21: ‘God, I entrust her to you’
AS SOON AS Usman Bhai Jan realised what had happened he drove the dyna to Swat Central Hospital at top speed.
The other girls were screaming and crying. I was lying on Moniba’s lap, bleeding from my head and left ear. We had only gone a short way when a policeman stopped the van and started asking questions, wasting precious time. One girl felt my neck for a pulse. ‘She’s alive!’ she shouted. ‘We must get her to hospital. Leave us alone and catch the man who did this!’
Mingora seemed like a big town to us but it’s really a small place and the news spread quickly. My father was at the Swat Press Club for a meeting of the Association of Private Schools and had just gone on stage to give a speech when his mobile rang. He recognised the number as the Khushal School and passed the phone to his friend Ahmad Shah to answer. ‘Your school bus has been fired on,’ he whispered urgently to my father.
The colour drained from my father’s face. He immediately thought, Malala could be on that bus!
Then he tried to reassure himself, thinking it might be a boy, a jealous lover who had fired a pistol in the air to shame his beloved. He was at an important gathering of about 400 principals who had come from all over Swat to protest against plans by the government to impose a central regulatory authority.
As president of their association, my father felt he couldn’t let all those people down so he delivered his speech as planned. But there were beads of sweat on his forehead and for once there was no need for anyone to signal to him to wind it up.
As soon as he had finished, my father did not wait to take questions from the audience and instead rushed off to the hospital with Ahmad Shah and another friend, Riaz, who had a car. The hospital was only five minutes away. They arrived to find crowds gathered outside and photographers and TV cameras. Then he knew for certain that I was there. My father’s heart sank. He pushed through the people and ran through the camera flashes into the hospital. Inside I was lying on a trolley, a bandage over my head, my eyes closed, my hair spread out.
‘My daughter, you are my brave daughter, my beautiful daughter,’ he said over and over, kissing my forehead and cheeks and nose. He didn’t know why he was speaking to me in English. I think somehow I knew he was there even though my eyes were closed. My father said later, ‘I can’t explain it. I felt she responded.’ Someone said I had smiled. But to my father it was not a smile, just a small beautiful moment because he knew he had not lost me for ever. Seeing me like that was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. All children are special to their parents, but to my father I was his universe. I had been his comrade in arms for so long, first secretly as Gul Makai, then quite openly as Malala. He had always believed that if the Taliban came for anyone, it would be for him, not me.
He said he felt as if he had been hit by a thunderbolt. ‘They wanted to kill two birds with one stone.
Kill Malala and silence me for ever.’
He was very afraid but he didn’t cry. There were people everywhere. All the principals from the meeting had arrived at the hospital and there were scores of media and activists; it seemed the whole town was there. ‘Pray for Malala,’ he told them. The doctors reassured him that they had done a CT scan which showed that the bullet had not gone near my brain. They cleaned and bandaged the wound.
‘O Ziauddin! What have they done?’ Madam Maryam burst through the doors. She had not been at school that day but at home nursing her baby when she received a phone call from her brother-in-law checking she was safe. Alarmed, she switched on the TV and saw the headline that there had been a shooting on the Khushal School bus. As soon as she heard I had been shot she called her husband. He brought her to the hospital on the back of his motorbike, something very rare for a respectable Pashtun woman. ‘Malala, Malala. Do you hear me?’ she called.
I grunted.
Maryam tried to find out more about what was going on. A doctor she knew told her the bullet had passed through my forehead, not my brain, and that I was safe. She also saw the two other Khushal girls who had been shot. Shazia had been hit twice, in the left collarbone and palm, and had been brought to the hospital with me. Kainat had not realised she was hurt to start with and had gone home, then discovered she had been grazed by a bullet at the top of her right arm so her family had brought her in.
My father knew he should go and check on them but did not want to leave my bedside for a minute.
His phone kept ringing. The chief minister of KPK was the first person who called. ‘Don’t worry, we will sort everything out,’ he said. ‘Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar is expecting you.’ But it was the army who took charge. At 3 p.m. the local commander arrived and announced they were sending an army helicopter to take me and my father to Peshawar. There wasn’t time to fetch my mother so Maryam insisted she would go too as I might need a woman’s help. Maryam’s family was not happy about this as she was still nursing her baby boy, who had recently undergone a small operation. But she is like my second mother.
