Текст книги "I Am Malala : The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban"

Автор книги: Malala Yousafzai

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

18

The Woman and the Sea

AUNT NAJMA WAS in tears. She had never seen the sea before. My family and I sat on the rocks, gazing across the water, breathing in the salt tang of the Arabian Sea. It was such a big expanse, surely no one could know where it ended. At that moment I was very happy. ‘One day I want to cross this sea,’ I said.

‘What is she saying?’ asked my aunt as if I were talking about something impossible. I was still trying to get my head round the fact that she had been living in the seaside city of Karachi for thirty years and yet had never actually laid eyes on the ocean. Her husband would not take her to the beach, and even if she had somehow slipped out of the house, she would not have been able to follow the signs to the sea because she could not read.

I sat on the rocks and thought about the fact that across the water were lands where women were free. In Pakistan we had had a woman prime minister and in Islamabad I had met those impressive working women, yet the fact was that we were a country where almost all the women depend entirely on men. My headmistress Maryam was a strong, educated woman but in our society she could not live on her own and come to work. She had to be living with a husband, brother or parents.

In Pakistan when women say they want independence, people think this means we don’t want to obey our fathers, brothers or husbands. But it does not mean that. It means we want to make decisions for ourselves. We want to be free to go to school or to go to work. Nowhere is it written in the Quran that a woman should be dependent on a man. The word has not come down from the heavens to tell us that every woman should listen to a man.

‘You are a million miles away, Jani,’ said my father interrupting my thoughts. ‘What are you dreaming about?’

‘Just about crossing oceans, Aba’, I replied.

‘Forget all that!’ shouted my brother Atal. ‘We’re at the beach and I want to go for a camel ride!’

It was January 2012 and we were in Karachi as guests of Geo TV after the Sindh government announced they were renaming a girls’ secondary school on Mission Road in my honour. My brother Khushal was now at school in Abbottabad, so it was just me, my parents and Atal. We flew to Karachi, and it was the first time any of us had ever been on a plane. The journey was just two hours, which I found incredible. It would have taken us at least two days by bus. On the plane we noticed that some people could not find their seats because they could not read letters and numbers. I had a window seat and could see the deserts and mountains of our land below me. As we headed south the land became more parched. I was already missing the green of Swat. I could see why, when our people go to Karachi to work, they always want to be buried in the cool of our valley.

Driving from the airport to the hostel, I was amazed by the number of people and houses and cars. Karachi is one of the biggest cities on earth. It was strange to think it was just a port of 300,000 people when Pakistan was created. Jinnah lived there and made it our first capital, and it was soon flooded by millions of Muslim refugees from India known as mohajirs, which means ‘immigrants’, who spoke Urdu. Today it has around twenty million people. It’s actually the largest Pashtun city in the world, even though it’s far from our lands; between five and seven million Pashtuns have gone there to work.

Unfortunately, Karachi has also become a very violent city and there is always fighting between the mohajirs and Pashtuns. The mohajir areas we saw all seemed very organised and neat whereas the Pashtun areas were dirty and chaotic. The mohajirs almost all support a party called the MQM led by Altaf Hussain, who lives in exile in London and communicates with his people by Skype. The MQM is a very organised movement, and the mohajir community sticks together. By contrast we Pashtuns are very divided, some following Imran Khan because he is Pashtun, a khan and a great cricketer, some Maulana Fazlur Rehman because his party JUI is Islamic, some the secular ANP because it’s a Pashtun nationalist party and some the PPP of Benazir Bhutto or the PML(N) of Nawaz Sharif.

We went to the Sindh assembly, where I was applauded by all the members. Then we went to visit some schools including the one that was being named after me. I made a speech about the importance of education and also talked about Benazir Bhutto as this was her city. ‘We must all work together for the rights of girls,’ I said. The children sang for me and I was presented with a painting of me looking up at the sky. It was both odd and wonderful to see my name on a school just like my namesake Malalai of Maiwind, after whom so many schools in Afghanistan are named. In the next school holidays my father and I planned to go and talk to parents and children in the distant hilly areas of Swat about the importance of learning to read and write. ‘We will be like preachers of education,’ I said.

