I Am Malala

PART FIVE

A Second Life

Watan zama za da watan yam
Ka da watan da para mram khushala yama!

I am a patriot and I love my country
And for that I would gladly sacrifice all

23 ‘The Girl Shot in the Head, Birmingham’

I WOKE UP on 16 October, a week after the shooting. I was thousands of miles away from home with a tube in my neck to help me breathe and unable to speak. I was on the way back to critical care after another CT scan, and flitted between consciousness and sleep until I woke properly.

The first thing I thought when I came round was, Thank God I’m not dead. But I had no idea where I was. I knew I was not in my homeland. The nurses and doctors were speaking English though they seemed to all be from different countries. I was speaking to them but no one could hear me because of the tube in my neck. To start with my left eye was very blurry and everyone had two noses and four eyes. All sorts of questions flew through my waking brain: Where was I? Who had brought me there? Where were my parents? Was my father alive? I was terrified.

Dr Javid, who was there when I was brought round, says he will never forget the look of fear and bewilderment on my face. He spoke to me in Urdu. The only thing I knew was that Allah had blessed me with a new life. A nice lady in a headscarf held my hand and said, ‘Asalaamu alaikum,’ which is our traditional Muslim greeting. Then she started saying prayers in Urdu and reciting verses of the Quran. She told me her name was Rehanna and she was the Muslim chaplain. Her voice was soft and her words were soothing, and I drifted back to sleep.

I dreamed I wasn’t really in hospital.

When I woke again the next day I noticed I was in a strange green room with no windows and very bright lights. It was an intensive care cubicle in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Everything was very clean and shiny, not like the hospital in Mingora.

A nurse gave me a pencil and a pad. I couldn’t write properly. The words came out wrong. I wanted to write my father’s phone number. I couldn’t space letters. Dr Javid brought me an alphabet board so I could point to the letters. The first words I spelt out were ‘father’ and ‘country’. The nurse told me I was in Birmingham, but I had no idea where that was. Only later did they bring me an atlas so I could see it was in England. I didn’t know what had happened. The nurses weren’t telling me anything. Even my name. Was I still Malala?

My head was aching so much that even the injections they gave me couldn’t stop the pain. My left ear kept bleeding and my left hand felt funny. Nurses and doctors kept coming in and out. The nurses asked me questions and told me to blink twice for yes. No one told me what was going on or who had brought me to the hospital. I thought they didn’t know themselves. I could feel that the left side of my face wasn’t working properly. If I looked at the nurses or doctors for too long my left eye watered. I didn’t seem to be able to hear from my left ear and my jaw wouldn’t move properly. I gestured to people to stand on my right.

Then a kind lady called Dr Fiona came and gave me a white teddy bear. She said I should call it Junaid and she would explain why later. I didn’t know who Junaid was so I named it Lily. She also brought me a pink exercise book to write in. The first two questions my pen wrote were, ‘Why have I no father?’ and ‘My father has no money. Who will pay for all this?’

‘Your father is safe,’ she replied. ‘He is in Pakistan. Don’t worry about payment.’

I repeated the questions to anyone who came in. They all said the same. But I was not convinced. I had no idea what had happened to me and I didn’t trust anyone. If my father was fine, why wasn’t he here? I thought my parents didn’t know where I was and could be searching for me in the chowks and bazaars of Mingora. I didn’t believe my parents were safe. Those first days my mind kept drifting in and out of a dream world. I kept having flashbacks to lying on a bed with men around me, so many that you couldn’t count, and asking, ‘Where is my father?’ I thought I had been shot but wasn’t sure – were these dreams or memories?

I was obsessed by how much this must be costing. The money from the awards had almost all gone on the school and buying a plot of land in our village in Shangla. Whenever I saw the doctors talking to one another I thought they were saying, ‘Malala doesn’t have any money. Malala can’t pay for her treatment.’ One of the doctors was a Polish man who always looked sad. I thought he was the owner of the hospital and was unhappy because I couldn’t pay. So I gestured at a nurse for paper and wrote, ‘Why are you sad?’ He replied, ‘No, I am not sad.’ ‘Who will pay?’ I wrote. ‘We don’t have any money.’ ‘Don’t worry, your government will pay,’ he said. Afterwards he always smiled when he saw me.

I always think about solutions to problems so I thought maybe I could go down to the reception of the hospital and ask for a phone to call my mother and father. But my brain was telling me, 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