I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban (9 page)

As we got older the village began to seem boring. The only television was in the
hujra
of one of the wealthier families, and no one had a computer.

Women in the village hid their faces whenever they left their purdah quarters and could not meet or speak to men who were not their close relatives. I wore more fashionable clothes and didn’t cover my face even when I became a teenager. One of my male cousins was angry and asked my father, ‘Why isn’t she covered?’ He replied, ‘She’s my daughter. Look after your own affairs.’ But some of the family thought people would gossip about us and say we were not properly following
Pashtunwali
.

I am very proud to be a Pashtun but sometimes I think our code of conduct has a lot to answer for, particularly where the treatment of women is concerned. A woman named Shahida who worked for us and had three small daughters, told me that when she was only ten years old her father had sold her to an old man who already had a wife but wanted a younger one. When girls disappeared it was not always because they had been married off. There was a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl called Seema. Everyone knew she was in love with a boy, and sometimes he would pass by and she would look at him from under her long dark lashes, which all the girls envied. In our society for a girl to flirt with any man brings shame on the family, though it’s all right for the man. We were told she had committed suicide, but we later discovered her own family had poisoned her.

We have a custom called
swara
by which a girl can be given to another tribe to resolve a feud. It is officially banned but still continues. In our village there was a widow called Soraya who married a widower from another clan which had a feud with her family.
Nobody can marry a widow without the permission of her family. When Soraya’s family found out about the union they were furious. They threatened the widower’s family until a
jirga
was called of village elders to resolve the dispute. The
jirga
decided that the widower’s family should be punished by handing over their most beautiful girl to be married to the least eligible man of the rival clan. The boy was a good-for-nothing, so poor that the girl’s father had to pay all their expenses. Why should a girl’s life be ruined to settle a dispute she had nothing to do with?

When I complained about these things to my father he told me that life was harder for women in Afghanistan. The year before I was born a group called the Taliban led by a one-eyed mullah had taken over the country and was burning girls’ schools. They were forcing men to grow beards as long as a lantern and women to wear burqas. Wearing a burqa is like walking inside big fabric shuttlecock with only a grille to see through and on hot days it’s like an oven. At least I didn’t have to wear one. He said that the Taliban had even banned women from laughing out loud or wearing white shoes as white was ‘a colour that belonged to men’. Women were being locked up and beaten just for wearing nail varnish. I shivered when he told me such things.

I read my books like
Anna Karenina
and the novels of Jane Austen and trusted in my father’s words: ‘Malala is free as a bird.’ When I heard stories of the atrocities in Afghanistan I felt proud to be in Swat. ‘Here a girl can go to school,’ I used to say. But the Taliban were just around the corner and were Pashtuns like us. For me the valley was a sunny place and I couldn’t see the clouds gathering behind the mountains. My father used to say, ‘I will protect your freedom, Malala. Carry on with your dreams.’

5

Why I Don’t Wear Earrings and Pashtuns Don’t Say Thank You

B
Y THE AGE
of seven I was used to being top of my class. I was the one who would help other pupils who had difficulties. ‘Malala is a genius girl,’ my class fellows would say. I was also known for participating in everything – badminton, drama, cricket, art, even singing, though I wasn’t much good. So when a new girl named Malka-e-Noor joined our class, I didn’t think anything of it. Her name means ‘Queen of Light’ and she said she wanted to be Pakistan’s first female army chief. Her mother was a teacher at a different school, which was unusual as none of our mothers worked. To begin with she didn’t say much in class. The competition was always between me and my best friend Moniba, who had beautiful writing and presentation, which the examiners liked, but I knew I could beat her on content. So when we did the end-of-year exams and Malka-e-Noor came first, I was shocked. At home I cried and cried and had to be comforted by my mother.

Around that time we moved away from where we had been living on the same street as Moniba to an area where I didn’t have any friends. On our new road there was a girl called Safina, who was a bit younger than me, and we started to play together. She was a pampered girl who had lots of dolls and a shoebox full of jewellery. But she kept eyeing up the pink plastic pretend mobile phone my father had bought me, which was one of the only toys I had. My father was always talking on his mobile so I loved to copy him and pretend to make calls on mine. One day it disappeared.

A few days later I saw Safina playing with a phone exactly the same as mine. ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked. ‘I bought it in the bazaar,’ she said.

I realise now she could have been telling the truth but back then I thought,
She is doing this to me and I will do the same to her
. I used to go to her house to study, so whenever I was there I would pocket her things, mostly toy jewellery like earrings and necklaces. It was easy. At first stealing gave me a thrill, but that did not last long. Soon it became a compulsion. I did not know how to stop.

One afternoon I came home from school and rushed into the kitchen as usual for a snack. ‘Hello,
Bhabi
!’ I called. ‘I’m starving!’ There was silence. My mother was sitting on the floor pounding spices, brightly coloured turmeric and cumin, filling the air with their aroma. Over and over she pounded. Her eyes would not meet mine. What had I done? I was very sad and went to my room. When I opened my cupboard, I saw that all the things I had taken were gone. I had been caught.

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.