I am Malala

Shah and Maryam. None of them had ever been on a helicopter. As it took off we flew over an army sports gala with patriotic music pounding from speakers. To hear them singing about their love of country gave my father a bad taste. He normally liked singing along, but a patriotic song hardly seemed appropriate when here was a fifteen-year-old girl shot in the head, an almost dead daughter.
    Down below, my mother was watching from the roof of our house. When she heard that I had been hurt she was having her reading lesson with Miss Ulfat and struggling to learn words like ‘book’ and ‘apple’. The news at first was muddled and she initially believed I’d been in an accident and had injured my foot. She rushed home and told my grandmother, who was staying with us at the time. She begged my grandmother to start praying immediately. We believe Allah listens more closely to the white-haired. My mother then noticed my half-eaten egg from breakfast. There were pictures of me everywhere receiving the awards she had disapproved of. She sobbed as she looked at them. All around was Malala, Malala.
    Soon the house was full of women. In our culture, if someone dies women come to the home of the deceased and the men to the hujra – not just family and close friends but everyone from the neighbourhood.
    My mother was astonished to see all the people. She sat on a prayer mat and recited from the Quran. She told the women, ‘Don’t cry – pray!’ Then my brothers rushed into the room. Atal, who had walked home from school, had turned on the television and seen the news that I had been shot. He had called Khushal, and together they joined the weeping. The phone did not stop ringing. People reassured my mother that although I had been shot in the head, the bullet had just skimmed my forehead. My mother was very confused by all the different stories, first that my foot had been injured, then that I had been shot in the head. She thought I would think it strange that she hadn’t come to me, but people told her not to go as I was either dead or about to be moved. One of my father’s friends phoned her to tell her I was being taken to Peshawar by helicopter and she should come by road. The worst moment for her was when someone came to the house with my front door keys, which had been found at the scene of the shooting. ‘I don’t want keys, I want my daughter!’ my mother cried. ‘What use are keys without Malala?’ Then they heard the sound of the helicopter.
    The helipad was just a mile from our house and all the women rushed up to the roof. ‘It must be Malala!’ they said. As they watched the helicopter fly overhead, my mother took her scarf off her head, an extremely rare gesture for a Pashtun woman, and lifted it up to the sky, holding it in both hands as if it was an offering. ‘God, I entrust her to You,’ she said to the heavens. ‘We didn’t accept security guards – You are our protector. She was under Your care and You are bound to give her back.’
    Inside the helicopter I was vomiting blood. My father was horrified, thinking this meant I had internal bleeding. He was starting to lose hope. But then Maryam noticed me trying to wipe my mouth with my scarf. ‘Look, she is responding!’ she said. ‘That’s an excellent sign.’
    When we landed in Peshawar, they assumed we’d be taken to Lady Reading Hospital, where there was a very good neurosurgeon called Dr Mumtaz who had been recommended. Instead they were alarmed to be taken to CMH, the Combined Military Hospital. CMH is a large sprawling brick hospital with 600 beds and dates from British rule. There was a lot of construction going on to build a new tower block. Peshawar is the gateway to the FATA and since the army went into those areas in 2004 to take on the militants, the hospital had been very busy tending wounded soldiers and victims of the frequent suicide bombs in and around the city. As in much of our country, there were concrete blocks and checkpoints all around CMH to protect it from suicide bombers.
    I was rushed to the Intensive Care Unit, which is in a separate building. Above the nurses’ station the clock showed it was just after 5 p.m. I was wheeled into a glass-walled isolation unit and a nurse put me on a drip. In the next room was a soldier who had been horrifically burned in an IED attack and had a leg blown off. A young man came in and introduced himself as Colonel Junaid, a neurosurgeon. My father became even more