Later that day we visited my aunt and uncle. They lived in a very small house and so at last my father understood why they had refused to take him in when he was a student. On the way we passed through Aashiqan e-Rasool square and were shocked to see a picture of the murderer of Governor Salman Taseer decorated with garlands of rose petals as though he were a saint. My father was angry. ‘In a city of twenty million people is there not one person who will take this down?’

There was one important place we had to include in our visit to Karachi besides our outings to the sea or the huge bazaars, where my mother bought lots of clothes. We needed to visit the mausoleum of our founder and great leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah. This is a very peaceful building of white marble and somehow seemed separate from the hustle and bustle of the city. It felt sacred to us. Benazir was on her way there to make her first speech on her return to Pakistan when her bus was blown up.

The guard explained that the tomb in the main room under a giant chandelier from China did not contain Jinnah’s body. The real tomb is on the floor below, where he lies alongside his sister Fatima, who died much later. Next to it is the tomb of our first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was assassinated.

Afterwards we went into the small museum at the back, which had displays of the special white bow ties Jinnah used to order from Paris, his three-piece suits tailored in London, his golf clubs and a special travelling box with drawers for twelve pairs of shoes including his favourite two-tone brogues. The walls were covered with photographs. In the ones from the early days of Pakistan you could easily see from his thin sunken face that Jinnah was dying. His skin looked paper-thin. But at the time it was kept a secret. Jinnah smoked fifty cigarettes a day. His body was riddled with TB and lung cancer when Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy of India, agreed that India would be divided at independence. Afterwards he said that had he known Jinnah was dying he would have delayed and there would have been no Pakistan. As it was, Jinnah died in September 1948 just over a year later. Then, a little more than three years after that, our first prime minister was killed. Right from the start we were an unlucky country.

Some of Jinnah’s most famous speeches were displayed. There was the one about people of all religions being free to worship in the new Pakistan. And another where he had spoken about the important role of women. I wanted to see pictures of the women in his life. But his wife died young and was a Parsee, and their only daughter Dina stayed in India and married a Parsee, which didn’t sit very well in the new Muslim homeland. Now she lives in New York. So most of the pictures I found were of his sister Fatima.

It was hard to visit that place and read those speeches without thinking that Jinnah would be very disappointed in Pakistan. He would probably say that this was not the country he had wanted. He wished us to be independent, to be tolerant, to be kind to each other. He wanted everyone to be free whatever their beliefs.

‘Would it have been better if we had not become independent but stayed part of India?’ I asked my father. It seemed to me that before Pakistan there was endless fighting between Hindus and Muslims. Then even when we got our own country there was still fighting, but this time it was between mohajirs and Pashtuns and between Sunnis and Shias. Instead of celebrating each other, our four provinces struggle to get along. Sindhis often talk of separation and in Baluchistan there is an ongoing war which gets talked about very little because it is so remote. Did all this fighting mean we needed to divide our country yet again?

When we left the museum some young men with flags were protesting outside. They told us they were Seraiki speakers from southern Punjab and wanted their own province.

There seemed to be so many things about which people were fighting. If Christians, Hindus or Jews are really our enemies, as so many say, why are we Muslims fighting with each other? Our people have become misguided. They think their greatest concern is defending Islam and are being led astray by those like the Taliban who deliberately misinterpret the Quran. We should focus on practical issues. We have so many people in our country who are illiterate. And many women have no education at all. We live in a place where schools are blown up. We have no reliable electricity supply. Not a single day passes without the killing of at least one Pakistani.

One day a lady called Shehla Anjum turned up at our hostel. She was a Pakistani journalist living in Alaska and wanted to meet me after she had seen the documentary about us on the New York Times website. She chatted with me for a while then with my father. I noticed she had tears in her eyes. Then she asked my father, ‘Did you know, Ziauddin, that the Taliban have threatened this innocent girl?’ We didn’t know what she was talking about so she went on the Internet and showed us that the Taliban had that day issued threats against two women – Shad Begum, an activist in Dir, and me, Malala. ‘These two are spreading secularism and should be killed,’ it said. I didn’t take it seriously as there are so many things on the Internet and I thought we would have heard from elsewhere if it were real.

