives. I heard that the police in Pakistan made some investigations. But as far as I know, nobody has been brought to justice. Honor killings are against the law in Pakistan, although in the rural areas it is a law that seems to be hardly enforced.
When I define “love,” I define it as freedom. The plight of women can be changed if we think differently, if we can break a few norms of family and society, and the governments of such societies abolish discriminatory laws that go against basic human rights. To be clear: it takes courage from both men and women.
Some men feel embarrassed or ashamed to believe in the empowerment of women. There are many men who are prepared to think differently about their daughters’ futures, but some men encourage their daughters’ freedom without owning the change in themselves. These men believe in equality, and yet they do not shout about it. It needs to be shouted about because misogyny is everywhere still. Sometimes it is in jokes, sometimes it is in subtle casual comments. But it all comes from the same place: a place where women are not seen as equal. When I first came to Britain, a Pakistani taxi driver who was taking me to New Street station in Birmingham wanted to give me some advice:
“Do not trust three things in this country,” he said. “The three Ws.”
I said, “Okay, what are they?” And he said, “W for weather, W for work, and W for women.”
I said to him, “Okay, I may agree with you on two but not three. I mean, yes, I can see that you may get work and lose it. I agree with you on weather because here in the UK, it is raining in the morning and it is sunny in the afternoon. But W for women? This I do not agree with! Tell me faithfully,” I said to him. “You are a married person and you have a wife. I ask you who is the most loyal in your family, the most loving in your marriage, you or your wife?” And here he became very embarrassed and laughed nervously. “Yes, you are right. My wife is loyal and loving to our family.”
Why did this man who is happy in his marriage tell me this thing about the third W?
“Why say this when you love your own wife, who is a force for good in your family?” I asked him.
“It is just a saying, and people say it!”
And I said to him, “But don’t follow! It is man’s propaganda, a man’s code. Advise against two Ws—work and weather—and one M, man!”
We Cried Like Children Cry
The early months and first year or two of our living in the UK were hard for us. Following Malala’s attack, we wept more tears than I thought possible. On top of the injuries to her ear and her face, a chunk of her skull had to be taken out and embedded in her stomach while her brain swelled. She now has a metal plate in place of the shattered part of her skull, which in the end could not be used.
When Malala was in the hospital in Birmingham and we were by her side, her beautiful face seemed to be gone. The most shocking and saddening thing was the drooping left side of her face. She had palsy. Our beautiful girl Malala seemed to be a different girl now. She had lost her smile and lost her laughter, and I used to watch Toor Pekai with her and see Pekai’s tears roll down her face and splash onto her scarf. Malala’s smile would come back later, the next summer following expert surgery, but so many things were unknown at the beginning.
I think trauma can either bring a husband and wife together or force them apart. For us, the trauma of almost losing Malala strengthened our marriage, although almost losing our child made it feel like our lives were truly gone.
We lived first in the hospital hostel and then moved to our apartment on the tenth floor of a city center tower block. We moved twice more after that. In those early days of living in the UK, Toor Pekai would look out of the window and see the women below, so freely walking about the streets in the night air, but dressed in so little by the standards of the women in the bazaars of Mingora. She would weep yet more tears of deep confusion and fear. “Khaista, surely these women will freeze to death.”
Where my tears had not fallen at the first news of Malala’s attack, now Toor Pekai and I would often cry together the whole night long. We cried like children cry. Our tears were unstoppable. Our bodies shook. It was like the grief was a kind of thunder. There were so many possibilities of how Malala’s life might be restricted: paralysis down one side of her face, an inability to speak, limited memory. And yet in the morning we would rise up from the hostel bed and go to Malala lying in her bed for another day filled with a mixture of deep hope and terrible dread that this was the day that would bring more bad news.
Every decision about Malala’s well-being Toor Pekai and I made together. Toor Pekai needed me to act as her translator because she could not understand what the British doctors were telling us. Later, Dr. Fiona apologized to me for the fact that she had sought reassurance that I was involving Pekai in the decision making. Many men, she said, do not involve their wives. But for us, there was not one decision made without the other one agreeing, even down to the smallest things such as how to tie back Malala’s hair. I honestly do not know what I would have done without Toor Pekai.
