I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban (33 page)

Watan zama za da watan yam
Ka da watan da para mram khushala yama!

I am a patriot and I love my country
And for that I would gladly sacrifice all

23

‘The Girl Shot in the Head, Birmingham’

I
WOKE UP
on 16 October, a week after the shooting. I was thousands of miles away from home with a tube in my neck to help me breathe and unable to speak. I was on the way back to critical care after another CT scan, and flitted between consciousness and sleep until I woke properly.

The first thing I thought when I came round was,
Thank God I’m not dead
. But I had no idea where I was. I knew I was not in my homeland. The nurses and doctors were speaking English though they seemed to all be from different countries. I was speaking to them but no one could hear me because of the tube in my neck. To start with my left eye was very blurry and everyone had two noses and four eyes. All sorts of questions flew through my waking brain:
Where was I? Who had brought me there? Where were my parents? Was my father alive? I was terrified
.

Dr Javid, who was there when I was brought round, says he will never forget the look of fear and bewilderment on my face. He spoke to me in Urdu. The only thing I knew was that Allah had blessed me with a new life. A nice lady in a headscarf held my hand and said, ‘
Asalaamu alaikum
,’ which is our traditional Muslim greeting. Then she started saying prayers in Urdu and reciting verses of the Quran. She told me her name was Rehanna and she was the Muslim chaplain. Her voice was soft and her words were soothing, and I drifted back to sleep.

I dreamed I wasn’t really in hospital.

When I woke again the next day I noticed I was in a strange green
room with no windows and very bright lights. It was an intensive care cubicle in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Everything was very clean and shiny, not like the hospital in Mingora.

A nurse gave me a pencil and a pad. I couldn’t write properly. The words came out wrong. I wanted to write my father’s phone number. I couldn’t space letters. Dr Javid brought me an alphabet board so I could point to the letters. The first words I spelt out were ‘father’ and ‘country’. The nurse told me I was in Birmingham, but I had no idea where that was. Only later did they bring me an atlas so I could see it was in England. I didn’t know what had happened. The nurses weren’t telling me anything. Even my name. Was I still Malala?

My head was aching so much that even the injections they gave me couldn’t stop the pain. My left ear kept bleeding and my left hand felt funny. Nurses and doctors kept coming in and out. The nurses asked me questions and told me to blink twice for yes. No one told me what was going on or who had brought me to the hospital. I thought they didn’t know themselves. I could feel that the left side of my face wasn’t working properly. If I looked at the nurses or doctors for too long my left eye watered. I didn’t seem to be able to hear from my left ear and my jaw wouldn’t move properly. I gestured to people to stand on my right.

Then a kind lady called Dr Fiona came and gave me a white teddy bear. She said I should call it Junaid and she would explain why later. I didn’t know who Junaid was so I named it Lily. She also brought me a pink exercise book to write in. The first two questions my pen wrote were, ‘Why have I no father?’ and ‘My father has no money. Who will pay for all this?’

‘Your father is safe,’ she replied. ‘He is in Pakistan. Don’t worry about payment.’

I repeated the questions to anyone who came in. They all said the same. But I was not convinced. I had no idea what had happened to me and I didn’t trust anyone. If my father was fine, why wasn’t he here? I thought my parents didn’t know where I was and could
be searching for me in the chowks and bazaars of Mingora. I didn’t believe my parents were safe. Those first days my mind kept drifting in and out of a dream world. I kept having flashbacks to lying on a bed with men around me, so many that you couldn’t count, and asking, ‘Where is my father?’ I thought I had been shot but wasn’t sure – were these dreams or memories?

I was obsessed by how much this must be costing. The money from the awards had almost all gone on the school and buying a plot of land in our village in Shangla. Whenever I saw the doctors talking to one another I thought they were saying, ‘Malala doesn’t have any money. Malala can’t pay for her treatment.’ One of the doctors was a Polish man who always looked sad. I thought he was the owner of the hospital and was unhappy because I couldn’t pay. So I gestured at a nurse for paper and wrote, ‘Why are you sad?’ He replied, ‘No, I am not sad.’ ‘Who will pay?’ I wrote. ‘We don’t have any money.’ ‘Don’t worry, your government will pay,’ he said. Afterwards he always smiled when he saw me.

I always think about solutions to problems so I thought maybe I could go down to the reception of the hospital and ask for a phone to call my mother and father. But my brain was telling me,
You don’t have the money to pay for the call nor do you know the country code
. Then I thought,
I need to go out and start working to earn money so I can buy a phone and call my father so we can all be together again
.

Everything was so mixed up in my mind. I thought the teddy bear Dr Fiona had given me was green and had been swapped with a white one. ‘Where’s the green teddy?’ I kept asking, even though I was told over and over there was no green teddy. The green was probably the glow of the walls in the intensive care unit but I’m still convinced there was a green teddy.

