I Am Malala

shouting goodbye, I had been in four hospitals and travelled thousands of miles. It felt like sixteen years. Then the door opened and there were the familiar voices saying ‘Jani’ and ‘Pisho’, and they were there, kissing my hands as they were frightened to touch me.

I couldn’t control myself and wept as loudly as I could. All that time alone in hospital I hadn’t cried even when I had all those injections in my neck or the staples removed from my head. But now I could not stop. My father and mother were also weeping. It was as if all the weight had been lifted from my heart. I felt that everything would be fine now. I was even happy to see my brother Khushal, as I needed someone to fight with. ‘We missed you Malala’, said my brothers, though they were soon more interested in all the teddies and gifts. And Khushal and I were soon fighting again when he took my laptop to play games on.

I was shocked by my parents’ appearance. They were tired from the long flight from Pakistan but that wasn’t all – they looked older and I could see they both had grey hairs. They tried to hide it, but I could see they were also disturbed by how I looked. Before they came in, Dr Javid had warned them, ‘The girl you will see is only ten per cent recovered; there is still ninety per cent to go.’ But they had no idea that half my face was not working and that I couldn’t smile. My left eye bulged, half my hair was gone and my mouth tilted to one side as if it had been pulled down so when I tried to smile it looked more like a grimace. It was as if my brain had forgotten it had a left face. I also couldn’t hear from one side, and I spoke in baby language as if I was a small child.

My parents were put in a hostel in the university among all the students. The people in charge of the hospital thought it might be difficult for them to stay at the hospital because they would be besieged by journalists, and they wanted to protect us at this critical stage in my recovery. My parents had very little with them except the clothes they were wearing and what Shiza’s mother Sonia had given them because when they left Swat on 9 October they had no idea they wouldn’t be going back. When they returned to the hostel room, they cried like children. I had always been such a happy child. My father would boast to people about ‘my heavenly smile and heavenly laughter’. Now he lamented to my mother, ‘That beautiful symmetrical face, that bright shining face has gone; she has lost her smile and laughter. The Taliban are very cruel – they have snatched her smile,’ he added. ‘You can give someone eyes or lungs but you cannot restore their smile.’

The problem was a facial nerve. The doctors were not sure at that point if it was damaged and might repair itself, or if it was cut. I reassured my mother that it didn’t matter to me if my face was not symmetrical. Me, who had always cared about my appearance, how my hair looked! But when you see death, things change. ‘It doesn’t matter if I can’t smile or blink properly,’ I told her, ‘I’m still me, Malala. The important thing is God has given me my life.’ Yet every time they came to the hospital and I laughed or tried to smile, my mother’s face would darken as if a shadow had crossed it. It was like a reverse mirror – when there was laughter on my face there was distress on my mother’s.

My father would look towards my mother, who had this big question in her eyes: Why was Malala like this? The girl she had brought into the world and for fifteen years had been smiling. One day my father asked her, ‘Pekai, tell me truthfully. What do you think – is it my fault?’

‘No, Khaista,’ she replied. ‘You didn’t send Malala out thieving or killing or to commit crimes. It was a noble cause.’

Even so, my father worried that in future every time I smiled it would be a reminder of the shooting. That was not the only way they found me changed. Back in Swat I used to be a very fragile and sensitive child who would cry at the slightest thing, but in hospital in Birmingham even when I was in terrible pain I did not complain.

The hospital refused to allow other visitors even though they were inundated by requests, as they wanted me to be able to concentrate on my rehabilitation in private. Four days after my parents arrived a group of politicians came to the hospital from the three countries that had helped me – Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior minister, William Hague, the British foreign minister and Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, foreign minister of the UAE. They were not allowed to see me but were briefed by doctors and met my father. He was upset by the ministers’ visit because Rehman Malik said to him, ‘Tell Malala she should give a smile to the nation.’ He did not know that that was the one thing I could not do.

Rehman Malik had revealed that my attacker was a talib called Ataullah Khan who he said had been arrested in 2009 during the military operation in Swat but freed after three months. There were media reports that he had done a physics degree at Jehanzeb College. Malik claimed the plan to shoot me was hatched in Afghanistan. He said he had put a $1 million bounty on the head of Ataullah and promised they would find him.We doubted that, as no one has ever been caught – not the killer of Benazir Bhutto, not whoever was behind the plane crash that killed General Zia, not the assassin of our first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan.

Only two people had been arrested after my shooting – our poor dear driver Usman Bhai Jan and the school accountant, who had taken the call from Usman Bhai Jan to say what had happened. He was released after a few days but Usman Bhai Jan was still in army custody as they said they would need him to identify people. We were very upset about that. Why had they arrested Usman Bhai Jan and not Ataullah?

The United Nations announced they were designating 10 November, one month and a day after the shooting, Malala Day. I didn’t pay much attention as I was preparing for a big operation the following day to repair my facial nerve. The doctors had done tests with electrical impulses and it had not responded, so they concluded it was cut and they needed to operate soon or my face would remain paralysed. The hospital had been giving regular updates to journalists about how I was doing but did not tell them about this to keep it private.

I was taken into theatre on 11 November for a surgeon called Richard Irving to carry out the operation. He had explained to me that this nerve controlled the side of my face, and its job was to open and close my left eye, move my nose, raise my left eyebrow and make me smile. Repairing the nerve was such delicate work that it took eight and a half hours. The surgeon first cleared my ear canal of scar tissue and bone fragments and discovered that my left eardrum was damaged. Then he followed the facial nerve from the temporal bone where it enters the skull all the way to its exit, and on the way removed many more fragments of bone which had been restricting my jaw movement. He found two centimetres of my nerve completely missing where it leaves the skull and rerouted it in front of my ear from its normal passage behind the ear, to make up for the gap.

The operation went well, though it was a three-month wait before the left side of my face started working bit by bit. I had to do facial exercises every day in front of my small mirror. Mr Irving told me that after six months the nerve would start working though I would never be completely the same. To my delight I could soon smile and wink my eye, and week by week my parents saw more movement coming into my face. Though it was my face, I could see it was my parents who were happiest to have it back. Afterwards Mr Irving said it was the best outcome he had seen in twenty years of facial nerve surgery, and it was 86 per cent recovered.

The other good result was that finally my headaches lifted and I started reading again. I began with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, one of a pile of books sent to me by Gordon Brown. I loved reading about Dorothy and how even though she was trying to get back home she stopped and helped those in need like the cowardly lion and the rusty tin man. She had to overcome a lot of obstacles to get where she was going, and I thought if you want to achieve a goal, there will be hurdles in your way but you must continue. I was so excited by the book that I read it quickly and afterwards told my father all about it. He was very happy because he thought if I could memorise and narrate such detail then my memory must be fine.

I knew my parents were worried about my memory as I told them I didn’t remember anything about the shooting and kept forgetting the names of my friends. They weren’t very subtle. One day my father asked, ‘Malala, can you sing us some Pashto tapey?’I sang a verse we liked: ‘When you start your journey from the end of a snake’s tail,/ You will end up on its head in an ocean of poison.’ To us that referred to how the authorities in Pakistan had initially used the militants and now were in a mess of their own making. Then I said, ‘Actually there’s a tapa I want to rewrite.’

My father looked intrigued. Tapey are the centuries-old collected wisdom of our society; you don’t change them. ‘Which one?’ he asked.

‘This one,’ I said.

If the men cannot win the battle, O my country,
Then the women will come forth and win you an honour.