When I was put in the ambulance my father was afraid the Taliban would attack again. It seemed to him that everyone must know who was inside. The helipad was only a mile away, a five-minute drive, but he was scared the whole way. When we got there the helicopter had not arrived, and we waited for what to him felt like hours inside the ambulance. Finally it landed and I was taken on board with my father, my cousin Khanjee, Ahmad Shah and Maryam. None of them had ever been on a helicopter.
As it took off we flew over an army sports gala with patriotic music pounding from speakers. To hear them singing about their love of country gave my father a bad taste. He normally liked singing along, but a patriotic song hardly seemed appropriate when here was a fifteen-year-old girl shot in the head, an almost dead daughter.
Down below, my mother was watching from the roof of our house. When she heard that I had been hurt she was having her reading lesson with Miss Ulfat and struggling to learn words like ‘book’ and ‘apple’. The news at first was muddled and she initially believed I’d been in an accident and had injured my foot. She rushed home and told my grandmother, who was staying with us at the time. She begged my grandmother to start praying immediately. We believe Allah listens more closely to the white-haired. My mother then noticed my half-eaten egg from breakfast. There were pictures of me everywhere receiving the awards she had disapproved of. She sobbed as she looked at them. All around was Malala, Malala.
Soon the house was full of women. In our culture, if someone dies women come to the home of the deceased and the men to the hujra - not just family and close friends but everyone from the neighbourhood.
My mother was astonished to see all the people. She sat on a prayer mat and recited from the Quran. She told the women, ‘Don’t cry - pray!’ Then my brothers rushed into the room. Atal, who had walked home from school, had turned on the television and seen the news that I had been shot. He had called Khushal, and together they joined the weeping. The phone did not stop ringing. People reassured my mother that although I had been shot in the head, the bullet had just skimmed my forehead. My mother was very confused by all the different stories, first that my foot had been injured, then that I had been shot in the head. She thought I would think it strange that she hadn’t come to me, but people told her not to go as I was either dead or about to be moved. One of my father’s friends phoned her to tell her I was being taken to Peshawar by helicopter and she should come by road. The worst moment for her was when someone came to the house with my front door keys, which had been found at the scene of the shooting. ‘I don’t want keys, I want my daughter!’ my mother cried. ‘What use are keys without Malala?’ Then they heard the sound of the helicopter.
The helipad was just a mile from our house and all the women rushed up to the roof. ‘It must be Malala!’ they said. As they watched the helicopter fly overhead, my mother took her scarf off her head, an extremely rare gesture for a Pashtun woman, and lifted it up to the sky, holding it in both hands as if it was an offering. ‘God, I entrust her to You,’ she said to the heavens. ‘We didn’t accept security guards - You are our protector. She was under Your care and You are bound to give her back.’
Inside the helicopter I was vomiting blood. My father was horrified, thinking this meant I had internal bleeding. He was starting to lose hope. But then Maryam noticed me trying to wipe my mouth with my scarf. ‘Look, she is responding!’ she said. ‘That’s an excellent sign.’
When we landed in Peshawar, they assumed we’d be taken to Lady Reading Hospital, where there was a very good neurosurgeon called Dr Mumtaz who had been recommended. Instead they were alarmed to be taken to CMH, the Combined Military Hospital. CMH is a large sprawling brick hospital with 600 beds and dates from British rule. There was a lot of construction going on to build a new tower block. Peshawar is the gateway to the FATA and since the army went into those areas in 2004 to take on the militants, the hospital had been very busy tending wounded soldiers and victims of the frequent suicide bombs in and around the city. As in much of our country, there were concrete blocks and checkpoints all around CMH to protect it from suicide bombers.
I was rushed to the Intensive Care Unit, which is in a separate building. Above the nurses’ station the clock showed it was just after 5 p.m. I was wheeled into a glass-walled isolation unit and a nurse put me on a drip. In the next room was a soldier who had been horrifically burned in an IED attack and had a leg blown off. A young man came in and introduced himself as Colonel Junaid, a neurosurgeon. My father became even more disturbed. He didn’t think he looked like a doctor; he seemed so young. ‘Is she your daughter?’ asked the colonel. Maryam pretended to be my mother so she could come in.
Colonel Junaid examined me. I was conscious and restless but not speaking or aware of anything, my eyes fluttering. The colonel stitched the wound above my left brow where the bullet had entered, but he was surprised not to see any bullet in the scan. ‘If there is an entry there has to be an exit,’ he said. He palpated my spine and located the bullet lying next to my left shoulder blade. ‘She must have been stooping so her neck was bent when she was shot,’ he said.