I kept forgetting English words. One note to the nurses was ‘a wire to clean my teeth’. It felt like something was stuck between them and I meant floss. Actually my tongue was numb and my teeth were fine. The only thing that calmed me was when Rehanna
came. She said healing prayers and I started moving my lips to some of them and mouthing ‘Amin’ (our word for ‘amen’) at the end. The television was kept off, except once when they let me watch
Masterchef
which I used to watch in Mingora and loved but everything was blurred. It was only later I learned that people were not allowed to bring in newspapers or tell me anything as the doctors were worried it could traumatise me.

I was terrified that my father could be dead. Then Fiona brought in a Pakistani newspaper from the week before which had a photograph of my father talking to General Kayani with a shawled figure sitting at the back next to my brother. I could just see her feet. ‘That’s my mother!’ I wrote.

Later that day Dr Javid came in with his mobile phone. ‘We’re going to call your parents,’ he said. My eyes shone with excitement. ‘You won’t cry, you won’t weep,’ he instructed me. He was gruff but very kind, like he had known me for ever. ‘I will give you the mobile and be strong.’ I nodded. He dialled the number, spoke and then gave me the phone.

There was my father’s voice. I couldn’t talk because of the tube in my neck. But I was so happy to hear him. I couldn’t smile because of my face, but it was as if there was a smile inside. ‘I’ll come soon,’ he promised. ‘Now have a rest and in two days we will be there.’ Later he told me that Dr Javid had also ordered him not to cry as that would make us all sadder. The doctor wanted us to be strong for each other. The call did not last long because my parents did not want to tire me out. My mother blessed me with prayers.

I still presumed that the reason they weren’t with me was because my father didn’t have the money to pay for my treatment. That’s why he was still in Pakistan, to sell our land in the village and also our school. But our land was small and I knew our school buildings and our house were rented, so what could he sell? Perhaps he was asking rich people for a loan.

*

Even after the call, my parents were not completely reassured. They hadn’t actually heard my voice and were still cut off from the outside world. People who visited them were bringing conflicting reports. One of those visitors was Major General Ghulam Qamar, head of military operations in Swat. ‘There is good news coming from the UK,’ he told my father. ‘We are very happy our daughter has survived.’ He said ‘our’ because now I was seen as the daughter of the nation.

The general told my father that they were carrying out door-to-door searches throughout Swat and monitoring the borders. He said they knew that the people who had targeted me came from a gang of twenty-two Taliban men and that they were the same gang who had attacked Zahid Khan, my father’s friend who had been shot two months earlier.

My father said nothing but he was outraged. The army had been saying for ages that there were no Taliban in Mingora and that they had cleared them all out. Now this general was telling him that there had been twenty-two of them in our town for at least two months. The army had also insisted Zahid Khan was shot in a family feud and not by the Taliban. Now they were saying I had been targeted by the same Taliban as him. My father wanted to say, ‘You knew there were Taliban in the valley for two months. You knew they wanted to kill my daughter and you didn’t stop them?’ But he realised it would get him nowhere.

The general hadn’t finished. He told my father that although it was good news that I had regained consciousness there was a problem with my eyesight. My father was confused. How could the officer have information he didn’t? He was worried that I would be blind. He imagined his beloved daughter, her face shining, walking around in lifelong darkness asking, ‘
Aba
, where am I?’ So awful was this news that he couldn’t tell my mother, even though he is usually hopeless at keeping secrets, particularly from her. Instead he told God, ‘This is unacceptable. I will give her one of my own eyes.’ But then he was worried that at forty-three years old his own eyes might not be very good. He hardly slept that night. The next morning
he asked the major in charge of security if he could borrow his phone to call Colonel Junaid. ‘I have heard that Malala can’t see,’ my father told him in distress.

‘That’s nonsense,’ he replied. ‘If she can read and write, how can she not see? Dr Fiona has kept me updated, and one of the first notes Malala wrote was to ask about you.’

Far away in Birmingham, not only could I see but I was asking for a mirror. ‘Mirror,’ I wrote in the pink diary – I wanted to see my face and hair. The nurses brought me a small white mirror which I still have. When I saw myself, I was distraught. My long hair, which I used to spend ages styling, had gone, and the left side of my head had none at all. ‘Now my hair is small,’ I wrote in the book. I thought the Taliban had cut it off. In fact the Pakistani doctors had shaved my head with no mercy. My face was distorted like someone had pulled it down on one side, and there was a scar to the side of my left eye.

‘Hwo did this to me?’ I wrote, my letters still scrambled. ‘What happened to me?’

I also wrote ‘Stop lights’ as the bright lights were making my head ache.

‘Something bad happened to you,’ said Dr Fiona.

‘Was I shot? Was my father shot?’ I wrote.

She told me that I had been shot on the school bus. She said two of my friends on the bus had also been shot, but I didn’t recognise their names. She explained that the bullet had entered through the side of my left eye where there was a scar, travelled eighteen inches down to my left shoulder and stopped there. It could have taken out my eye or gone into my brain. It was a miracle I was alive.