That evening my father received a call from the family who had been sharing our home for the last eighteen months. Their previous home had a mud roof which leaked in the rain and we had two spare rooms so they stayed with us for a nominal rent and their children went to our school for free. They had three children, and we liked them living with us as we all played cops and robbers on the roof. They told my father that the police had turned up at the house and demanded to know whether we had received any threats. When my father heard this, he called the deputy superintendent, who asked him the same thing. My father asked, ‘Why, have you any information?’ The officer asked to see my father when we were back in Swat.

After that my father was restless and could not enjoy Karachi. I could see my mother and father were both very upset. I knew my mother was still mourning my aunt and they had been feeling uneasy about me receiving so many awards, but it seemed to be about more than that. ‘Why are you like this?’ I asked. ‘You’re worried about something but you’re not telling us.’

Then they told me about the call from home and that they were taking the threats seriously. I don’t know why, but hearing I was being targeted did not worry me. It seemed to me that everyone knows they will die one day. My feeling was that nobody can stop death; it doesn’t matter if it comes from a talib or cancer. So I should do whatever I want to do.

‘Maybe we should stop our campaigning, Jani, and go into hibernation for a time,’ said my father.

‘How can we do that?’ I replied. ‘You were the one who said if we believe in something greater than our lives, then our voices will only multiply even if we are dead. We can’t disown our campaign!’

People were asking me to speak at events. How could I refuse, saying there was a security problem? We couldn’t do that, especially not as proud Pashtuns. My father always says that heroism is in the Pashtun DNA.

Still, it was with a heavy heart that we returned to Swat. When my father went to the police they showed him a file on me. They told him that my national and international profile meant I had attracted attention and death threats from the Taliban and that I needed protection. They offered us guards but my father was reluctant. Many elders in Swat had been killed despite having bodyguards and the Punjab governor had been killed by his own bodyguard. He also thought armed guards would alarm the parents of the students at school, and he didn’t want to put others at risk. When he had had threats before he always said, ‘Let them kill me but I’ll be killed alone.’

He suggested sending me to boarding school in Abbottabad like Khushal, but I didn’t want to go. He also met the local army colonel, who said being in college in Abbottabad would not really be any safer and that as long as I kept a low profile we would be OK in Swat. So when the government of KPK offered to make me a peace ambassador, my father said it was better to refuse.

At home I started bolting the main gate of our house at night. ‘She smells the threat,’ my mother told my father. He was very unhappy. He kept telling me to draw the curtains in my room at night, but I would not.

‘Aba, this is a very strange situation,’ I told him. ‘When there was Talibanisation we were safe; now there are no Taliban we are unsafe.’

‘Yes, Malala,’ he replied. ‘Now the Talibanisation is especially for us, for those like you and me who continue to speak out. The rest of Swat is OK. The rickshaw drivers, the shopkeepers are all safe. This is Talibanisation for particular people, and we are among them.’

There was another downside to receiving those awards – I was missing a lot of school. After the exams in March the cup that went into my new cabinet was for second place.

19

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 dyna, the school van. It wasn’t very comfortable, especially because we also had giant pots of chicken and rice on the floor for the picnic, but it was only half an hour’s drive. We had fun, singing songs on the way there. Moniba was looking very beautiful, her skin porcelain-pale. ‘What skin cream are you using?’ I asked her.

‘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 isha prayers, the last prayers of the day, at the mosque on the street near his house when he was shot in the face.

When he heard the news my father said the earth fell away from his feet. ‘It was as if I had been shot,’ he said. ‘I was sure it was my turn next.’

We pleaded with my father not to go to the hospital as it was very late and the people who had attacked Zahid Khan might be waiting for him. But he said not to go would be cowardly. He was offered an escort by some fellow political activists but he thought that it would be too late to go if he waited for them. So he called my cousin to take him. My mother began to pray.

When he got to the hospital only one other member of the jirga committee was there. Zahid Khan was bleeding so much it was as if his white beard was bathed in red. But he had been lucky. A man had fired at him three times from close range with a pistol, but Zahid Khan had managed to grab his hand so only the first bullet struck. Strangely it went through his neck and out through his nose. Later he said he remembered a small clean-shaven man just standing there smiling, not even wearing a mask. Then darkness overcame him as if he had fallen into a black hole. The irony was that Zahid Khan had only recently started to walk to the mosque again because he thought it was safe.