They took me for another CT scan. Then the colonel called my father into his office, where he had the scans up on a screen. He told him that the scan in Swat had been done from only one angle, but this new scan showed the injury was more serious. ‘Look, Ziauddin,’ he said. ‘The CT scan shows the bullet went very close to the brain.’ He said particles of bone had damaged the brain membrane. ‘We can pray to God. Let’s wait and see,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to operate at this stage.’
My father became more agitated. In Swat the doctors had told him this was something simple, now it seemed very serious. And if it was serious why weren’t they operating? He felt uncomfortable in a military hospital. In our country, where the army has seized power so many times, people are often wary of the military, particularly those from Swat, where the army had taken so long to act against the Taliban. One of my father’s friends called him and said, ‘Get her moved from that hospital. We don’t want her to become shaheed millat [a martyr of the nation] like Liaquat Ali Khan.’ My father didn’t know what to do.
‘I’m confused,’ he told Colonel Junaid. ‘Why are we here? I thought we’d go to the civil hospital.’
Then he asked, ‘Please, can you bring in Dr Mumtaz?’
‘How would that look?’ replied Colonel Junaid who was, not surprisingly, offended.
Afterwards, we found out that despite his youthful appearance he had been a neurosurgeon for thirteen years and was the most experienced and decorated neurosurgeon in the Pakistani army. He had joined the military as a doctor because of their superior facilities, following in the footsteps of his uncle, who was also an army neurosurgeon. The Peshawar CMH was on the front line of the war on the Taliban and Junaid dealt with gunshot wounds and blasts every day. ‘I’ve treated thousands of Malalas,’ he later said.
But my father didn’t know that at the time and became very depressed. ‘Do whatever you think,’ he said. ‘You’re the doctor.’
The next few hours were a wait-and-see time, the nurses monitoring my heartbeat and vital signs.
Occasionally I made a low grunt and moved my hand or fluttered my eyes. Then Maryam would say, ‘Malala, Malala.’ Once my eyes completely opened. ‘I never noticed before how beautiful her eyes are,’ said Maryam. I was restless and kept trying to get the monitor off my finger. ‘Don’t do that,’
Maryam said.
‘Miss, don’t tell me off,’ I whispered as if we were at school. Madam Maryam was a strict headmistress.
Late in the evening my mother came with Atal. They had made the four-hour journey by road, driven by my father’s friend Mohammad Farooq. Before she arrived Maryam had called to warn her, ‘When you see Malala don’t cry or shout. She can hear you even if you think she can’t.’ My father also called her and told her to prepare for the worst. He wanted to protect her.
When my mother arrived they hugged and held back tears. ‘Here is Atal,’ she told me. ‘He has come to see you.’
Atal was overwhelmed and cried a lot. ‘Mama,’ he wept, ‘Malala is hurt so badly.’
My mother was in a state of shock and could not understand why the doctors were not operating to remove the bullet. ‘My brave daughter, my beautiful daughter,’ she cried. Atal was making so much noise that eventually an orderly took them to the hospital’s military hostel, where they were being put up.
My father was bewildered by all the people gathered outside - politicians, government dignitaries, provincial ministers - who had come to show their sympathy. Even the governor was there; he gave my father 100,000 rupees for my treatment. In our society if someone dies, you feel very honoured if one dignitary comes to your home. But now he was irritated. He felt all these people were just waiting for me to die when they had done nothing to protect me.
Later, while they were eating, Atal turned on the TV. My father immediately turned it off. He couldn’t face seeing news of my attack at that moment.When he left the room Maryam switched it back on. Every channel was showing footage of me with a commentary of prayers and moving poems as if I had died. ‘My Malala, my Malala,’ my mother wailed and Maryam joined her.
Around midnight Colonel Junaid asked to meet my father outside the ICU. ‘Ziauddin, Malala’s brain is swelling.’ My father didn’t understand what this meant. The doctor told him I had started to deteriorate; my consciousness was fading, and I had again been vomiting blood. Colonel Junaid ordered a third CT scan. This showed that my brain was swelling dangerously.
‘But I thought the bullet hadn’t entered her brain,’ said my father.
Colonel Junaid explained that a bone had fractured and splinters had gone into my brain, creating a shock and causing it to swell. He needed to remove some of my skull to give the brain space to expand, otherwise the pressure would become unbearable. ‘We need to operate now to give her a chance,’ he said. ‘If we don’t, she may die. I don’t want you to look back and regret not taking action.’
