I am Malala

neighbour Safina and he fell in love with her instead. When she said she wasn’t interested he turned his attention back to me. After that they moved to another street and we moved into their house. Then Haroon went away to army cadet college.
    But he came back for the holidays, and one day when I returned home from school he was hanging around on the street. He followed me to the house and put a note inside our gate where I would see it. I told a small girl to fetch it for me. He had written, ‘Now you have become very popular, I still love you and know you love me. This is my number, call me.’
    I gave the note to my father and he was angry. He called Haroon and told him he would tell his father. That was the last time I saw him. After that the boys stopped coming to our street, but one of the small boys who played with Atal would call out suggestively, ‘How is Haroon?’ whenever I passed by. I got so fed up with it that one day I told Atal to bring the boy inside. I shouted at him so angrily that he stopped.
    I told Moniba what had happened once we were friends again. She was always very careful about interactions with boys because her brothers watched everything. ‘Sometimes I think it’s easier to be a Twilight vampire than a girl in Swat,’ I sighed. But really I wished that being hassled by a boy was my biggest problem.

20

    Who is Malala?
    O NE MORNING IN late summer when my father was getting ready to go to school he noticed that the painting of me looking at the sky which we had been given by the school in Karachi had shifted in the night. He loved that painting and had hung it over his bed. Seeing it crooked disturbed him. ‘Please put it straight,’ he asked my mother in an unusually sharp tone.
    That same week our maths teacher Miss Shazia arrived at school in a hysterical state. She told my father that she’d had a nightmare in which I came to school with my leg badly burned and she had tried to protect it. She begged him to give some cooked rice to the poor, as we believe that if you give rice, even ants and birds will eat the bits that drop to the floor and will pray for us. My father gave money instead and she was distraught, saying that wasn’t the same.
    We laughed at Miss Shazia’s premonition, but then I started having bad dreams too. I didn’t say anything to my parents but whenever I went out I was afraid that Taliban with guns would leap out at me or throw acid in my face, as they had done to women in Afghanistan. I was particularly scared of the steps leading up to our street where the boys used to hang out. Sometimes I thought I heard footsteps behind me or imagined figures slipping into the shadows.
    Unlike my father, I took precautions. At night I would wait until everyone was asleep – my mother, my father, my brothers, the other family in our house and any guests we had from our village – then I’d check every single door and window. I’d go outside and make sure the front gate was locked. Then I would check all the rooms, one by one. My room was at the front with lots of windows and I kept the curtains open. I wanted to be able to see everything, though my father told me not to. ‘If they were going to kill me they would have done it in 2009,’ I said. But I worried someone would put a ladder against the house, climb over the wall and break in through a window.
    Then I’d pray. At night I used to pray a lot. The Taliban think we are not Muslims but we are. We believe in God more than they do and we trust him to protect us. I used to say the Ayat al-Kursi , the Verse of the Throne from the second surah of the Quran, the Chapter of the Cow. This is a very special verse and we believe that if you say it three times at night your home will be safe from shayatin or devils. When you say it five times your street will be safe, and seven times will protect the whole area. So I’d say it seven times or even more. Then I’d pray to God, ‘Bless us. First our father and family, then our street, then our whole mohalla , then all Swat.’ Then I’d say, ‘No, all Muslims.’ Then, ‘No, not just Muslims; bless all human beings.’
    The time of year I prayed most was during exams. It was the one time when my friends and I did all five prayers a day like my mother was always trying to get me to do. I found it particularly hard in the afternoon, when I didn’t want to be dragged away from the TV. At exam time I prayed to Allah for high marks though our teachers used to