A Private Talibanisation
‘LET’S PRETEND IT’S a Twilight movie and that we’re vampires in the forest,’ I said to Moniba. We were on a school trip to Marghazar, a beautiful green valley where the air is cool, and there is a tall mountain and a crystal-clear river where we were planning to have a picnic. Nearby was the White Palace Hotel, which used to be the wali’s summer residence.
It was April 2012, the month after our exams so we were all feeling relaxed. We were a group of about seventy girls. Our teachers and my parents were there too. My father had hired three Flying Coaches but we could not all fit in, so five of us – me, Moniba and three other girls – were in the
‘The same one you’re using,’ she replied.
I knew that could not be true. ‘No. Look at my dark skin and look at yours!’
We visited the White Palace and saw where the Queen had slept and the gardens of beautiful flowers. Sadly we could not see the wali’s room as it had been damaged by the floods.
We ran around for a while in the green forest, then took some photographs and waded into the river and splashed each other with water. The drops sparkled in the sun. There was a waterfall down the cliff and for a while we sat on the rocks and listened to it. Then Moniba started splashing me again.
‘Don’t! I don’t want to get my clothes wet!’ I pleaded. I walked off with two other girls she didn’t like. The other girls stirred things up, what we call ‘putting masala on the situation’. It was a recipe for another argument between Moniba and me. That put me in a bad mood, but I cheered up when we got to the top of the cliff, where lunch was being prepared. Usman Bhai Jan, our driver, made us laugh as usual. Madam Maryam had brought her baby boy and Hannah, her two-year-old, who looked like a little doll but was full of mischief.
Lunch was a disaster. When the school assistants put the pans on the fire to heat up the chicken curry, they panicked that there was not enough food for so many girls and added water from the stream. We said it was ‘the worst lunch ever’. It was so watery that one girl said, ‘The sky could be seen in the soupy curry.’
Like on all our trips my father got us all to stand on a rock and talk about our impressions of the day before we left. This time all anyone talked about was how bad the food was. My father was embarrassed and for once, short of words.
The next morning a school worker came with milk, bread and eggs to our house for our breakfast. My father always answered the door as women must stay inside. The man told him the shopkeeper had given him a photocopied letter.
When my father read it, he went pale. ‘By God, this is terrible propaganda against our school!’ he told my mother. He read it out.
Dear Muslim brothers
There is a school, the Khushal School, which is run by an NGO [NGOs have a very bad reputation among religious people in our country so this was a way to invite people’s wrath] and is a centre of vulgarity and obscenity. It is a Hadith of the Holy Prophet that if you see something bad or evil you should stop it with your own hand. If you are unable to do that then you should tell others about it, and if you can’t do that you should think about how bad it is in your heart. I have no personal quarrel with the principal but I am telling you what Islam says. This school is a centre of vulgarity and obscenity and they take girls for picnics to different resorts. If you don’t stop it you will have to answer to God on Doomsday. Go and ask the manager of the White Palace Hotel and he will tell you what these girls did…
He put down the piece of paper. ‘It has no signature. Anonymous.’
We sat stunned.
‘They know no one will ask the manager,’ said my father. ‘People will just imagine something terrible went on.’
‘We know what happened there. The girls did nothing bad,’ my mother reassured him.
My father called my cousin Khanjee to find out how widely the letters had been distributed. He called back with bad news – they had been left everywhere, though most shopkeepers had ignored them and thrown them away. There were also giant posters pasted on the front of the mosque with the same accusations.
At school my classmates were terrified. ‘Sir, they are saying very bad things about our school,’ they said to my father. ‘What will our parents say?’
My father gathered all the girls into the courtyard. ‘Why are you afraid?’ he asked. ‘Did you do anything against Islam? Did you do anything immoral? No. You just splashed water and took pictures, so don’t be scared. This is the propaganda of the followers of Mullah Fazlullah. Down with them! You have the right to enjoy greenery and waterfalls and landscape just as boys do.’
My father spoke like a lion, but I could see in his heart he was worried and scared. Only one person came and withdrew his sister from the school, but we knew that was not the end of it. Shortly after that we were told a man who had completed a peace walk from Dera Ismail Khan was coming through Mingora and we wanted to welcome him. I was on the way to meet him with my parents when we were approached by a short man who was frantically talking on two different phones. ‘Don’t go that way,’ he urged. ‘There is a suicide bomber over there!’ We’d promised to meet the peace walker, so we went by a different route, placed a garland round his neck, then left quickly for home.
All through that spring and summer odd things kept happening. Strangers came to the house asking questions about my family. My father said they were from the intelligence services. The visits became more frequent after my father and the Swat Qaumi Jirga held a meeting in our school to protest against army plans for the people of Mingora and our community defence committees to conduct night patrols.’The army say there is peace,’ said my father. ‘So why do we need flag marches and night patrols?’
Then our school hosted a painting competition for the children of Mingora sponsored by my father’s friend who ran an NGO for women’s rights. The pictures were supposed to show the equality of the sexes or highlight discrimination against women. That morning two men from the intelligence services came to our school to see my father. ‘What is going on in your school?’ they demanded.
‘This is a school,’ he replied. ‘There’s a painting competition just as we have debating competitions, cookery competitions and essay contests.’ The men got very angry and so did my father. ‘Everyone knows me and what I do!’ he said. ‘Why don’t you do your real work and find Fazlullah and those whose hands are red with the blood of Swat?’
That Ramadan a friend of my father’s in Karachi called Wakeel Khan sent clothes for the poor, which he wanted us to distribute. We went to a big hall to hand them out. Before we had even started, intelligence agents came and asked, ‘What are you doing? Who brought these outfits?’
On 12 July I turned fourteen, which in Islam means you are an adult. With my birthday came the news that the Taliban had killed the owner of the Swat Continental Hotel, who was on a peace committee. He was on his way from home to his hotel in Mingora Bazaar when they ambushed him in a field.
Once again people started worrying that the Taliban were creeping back. But whereas in 2008–9 there were many threats to all sorts of people, this time the threats were specific to those who spoke against militants or the high-handed behaviour of the army.
‘The Taliban is not an organised force like we imagine,’ said my father’s friend Hidayatullah when they discussed it. ‘It’s a mentality, and this mentality is everywhere in Pakistan. Someone who is against America, against the Pakistan establishment, against English law, he has been infected by the Taliban.’
It was late in the evening of 3 August when my father received an alarming phone call from a Geo TV correspondent called Mehboob. He was the nephew of my father’s friend Zahid Khan, the hotel owner who had been attacked in 2009. People used to say both Zahid Khan and my father were on the Taliban radar and both would be killed; the only thing they didn’t know was which would be killed first. Mehboob told us that his uncle had been on his way to