With my fear of losing Malala, I felt such guilt, such terrible guilt that I had not stopped her from campaigning. It was Toor Pekai who got me through this period in which I seemed to be stuck in a loop.
I went over my intentions again and again. What had been my aims and goals and objectives? What had I stood for? What had I been working towards that was worth this sacrifice of my child? How could I have miscalculated like this? Why had I not stopped Malala? I had not needed Malala’s voice for my own campaign, but I had encouraged her because it was her right to speak if she wanted to. We had stood together, united. But this fight almost left me with the dead body of my child.
Round and round and round my head these thoughts went, during the day and at night.
Toor Pekai was my moral compass. It was she who stopped me from having a full mental collapse. If she had said, “Oh, it is your fault! You put my daughter’s life at stake for this higher cause!” how could I have coped with hearing this from the woman closest to me? But I never heard a single word of reproach from Toor Pekai because she instinctively saw the purity of Malala’s and my intentions. She had seen the strength of Malala’s will. The campaign against the Taliban was not just mine and Malala’s, it was Toor Pekai’s, too. She had been beside us. In these dark moments after the attack, Pekai reminded me that our fight had been heartfelt. It had been Malala’s fight as much as ours. It was God’s plan.
People have asked me since, “Does Malala ever say to you, ‘Aba, you should have stopped me from speaking’?” And the answer is never. It is a blessing in disguise that Malala remembers nothing of the attack. Six years have passed since then, and I have never once heard a single sigh, a single word, spoken or implied, that somebody else was responsible for what she went through. She does not even speak against the boy who pulled the trigger.
Pekai and I live with the trauma of almost losing Malala every day. It is always there, buried deeper with time but never gone. The pain and fear that come from the possibility of your child dying is felt so deeply that it leaves its scar. All I can try to balance it with is the resolve in my deep love of and thanks to God: God gave Malala back to us. He brought her life back to us. We hang on to this together. We hang on to this as a family. We are human beings, with a deep commitment to human rights. We believe in what we do and we do what we believe in. It is so simple. It was our family’s moral response to a situation we were forced into. I thank God that He was witness to the purity of my intentions.
Pekai has helped me to accept that our family must not blame itself for the fact that the Taliban came at Malala with
their guns simply because she wanted to be educated. Malala did not make an army. She did not raise a gun. She raised a voice, which is her right.
Once our life settled down in Birmingham, it was very clear that Pekai’s lack of English was impacting everything. She barely knew a word. It was so isolating for her, and she had few Pakistani friends. In Mingora, our house had been full of people. But our house in Birmingham felt empty at the beginning. Once Malala had recovered, the boys and Malala were in school during the day. I would often travel as part of the job I was given as an education attaché to the Pakistani government. And during the holidays, I would travel with Malala, for the Malala Fund that was set up after her attack, or as part of the publicity for Malala’s book, I Am Malala, or for the documentary film He Named Me Malala. I loved this travel with Malala because it was just like it used to be, the two of us together, side by side.
We were so thankful to God that Malala had survived. Pekai would say, “We are here, we are alive, we are together.” She would never complain about being left on her own with the boys. But, still, this did not mean she was happy with this new life in the UK. I would hear her often on the phone to a friend in Swat saying, “Why am I not educated? Why is my life difficult? I don’t understand anything.” Sometimes I would see her wandering around the garden with the leftovers from our dinner. With nobody in the community to feed, she would leave our food for the birds, but the birds knew not to eat it.
One of the earliest English phrases Pekai learned to say was “top up,” because it enabled her to buy a top-up card for her mobile phone, which then meant she could ring friends and relations in Pakistan. We all missed Pakistan, but for Pekai, there were many basic elements of UK life to master, like transport and calendars, that the rest of us found much easier. She did not know how to spell her name in English. When she had to fill in forms she had no idea when her birthday was. On top of general day-to-day confusion, Pekai suffered terrible headaches that the doctor said were a reaction to the trauma of the attack on Malala.
Let Her Fly Page 9