I Am Malala

The Village

IN OUR TRADITION on the seventh day of a child’s life we have a celebration called Woma (which means ‘seventh’) for family, friends and neighbours to come and admire the newborn. My parents had not held one for me because they could not afford the goat and rice needed to feed the guests, and my grandfather would not help them out because I was not a boy. When my brothers came along and Baba wanted to pay, my father refused as he hadn’t done this for me. But Baba was the only grandfather I had as my mother’s father had died before I was born and we became close. My parents say I have qualities of both grandfathers – humorous and wise like my mother’s father and vocal like my father’s father! Baba had grown soft and white-bearded in his old age and I loved going to visit him in the village.

Whenever he saw me he would greet me with a song as he was still concerned about the sad meaning of my name and wanted to lend some happiness to it: ‘Malala Maiwand wala da. Pa tool jehan ke da khushala da,’ he sang. ‘Malala is of Maiwand and she’s the happiest person in the whole world.’

We always went to the village for the Eid holidays. We would dress in our finest clothes and pile into the Flying Coach, a minibus with brightly painted panels and jangling chains, and drive north to Barkana, our family village in Shangla. Eid happens twice a year – Eid ul-Fitr or ‘Small Eid’ marks the end of the Ramadan fasting month, and Eid ul-Azha or ‘Big Eid’ commemorates the Prophet Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son Ismail to God. The dates of the feasts are announced by a special panel of clerics who watch for the appearance of the crescent moon. As soon as we heard the broadcast on the radio, we set off.

The night before we hardly slept because we were so excited. The journey usually took about five hours as long as the road had not been washed away by rains or landslides, and the Flying Coach left early in the morning. We struggled to Mingora bus station, our bags laden with gifts for our family – embroidered shawls and boxes of rose and pistachio sweets as well as medicine they could not get in the village. Some people took sacks of sugar and flour, and most of the baggage was tied to the top of the bus in a towering pile. Then we crammed in, fighting over the window seats even though the panes were so encrusted with dirt it was hard to see out of them. The sides of Swat buses are painted with scenes of bright pink and yellow flowers, neon-orange tigers and snowy mountains. My brothers liked it if we got one with F-16 fighter jets or nuclear missiles, though my father said if our politicians hadn’t spent so much money on building an atomic bomb we might have had enough for schools.

We drove out of the bazaar, past the grinning red mouth signs for dentists, the carts stacked with wooden cages crammed with beady-eyed white chickens with scarlet beaks, and jewellery stores with windows full of gold wedding bangles. The last few shops as we headed north out of Mingora were wooden shacks that seemed to lean on each other, in front of which were piles of reconditioned tyres for the bad roads ahead. Then we were on the main road built by the last wali, which follows the wide Swat River on the left and hugs the cliffs to the right with their emerald mines. Overlooking the river were tourist restaurants with big glass windows we had never been to. On the road we passed dusty-faced children bent double with huge bundles of grass on their backs and men leading flocks of shaggy goats that wandered hither and thither.

As we drove on, the landscape changed to paddy fields of deep lush green that smelt so fresh and orchards of apricot and fig trees. Occasionally we passed small marble works over streams which ran milky white with the discharge of chemicals. This made my father cross. ‘Look at what these criminals are doing to pollute our beautiful valley,’ he always said. The road left the river and wound up through narrow passes over steep fir-clad heights, higher and higher, until our ears popped. On top of some of the peaks were ruins where vultures circled, the remains of forts built by the first wali. The bus strained and laboured, the driver cursing as trucks overtook us on blind bends with steep drops below. My brothers loved this, and they would taunt me and my mother by pointing out the wreckage of vehicles on the mountainside.

