My cousin Reena came into my room. ‘They knew you were stealing,’ she said. ‘They were waiting for you to come clean but you just kept on.’

I felt a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach. I walked back to my mother with my head bowed. ‘What you did was wrong, Malala,’ she said. ‘Are you trying to bring shame on us that we can’t afford to buy such things?’

‘It’s not true!’ I lied. ‘I didn’t take them.’

But she knew I had. ‘Safina started it,’ I protested. ‘She took the pink phone that Aba bought me.’

My mother was unmoved. ‘Safina is younger than you and you should have taught her better,’ she said. ‘You should have set an example.’

I started crying and apologised over and over again. ‘Don’t tell Aba,’ I begged. I couldn’t bear for him to be disappointed in me. It’s horrible to feel unworthy in the eyes of your parents.

It wasn’t the first time. When I was little I went to the bazaar with my mother and spotted a pile of almonds on a cart. They looked so tasty that I couldn’t resist grabbing a handful. My mother told me off and apologised to the cart owner. He was furious and would not be placated. We still had little money and my mother checked her purse to see what she had. ‘Can you sell them to me for ten rupees?’ she asked. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Almonds are very costly.’

My mother was very upset and told my father. He immediately went and bought the whole lot from the man and put them in a glass dish.

‘Almonds are good,’ he said. ‘If you eat them with milk just before bed it makes you brainy.’ But I knew he didn’t have much money and the almonds in the dish were a reminder of my guilt. I promised myself I’d never do such a thing again. And now I had. My mother took me to say sorry to Safina and her parents. It was very hard. Safina said nothing about my phone, which didn’t seem fair, but I didn’t mention it either.

Though I felt bad, I was also relieved it was over. Since that day I have never lied or stolen. Not a single lie nor a single penny, not even the coins my father leaves around the house, which we’re allowed to buy snacks with. I also stopped wearing jewellery because I asked myself, What are these baubles which tempt me? Why should I lose my character for a few metal trinkets? But I still feel guilty, and to this day I say sorry to God in my prayers.

My mother and father tell each other everything so Aba soon found out why I was so sad. I could see in his eyes that I had failed him. I wanted him to be proud of me, like he was when I was presented with the first-in-year trophies at school. Or the day our kindergarten teacher Miss Ulfat told him I had written, ‘Only Speak in Urdu,’ on the blackboard for my classmates at the start of an Urdu lesson so we would learn the language faster.

My father consoled me by telling me about the mistakes great heroes made when they were children. He told me that Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.’ At school we had read stories about Mohammad Ali Jinnah. As a boy in Karachi he would study by the glow of street lights because there was no light at home. He told other boys to stop playing marbles in the dust and to play cricket instead so their clothes and hands wouldn’t get dirty. Outside his office my father had a framed copy of a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to his son’s teacher, translated into Pashto. It is a very beautiful letter, full of good advice. ‘Teach him, if you can, the wonder of books . . . But also give him quiet time to ponder the eternal mystery of birds in the sky, bees in the sun, and the flowers on a green hillside,’ it says. ‘Teach him it is far more honourable to fail than to cheat.’

I think everyone makes a mistake at least once in their life. The important thing is what you learn from it. That’s why I have problems with our Pashtunwali code. We are supposed to take revenge for wrongs done to us, but where does that end? If a man in one family is killed or hurt by another man, revenge must be exacted to restore nang. It can be taken by killing any male member of the attacker’s family. Then that family in turn must take revenge. And on and on it goes. There is no time limit. We have a saying: ‘The Pashtun took revenge after twenty years and another said it was taken too soon.’

We are a people of many sayings. One is ‘The stone of Pashto does not rust in water,’ which means we neither forget nor forgive. That’s also why we rarely say thank you, manana, because we believe a Pashtun will never forget a good deed and is bound to reciprocate at some point, just as he will a bad one. Kindness can only be repaid with kindness. It can’t be repaid with expressions like ‘thank you’.

Many families live in walled compounds with watchtowers so they can keep an eye out for their enemies. We knew many victims of feuds. One was Sher Zaman, a man who had been in my father’s class and always got better grades than him. My grandfather and uncle used to drive my father mad, teasing him, ‘You’re not as good as Sher Zaman,’ so much he once wished that rocks would come down the mountain and flatten him. But Sher Zaman did not go to college and ended up becoming a dispenser in the village pharmacy. His family became embroiled in a dispute with their cousins over a small plot of forest. One day, as Sher Zaman and two of his brothers were on their way to the land, they were ambushed by his uncle and some of his men. All three brothers were killed.

As a respected man in the community, my father was often called on to mediate feuds. He did not believe in badal – revenge – and would try to make people see that neither side had anything to gain from continuing the violence, and it would be better for them to get on with their lives. There were two families in our village he could not convince. They had been locked in a feud for so long no one even seemed to remember how it had started – probably some small slight as we are a hot-headed people. First a brother on one side would attack an uncle on the other. Then vice versa. It consumed their lives.

Our people say it is a good system, and our crime rate is much lower than in non-Pashtun areas. But I think that if someone kills your brother, you shouldn’t kill them or their brother, you should teach them instead. I am inspired by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the man who some call the Frontier Gandhi, who introduced a non-violent philosophy to our culture.

It’s the same with stealing. Some people, like me, get caught and vow they will never do it again. Others say, ‘Oh it’s no big deal – it was just a little thing.’ But the second time they will steal something bigger and the third something bigger still. In my country too many politicians think nothing of stealing. They are rich and we are a poor country yet they loot and loot. Most of them don’t pay tax, but that’s the least of it. They take out loans from state banks but they don’t pay them back. They get kickbacks on government contracts from friends or the companies they award them to. Many of them own expensive flats in London.

I don’t know how they can live with their consciences when they see our people going hungry or sitting in the darkness of endless power cuts, or children unable to go to school as their parents need them to work. My father says that Pakistan has been cursed with more than its fair share of politicians who only think about money. They don’t care if the army is actually flying the plane, they are happy to stay out of the cockpit and sit in business class, close the curtains and enjoy the fine food and service while the rest of us are squashed in economy.

I had been born into a sort of democracy in which for ten years Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif kept replacing each other, none of their governments ever completing a term and always accusing each other of corruption. But two years after I was born the generals again took over. It happened in a manner so dramatic that it sounds like something out of a movie. Nawaz Sharif was prime minister at the time and had fallen out with his army chief General Pervez Musharraf and sacked him. At the time General Musharraf was on a plane of our national airline PIA coming back from Sri Lanka. Nawaz Sharif was so worried about his reaction that he tried to stop the plane from landing in Pakistan. He ordered Karachi airport to switch off its landing lights and to park fire engines on the runway to block the plane even though it had 200 other passengers on board and not enough fuel to get to another country. Within an hour of the announcement on television of Musharraf ’s sacking, tanks were on the streets and troops had taken over the newsrooms and the airports. The local commander, General Iftikhar, stormed the control tower at Karachi so that Musharraf ’s plane could land. Musharraf then seized power and threw Sharif into a dungeon in Attock Fort. Some people celebrated by handing out sweets as Sharif was unpopular, but my father cried when he heard the news. He had thought we were done with military dictatorships. Sharif was accused of treason and only saved by his friends in the Saudi royal family, who arranged his exile.