After praying for his friend, my father talked to the media. ‘We don’t understand why he’s been attacked when they claim there’s peace,’ he said. ‘It’s a big question for the army and administration.’

People warned my father to leave the hospital. ‘Ziauddin, it’s midnight and you’re here! Don’t be stupid!’ they said. ‘You are as vulnerable and as wanted a target as he is. Don’t take any more risks!’

Finally Zahid Khan was transferred to Peshawar to be operated on and my father came home. I had not gone to sleep because I was so worried. After that I double-checked all the locks every night.

At home our phone did not stop ringing with people calling to warn my father he could be the next target. Hidayatullah was one of the first to call. ‘For God’s sake be careful,’ he warned. ‘It could have been you. They are shooting jirga members one by one. You are the spokesman – how can they possibly let you live?’

My father was convinced the Taliban would hunt him down and kill him, but he again refused security from the police. ‘If you go around with a lot of security the Taliban will use Kalashnikovs or suicide bombers and more people will be killed,’ he said. ‘At least I’ll be killed alone.’ Nor would he leave Swat. ‘Where can I go?’ he asked my mother. ‘I cannot leave the area. I am president of the Global Peace Council, the spokesperson of the council of elders, the president of the Swat Association of Private Schools, director of my school and head of my family.’

His only precaution was to change his routine. One day he would go to the primary school first, another day to the girls’ school, the next day to the boys’ school. I noticed wherever he went he would look up and down the street four or five times.

Despite the risks, my father and his friends continued to be very active, holding protests and press conferences. ‘Why was Zahid Khan attacked if there’s peace? Who attacked him?’ they demanded. ‘Since we’ve come back from being IDPs we haven’t seen any attacks on army and police. The only targets now are peace-builders and civilians.’

The local army commander was not happy. ‘I tell you there are no terrorists in Mingora,’ he insisted. ‘Our reports say so.’ He claimed that Zahid Khan had been shot because of a dispute over property.

Zahid Khan was in hospital for twelve days then at home recuperating for a month after having plastic surgery to repair his nose. But he refused to be silent. If anything he became more outspoken, particularly against the intelligence agencies, as he was convinced they were behind the Taliban. He wrote opinion pieces in newspapers saying that the conflict in Swat had been manufactured. ‘I know who targeted me. What we need to know is who imposed these militants on us,’ he wrote. He demanded that the chief justice set up a judicial commission to investigate who had brought the Taliban into our valley.

He drew a sketch of his attacker and said the man should be stopped before shooting anyone else. But the police did nothing to find him.

After the threats against me my mother didn’t like me walking anywhere and insisted I get a rickshaw to school and take the bus home even though it was only a five-minute walk. The bus dropped me at the steps leading up to our street. A group of boys from our neighbourhood used to hang round there. Sometimes there was a boy called Haroon with them, who was a year older than me and used to live on our street. We had played together as children and later he told me he was in love with me. But then a pretty cousin came to stay with our neighbour Safina and he fell in love with her instead. When she said she wasn’t interested he turned his attention back to me. After that they moved to another street and we moved into their house. Then Haroon went away to army cadet college.

But he came back for the holidays, and one day when I returned home from school he was hanging around on the street. He followed me to the house and put a note inside our gate where I would see it. I told a small girl to fetch it for me. He had written, ‘Now you have become very popular, I still love you and know you love me. This is my number, call me.’

I gave the note to my father and he was angry. He called Haroon and told him he would tell his father. That was the last time I saw him. After that the boys stopped coming to our street, but one of the small boys who played with Atal would call out suggestively, ‘How is Haroon?’ whenever I passed by. I got so fed up with it that one day I told Atal to bring the boy inside. I shouted at him so angrily that he stopped.

I told Moniba what had happened once we were friends again. She was always very careful about interactions with boys because her brothers watched everything. ‘Sometimes I think it’s easier to be a Twilight vampire than a girl in Swat,’ I sighed. But really I wished that being hassled by a boy was my biggest problem.