Finally we made it up onto Sky Turn, the gateway to Shangla Top, a mountain pass which feels as if it’s on top of the world. Up there we were higher than the rocky peaks all around us. In the far distance we could see the snows of Malam Jabba, our ski resort. By the roadside were fresh springs and waterfalls, and when we stopped for a break and to drink some tea, the air was clean and fragrant with cedar and pine. We breathed it into our lungs greedily. Shangla is all mountain, mountain, mountain and just a small sky. After this the road winds back down for a while then follows the Ghwurban River and peters out into a rocky track. The only way to cross the river is by rope bridges or on a pulley system by which people swing themselves across in a metal box. Foreigners call them suicide bridges but we loved them.

If you look at a map of Swat you’ll see it is one long valley with little valleys we call darae off to the sides like the branches of a tree. Our village lies about halfway along on the east. It’s in the Kana dara, which is enclosed by craggy mountain walls and so narrow there is not even room for a cricket ground. We call our village Shahpur, but really there is a necklace of three villages along the bottom of the valley – Shahpur, the biggest; Barkana, where my father grew up; and Karshat, which is where my mother lived. At either end is a huge mountain – Tor Ghar, the Black Mountain to the south, and Spin Ghar, the White Mountain, to the north.

We usually stayed in Barkana at my grandfather’s house, where my father grew up. Like almost all the houses in the area, it was flat-roofed and made of stone and mud. I preferred staying in Karshat with my cousins on my maternal side because they had a concrete house with a bathroom and there were lots of children to play with. My mother and I stayed in the women’s quarters downstairs. The women spent their days looking after the children and preparing food to serve to the men in their hujra upstairs. I slept with my cousins Aneesa and Sumbul in a room which had a clock in the shape of a mosque and a cabinet on the wall containing a rifle and some packets of hair dye.

In the village the day started early and even I, who liked to sleep late, woke with the sound of cocks crowing and the clatter of dishes as the women prepared breakfast for the men. In the morning the sun reflected off the top of Tor Ghar; when we got up for the fajr prayers, the first of our five daily prayers, we would look left and see the golden peak of Spin Ghar lit with the first rays of the sun like a white lady wearing a jumar tika – a gold chain on her forehead.

Often rain would then come to wash everything clean, and the clouds would linger on the green terraces of the hills where people grew radishes and walnut trees. Dotted around were hives of bees. I loved the gloopy honey, which we ate with walnuts. Down on the river at the Karshat end were water buffaloes. There was also a shed with a wooden waterwheel providing power to turn huge millstones to grind wheat and maize into flour, which young boys would then pour into sacks. Next to that was a smaller shed containing a panel with a confusion of wires sprouting from it. The village received no electricity from the government so many villagers got their power from these makeshift hydroelectric projects.

As the day went on and the sun climbed higher in the sky, more and more of the White Mountain would be bathed in golden sun. Then as evening came it fell in shadow as the sun moved up the Black Mountain. We timed our prayers by the shadow on the mountains. When the sun hit a certain rock, we used to say our asr or afternoon prayers. Then in the evening, when the white peak of Spin Ghar was even more beautiful than in the morning, we said the makkam or evening prayers. You could see the White Mountain from everywhere, and my father told me he used to think of it as a symbol of peace for our land, a white flag at the end of our valley. When he was a child he thought this small valley was the entire world and that if anyone went beyond the point where either mountain kissed the sky, they would fall off.

Though I had been born in a city, I shared my father’s love of nature. I loved the rich soil, the greenness of the plants, the crops, the buffaloes and the yellow butterflies that fluttered about me as I walked. The village was very poor, but when we arrived our extended family would lay on a big feast. There would be bowls of chicken, rice, local spinach and spicy mutton, all cooked over the fire by the women, followed by plates of crunchy apples, slices of yellow cake and a big kettle of milky tea. None of the children had toys or books. The boys played cricket in a gully and even the ball was made from plastic bags tied together with elastic bands.

The village was a forgotten place. Water was carried from the spring. The few concrete houses had been built by families whose sons or fathers had gone south to work in the mines or to the Gulf, from where they sent money home. There are forty million of us Pashtuns, of which ten million live outside our homeland. My father said it was sad that they could never return as they needed to keep working to maintain their families’ new lifestyle.