As usual my father doesn’t help in the kitchen. I tease him, ‘Aba, you talk of women’s rights, but my mother manages everything! You don’t even clear the tea things.’
There are buses and trains but we are unsure about using them. My mother misses going shopping in Cheena Bazaar. She is happier since my cousin Shah came to stay. He has a car and takes her shopping, but it’s not the same as she can’t talk to her friends and neighbours about what she bought.
A door bangs in the house and my mother jumps – she jumps these days at the slightest noise. She often cries then hugs me’. ‘Malala is alive,’ she says. Now she treats me as if I was her youngest rather than eldest child.
I know my father cries too. He cries when I push my hair to the side and he sees the scar on my head, and he cries when he wakes from an afternoon nap to hear his children’s voices in the garden and realises with relief that one of them is still mine. He knows people say it’s his fault that I was shot, that he pushed me to speak up like a tennis dad trying to create a champion, as if I don’t have my own mind. It’s hard for him. All he worked for for over almost twenty years has been left behind: the school he built up from nothing, which now has three buildings with 1,100 pupils and seventy teachers. I know he felt proud at what he had created, a poor boy from that narrow village between the Black and White Mountains. He says, ‘It’s as if you planted a tree and nurtured it – you have the right to sit in its shade.’
His dream in life was to have a very big school in Swat providing quality education, to live peacefully and to have democracy in our country. In Swat he had achieved respect and status in society through his activities and the help he gave people. He never imagined living abroad and he gets upset when people suggest we wanted to come to the UK. ‘A person who has eighteen years of education, a nice life, a family, you throw him out just as you throw a fish out of water for speaking up for girls’ education?’ Sometimes he says we have gone from being IDPs to EDPs – externally displaced persons. Often over meals we talk about home and try to remember things. We miss everything, even the smelly stream. My father says, ‘If I had known this would happen, I would have looked back for a last time just as the Prophet did when he left Mecca to migrate to Medina. He looked back again and again.’ Already some of the things from Swat seem like stories from a distant place, like somewhere I have read about.
My father spends much of his time going to conferences on education. I know it’s odd for him that now people want to hear him because of me, not the other way round. I used to be known as his daughter; now he’s known as my father. When he went to France to collect an award for me he told the audience, ‘In my part of the world most people are known by their sons. I am one of the few lucky fathers known by his daughter.’
A smart new uniform hangs on my bedroom door, bottle green instead of royal blue, for a school where no one dreams of being attacked for going to classes or someone blowing up the building. In April I was well enough to start school in Birmingham. It’s wonderful going to school and not having to feel scared as I did in Mingora, always looking around me on my way to school, terrified a talib would jump out.
It’s a good school. Many subjects are the same as at home, but the teachers have PowerPoint and computers rather than chalk and blackboards. We have some different subjects – music, art, computer studies, home economics, where we learn to cook – and we do practicals in science, which is rare in Pakistan. Even though I recently got just forty percent in my physics exam, it is still my favourite subject. I love learning about Newton and the basic principles the whole universe obeys.
But like my mother I am lonely. It takes time to make good friends like I had at home, and the girls at school here treat me differently. People say, ‘Oh, that’s Malala’ – they see me as ‘Malala, girls’ rights activist’. Back in the Khushal School I was just Malala, the same double-jointed girl they had always known, who loved to tell jokes and drew pictures to explain things. Oh, and who was always quarrelling with her brother and best friend! I think every class has a very well behaved girl, a very intelligent or genius girl, a very popular girl, a beautiful girl, a girl who is a bit shy, a notorious girl . . . but here I haven’t worked out yet who is who.
As there is no one here I can tell my jokes to, I save them and tell them to Moniba when we Skype. My first question is always, ‘What’s the latest news at the school?’ I love to hear who is fighting with who, and who got told off by which teacher. Moniba came first in class in the most recent exams. My classmates still keep the seat for me with my name on it, and at the boys’ school Sir Amjad has put a big poster of me at the entrance and says he greets it every morning before going into his office.
I describe life in England to Moniba. I tell her of the streets with rows of identical houses, unlike home, where everything is different and higgledy-piggledy and a shack of mud and stones can stand next to a house as big as a castle. I tell her how they are lovely solid houses which could withstand floods and earthquakes but have no flat roofs to play on. I tell her I like England because people follow rules, they respect policemen and everything happens on time. The government is in charge and no one needs to know the name of the army chief. I see women having jobs we couldn’t imagine in Swat. They are police and security guards; they run big companies and dress exactly as they like.
I don’t often think about the shooting, though every day when I look in the mirror it is a reminder. The nerve operation has done as much as it can. I will never be exactly the same. I can’t blink fully and my left eye closes a lot when I speak. My father’s friend Hidayatullah told him we should be proud of my eye. ‘It’s the beauty of her sacrifice,’ he said.
It is still not definitely known who shot me, but a man named Ataullah Khan said he did it. The police have not managed to find him but they say they are investigating and want to interview me.
Though I don’t remember exactly what happened that day, sometimes I have flashbacks. They come unexpectedly. The worst one was in June, when we were in Abu Dhabi on the way to perform Umrah in Saudi Arabia. I went to a shopping mall with my mother as she wanted to buy a special burqa to pray in Mecca. I didn’t want one. I said I would just wear my shawl as it is not specified that a woman must wear a burqa. As we were walking through the mall, suddenly I could see so many men around me. I thought they were waiting for me with guns and would shoot. I was terrified though I said nothing. I told myself, Malala, you have already faced death. This is your second life. Don’t be afraid – if you are afraid you can’t move forward.
We believe that when we have our first sight of the Kaaba, the black-shrouded cube in Mecca that is our most sacred place, any wish in your heart is granted by God. When we prayed at the Kaaba, we prayed for peace in Pakistan and for girls’ education, and I was surprised to find myself in tears. But when we went to the other holy places in the desert of Mecca where the Prophet lived and preached, I was shocked that they were littered with empty bottles and biscuit wrappers. It seemed that people had neglected to preserve history. I thought they had forgotten the Hadith that cleanliness is half of faith.
My world has changed so much. On the shelves of our rented living room are awards from around the world – America, India, France, Spain, Italy and Austria, and many other places. I’ve even been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest person ever. When I received prizes for my work at school I was happy as I had worked hard for them, but these prizes are different. I am grateful for them, but they only remind me how much work still needs to be done to achieve the goal of education for every boy and girl. I don’t want to be thought of as ‘the girl who was shot by the Taliban’ but ‘the girl who fought for education’. This is the cause to which I want to devote my life.