But my father didn’t know that at the time and became very depressed. ‘Do whatever you think,’ he said. ‘You’re the doctor.’

The next few hours were a wait-and-see time, the nurses monitoring my heartbeat and vital signs. Occasionally I made a low grunt and moved my hand or fluttered my eyes. Then Maryam would say, ‘Malala, Malala.’ Once my eyes completely opened. ‘I never noticed before how beautiful her eyes are,’ said Maryam. I was restless and kept trying to get the monitor off my finger. ‘Don’t do that,’ Maryam said.

‘Miss, don’t tell me off,’ I whispered as if we were at school. Madam Maryam was a strict headmistress.

Late in the evening my mother came with Atal. They had made the four-hour journey by road, driven by my father’s friend Mohammad Farooq. Before she arrived Maryam had called to warn her, ‘When you see Malala don’t cry or shout. She can hear you even if you think she can’t.’ My father also called her and told her to prepare for the worst. He wanted to protect her.

When my mother arrived they hugged and held back tears. ‘Here is Atal,’ she told me. ‘He has come to see you.’

Atal was overwhelmed and cried a lot. ‘Mama,’ he wept, ‘Malala is hurt so badly.’

My mother was in a state of shock and could not understand why the doctors were not operating to remove the bullet. ‘My brave daughter, my beautiful daughter,’ she cried. Atal was making so much noise that eventually an orderly took them to the hospital’s military hostel, where they were being put up.

My father was bewildered by all the people gathered outside – politicians, government dignitaries, provincial ministers – who had come to show their sympathy. Even the governor was there; he gave my father 100,000 rupees for my treatment. In our society if someone dies, you feel very honoured if one dignitary comes to your home. But now he was irritated. He felt all these people were just waiting for me to die when they had done nothing to protect me.

Later, while they were eating, Atal turned on the TV. My father immediately turned it off. He couldn’t face seeing news of my attack at that moment.When he left the room Maryam switched it back on. Every channel was showing footage of me with a commentary of prayers and moving poems as if I had died. ‘My Malala, my Malala,’ my mother wailed and Maryam joined her.

Around midnight Colonel Junaid asked to meet my father outside the ICU. ‘Ziauddin, Malala’s brain is swelling.’ My father didn’t understand what this meant. The doctor told him I had started to deteriorate; my consciousness was fading, and I had again been vomiting blood. Colonel Junaid ordered a third CT scan. This showed that my brain was swelling dangerously.

‘But I thought the bullet hadn’t entered her brain,’ said my father.

Colonel Junaid explained that a bone had fractured and splinters had gone into my brain, creating a shock and causing it to swell. He needed to remove some of my skull to give the brain space to expand, otherwise the pressure would become unbearable. ‘We need to operate now to give her a chance,’ he said. ‘If we don’t, she may die. I don’t want you to look back and regret not taking action.’

Cutting away some of my skull sounded very drastic to my father. ‘Will she survive?’ he asked desperately, but was given little reassurance at that stage.

It was a brave decision by Colonel Junaid, whose superiors were not convinced and were being told by other people that I should be sent abroad. It was a decision that would save my life. My father told him to go ahead, and Colonel Junaid said he would bring in Dr Mumtaz to help. My father’s hand shook as he signed the consent papers. There in black and white were the words ‘the patient may die’.

They started the operation around 1.30 a.m. My mother and father sat outside the operating theatre. ‘O God, please make Malala well,’ prayed my father. He made bargains with God. ‘Even if I have to live in the deserts of the Sahara, I need her eyes open; I won’t be able to live without her. O God, let me give the rest of my life to her; I have lived enough. Even if she is injured, just let her survive.’

Eventually my mother interrupted him. ‘God is not a miser,’ she said. ‘He will give me back my daughter as she was.’ She began praying with the Holy Quran in her hand, standing facing the wall, reciting verses over and over for hours.

‘I had never seen someone praying like her,’ said Madam Maryam. ‘I was sure God would answer such prayers.’

My father tried not to think about the past and whether he had been wrong to encourage me to speak out and campaign.

Inside the theatre Colonel Junaid used a saw to remove an eight-to-ten-centimetre square from the upper-left part of my skull so my brain had the space to swell. He then cut into the subcutaneous tissue on the left of my stomach and placed the piece of bone inside to preserve it. Then he did a tracheotomy as he was worried the swelling was blocking my airway. He also removed clots from my brain and the bullet from my shoulder blade. After all these procedures I was put on a ventilator. The operation took almost five hours.

Despite my mother’s prayers, my father thought ninety per cent of the people waiting outside were just waiting for the news of my death. Some of them, his friends and sympathisers, were very upset, but he felt that others were jealous of our high profile and believed we had got what was coming to us.

My father was taking a short break from the intensity of the operating theatre and was standing outside when a nurse approached him. ‘Are you Malala’s father?’ Once again my father’s heart sank. The nurse took him into a room.

He thought she was going to say, ‘We’re sorry, I’m afraid we have lost her.’ But once inside he was told, ‘We need someone to get blood from the blood bank.’ He was relieved but baffled. Am I theonly person who can fetch it? he wondered. One of his friends went instead.

It was about 5.30 a.m. when the surgeons came out. Among other things, they told my father that they had removed a piece of skull and put it in my abdomen. In our culture doctors don’t explain things to patients or relatives, and my father asked humbly, ‘If you don’t mind, I have a stupid question. Will she survive – what do you think?’

‘In medicine two plus two does not always make four,’ replied Colonel Junaid. ‘We did our job – we removed the piece of skull. Now we must wait.’

‘I have another stupid question,’ said my father. ‘What about this bone? What will you do with it?’

‘After three months we will put it back,’ replied Dr Mumtaz. ‘It’s very simple, just like this.’ He clapped his hands.

The next morning the news was good. I had moved my arms. Then three top surgeons from the province came to examine me. They said Colonel Junaid and Dr Mumtaz had done a splendid job, and the operation had gone very well, but I should now be put into an induced coma because if I regained consciousness there would be pressure on the brain.

While I was hovering between life and death, the Taliban issued a statement assuming responsibility for shooting me but denying it was because of my campaign for education. ‘We carried out this attack, and anybody who speaks against us will be attacked in the same way,’ said Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for the TTP. ‘Malala has been targeted because of her pioneer role in preaching secularism . . . She was young but she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas. She was pro-West; she was speaking against the Taliban; she was calling President Obama her idol.’

My father knew what he was referring to. After I won the National Peace Prize the year before, I had done many TV interviews and in one of them I had been asked to name my favourite politicians. I had chosen Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Benazir Bhutto and President Barack Obama. I had read about Obama and admired him because as a young black man from a struggling family he had achieved his ambitions and dreams. But the image of America in Pakistan had become of one of drones, secret raids on our territory and Raymond Davis.