Cutting away some of my skull sounded very drastic to my father. ‘Will she survive?’ he asked desperately, but was given little reassurance at that stage.
It was a brave decision by Colonel Junaid, whose superiors were not convinced and were being told by other people that I should be sent abroad. It was a decision that would save my life. My father told him to go ahead, and Colonel Junaid said he would bring in Dr Mumtaz to help. My father’s hand shook as he signed the consent papers. There in black and white were the words ‘the patient may die’.
They started the operation around 1.30 a.m. My mother and father sat outside the operating theatre.
‘O God, please make Malala well,’ prayed my father. He made bargains with God. ‘Even if I have to live in the deserts of the Sahara, I need her eyes open; I won’t be able to live without her. O God, let me give the rest of my life to her; I have lived enough. Even if she is injured, just let her survive.’
Eventually my mother interrupted him. ‘God is not a miser,’ she said. ‘He will give me back my daughter as she was.’ She began praying with the Holy Quran in her hand, standing facing the wall, reciting verses over and over for hours.
‘I had never seen someone praying like her,’ said Madam Maryam. ‘I was sure God would answer such prayers.’
My father tried not to think about the past and whether he had been wrong to encourage me to speak out and campaign.
Inside the theatre Colonel Junaid used a saw to remove an eight-to-ten-centimetre square from the upper-left part of my skull so my brain had the space to swell. He then cut into the subcutaneous tissue on the left of my stomach and placed the piece of bone inside to preserve it. Then he did a tracheotomy as he was worried the swelling was blocking my airway. He also removed clots from my brain and the bullet from my shoulder blade. After all these procedures I was put on a ventilator. The operation took almost five hours.
Despite my mother’s prayers, my father thought ninety per cent of the people waiting outside were just waiting for the news of my death. Some of them, his friends and sympathisers, were very upset, but he felt that others were jealous of our high profile and believed we had got what was coming to us.
My father was taking a short break from the intensity of the operating theatre and was standing outside when a nurse approached him. ‘Are you Malala’s father?’ Once again my father’s heart sank.
The nurse took him into a room.
He thought she was going to say, ‘We’re sorry, I’m afraid we have lost her.’ But once inside he was told, ‘We need someone to get blood from the blood bank.’ He was relieved but baffled. Am I the only person who can fetch it? he wondered. One of his friends went instead.
It was about 5.30 a.m. when the surgeons came out. Among other things, they told my father that they had removed a piece of skull and put it in my abdomen. In our culture doctors don’t explain things to patients or relatives, and my father asked humbly, ‘If you don’t mind, I have a stupid question. Will she survive - what do you think?’
‘In medicine two plus two does not always make four,’ replied Colonel Junaid. ‘We did our job -we removed the piece of skull. Now we must wait.’
‘I have another stupid question,’ said my father. ‘What about this bone? What will you do with it?’
‘After three months we will put it back,’ replied Dr Mumtaz. ‘It’s very simple, just like this.’ He clapped his hands.
The next morning the news was good. I had moved my arms. Then three top surgeons from the province came to examine me. They said Colonel Junaid and Dr Mumtaz had done a splendid job, and the operation had gone very well, but I should now be put into an induced coma because if I regained consciousness there would be pressure on the brain.
While I was hovering between life and death, the Taliban issued a statement assuming responsibility for shooting me but denying it was because of my campaign for education. ‘We carried out this attack, and anybody who speaks against us will be attacked in the same way,’ said Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for the TTP. ‘Malala has been targeted because of her pioneer role in preaching secularism . She was young but she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas. She was pro-West; she was speaking against the Taliban; she was calling President Obama her idol.’
My father knew what he was referring to. After I won the National Peace Prize the year before, I had done many TV interviews and in one of them I had been asked to name my favourite politicians. I had chosen Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Benazir Bhutto and President Barack Obama. I had read about Obama and admired him because as a young black man from a struggling family he had achieved his ambitions and dreams. But the image of America in Pakistan had become of one of drones, secret raids on our territory and Raymond Davis.
A Taliban spokesman said that Fazlullah had ordered the attack at a meeting two months earlier.
‘Anyone who sides with the government against us will die at our hands,’ he said. ‘You will see.
Other important people will soon become victims.’ He added they had used two local Swati men who had collected information about me and my route to school and had deliberately carried out the attack near an army checkpoint to show they could strike anywhere.
