I am Malala

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.