That first morning, just a few hours after my operation, there was suddenly a flurry of activity, people neatening their uniforms and clearing up. Then General Kayani, the army chief, swept in. ‘The nation’s prayers are with you and your daughter,’ he told my father. I had met General Kayani when he came to Swat for a big meeting at the end of 2009 after the campaign against the Taliban.
‘I am happy you did a splendid job,’ I had said at that meeting. ‘Now you just need to catch Fazlullah.’ The hall filled with applause and General Kayani came over and put his hand on my head like a father.
Colonel Junaid gave the general a briefing on the surgery and the proposed treatment plan, and General Kayani told him he should send the CT scans abroad to the best experts for advice. After his visit no one else was allowed at my bedside because of the risk of infection. But many kept coming:
Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician; Mian Iftikhar Hussein, the provincial information minister and outspoken critic of the Taliban, whose only son had been shot dead by them; and the chief minister of our province, Haider Hoti, with whom I had appeared on talk-show discussions. None of them was allowed in.
‘Rest assured Malala will not die,’ Hoti told people. ‘She still has lots to do.’ Then around 3 p.m. in the afternoon two British doctors arrived by helicopter from Rawalpindi. Dr Javid Kayani and Dr Fiona Reynolds were from hospitals in Birmingham and happened to be in Pakistan advising the army on how to set up the country’s first liver transplant programme. Our country is full of shocking statistics, not just on education, and one of them is that one in seven children in Pakistan gets hepatitis, largely because of dirty needles, and many die of liver disease.
General Kayani was determined to change this, and the army had once again stepped in where the civilians had failed. He had asked the doctors to brief him on their progress before flying home, which happened to be the morning after I had been shot. When they went in to see him he had two televisions on, one tuned to a local channel in Urdu and the other to Sky News in English, with news of my shooting.
The army chief and the doctor were not related despite sharing a surname but knew each other well so the general told Dr Javid he was worried about the conflicting reports he was receiving and asked him to assess me before flying back to the UK. Dr Javid, who is an emergency care consultant at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, agreed, but asked to take Dr Fiona as she is from Birmingham Children’s Hospital and a specialist in children’s intensive care. She was nervous about going to Peshawar, which has become a no-go area for foreigners, but when she heard that I was a campaigner for girls’ education she was happy to help as she herself had been lucky to go to a good school and train to become a doctor.
Colonel Junaid and the hospital director were not pleased to see them. There was some argument until Dr Javid made it clear who had sent them. The British doctors were not happy with what they found. First they turned on a tap to wash their hands and discovered there was no water. Then Dr Fiona checked the machines and levels and muttered something to Dr Javid. She asked when my blood pressure had last been checked. ‘Two hours ago,’ came the reply. She said it needed to be checked all the time and asked a nurse why there was no arterial line. She also complained that my carbon dioxide level was far too low.
My father was glad he didn’t hear what she had told Dr Javid. She had said I was ‘salvageable’ - I had had the right surgery at the right time - but my chances of recovery were now being compromised by the aftercare. After neurosurgery it is essential to monitor breathing and gas exchange, and CO2 levels are supposed to be kept in the normal range. That’s what all the tubes and machines were monitoring. Dr Javid said it was ‘like flying an aircraft - you can only do it using the right instruments’, and even if the hospital had them they weren’t being used properly. Then they left in their helicopter because it is dangerous to be in Peshawar after dark.
Among the visitors who came and were not allowed in was Rehman Malik, the interior minister.
He had brought with him a passport for me. My father thanked him but he was very upset. That night when he went back to the army hostel, he took the passport from his pocket and gave it to my mother.
‘This is Malala’s, but I don’t know whether it’s to go abroad or to the heavens,’ he said. They both cried. In their bubble inside the hospital they did not realise that my story had travelled all round the world and that people were calling for me to be sent abroad for treatment.
My condition was deteriorating and my father now rarely picked up his calls. One of the few he took was from the parents of Arfa Karim, a child computer genius from Punjab with whom I had spoken during forums. She had become the youngest Microsoft-certified professional in the world at the age of nine for her skill at programming and had even been invited to meet Bill Gates in Silicon Valley. But tragically she had died that January of a heart attack following an epileptic fit. She was just sixteen, one year older than me. When her father called, my father cried. ‘Tell me how can one live without daughters,’ he sobbed.
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Author: Malala Yousafzai
