Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

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 as that would make us all sadder. The doctor wanted us to be strong for each other. The call did not last long because my parents did not want to tire me out. My mother blessed me with prayers.

I still presumed that the reason they weren’t with me was because my father didn’t have the money to pay for my treatment. That’s why he was still in Pakistan, to sell our land in the village and also our school. But our land was small and I knew our school buildings and our house were rented, so what could he sell? Perhaps he was asking rich people for a loan.

Even after the call, my parents were not completely reassured. They hadn’t actually heard my voice and were still cut off from the outside world. People who visited them were bringing conflicting reports. One of those visitors was Major General Ghulam Qamar, head of military operations in Swat. ‘There is good news coming from the UK,’ he told my father. ‘We are very happy our daughter has survived.’ He said ‘our’ because now I was seen as the daughter of the nation.

The general told my father that they were carrying out door-to-door searches throughout Swat and monitoring the borders. He said they knew that the people who had targeted me came from a gang of twenty-two Taliban men and that they were the same gang who had attacked Zahid Khan, my father’s friend who had been shot two months earlier.

My father said nothing but he was outraged. The army had been saying for ages that there were no Taliban in Mingora and that they had cleared them all out. Now this general was telling him that there had been twenty-two of them in our town for at least two months. The army had also insisted Zahid Khan was shot in a family feud and not by the Taliban. Now they were saying I had been targeted by the same Taliban as him. My father wanted to say, ‘You knew there were Taliban in the valley for two months. You knew they wanted to kill my daughter and you didn’t stop them?’ But he realised it would get him nowhere.

The general hadn’t finished. He told my father that although it was good news that I had regained consciousness there was a problem with my eyesight. My father was confused. How could the officer have information he didn’t? He was worried that I would be blind. He imagined his beloved daughter, her face shining, walking around in lifelong darkness asking, ‘Aba, where am I?’ So awful was this news that he couldn’t tell my mother, even though he is usually hopeless at keeping secrets, particularly from her. Instead he told God, ‘This is unacceptable. I will give her one of my own eyes.’

But then he was worried that at forty-three years old his own eyes might not be very good. He hardly slept that night. The next morning he asked the major in charge of security if he could borrow his phone to call Colonel Junaid. ‘I have heard that Malala can’t see,’ my father told him in distress.

‘That’s nonsense,’ he replied. ‘If she can read and write, how can she not see? Dr Fiona has kept me updated, and one of the first notes Malala wrote was to ask about you.’

Far away in Birmingham, not only could I see but I was asking for a mirror. ‘Mirror,’ I wrote in the pink diary - I wanted to see my face and hair. The nurses brought me a small white mirror which I still have. When I saw myself, I was distraught. My long hair, which I used to spend ages styling, had gone, and the left side of my head had none at all. ‘Now my hair is small,’ I wrote in the book. I thought the Taliban had cut it off. In fact the Pakistani doctors had shaved my head with no mercy. My face was distorted like someone had pulled it down on one side, and there was a scar to the side of my left eye.

‘Hwo did this to me?’ I wrote, my letters still scrambled. ‘What happened to me?’

I also wrote ‘Stop lights’ as the bright lights were making my head ache.

‘Something bad happened to you,’ said Dr Fiona.

‘Was I shot? Was my father shot?’ I wrote.

She told me that I had been shot on the school bus. She said two of my friends on the bus had also been shot, but I didn’t recognise their names. She explained that the bullet had entered through the side of my left eye where there was a scar, travelled eighteen inches down to my left shoulder and stopped there. It could have taken out my eye or gone into my brain. It was a miracle I was alive.

I felt nothing, maybe just a bit satisfied. ‘So they did it.’ My only regret was that I hadn’t had a chance to speak to them before they shot me. Now they’d never hear what I had to say. I didn’t even think a single bad thought about the man who shot me - I had no thoughts of revenge - I just wanted to go back to Swat. I wanted to go home.

After that images started to swim around in my head but I wasn’t sure what was a dream and what was reality. The story I remember of being shot is quite different from what really happened. I was in another school bus with my father and friends and another girl called Gul. We were on our way home when suddenly two Taliban appeared dressed in black. One of them put a gun to my head and the small bullet that came out of it entered my body. In this dream he also shot my father. Then everything is dark, I’m lying on a stretcher and there is a crowd of men, a lot of men, and my eyes are searching for my father. Finally I see him and try to talk to him but I can’t get the words out. Other times I am in a lot of places, in Jinnah Market in Islamabad, in Cheena Bazaar, and I am shot. I even dreamed that the doctors were Taliban.

As I grew more alert, I wanted more details. People coming in were not allowed to bring their phones, but Dr Fiona always had her iPhone with her because she is an emergency doctor. When she put it down, I grabbed it to search for my name on Google. It was hard as my double vision meant I kept typing in the wrong letters. I also wanted to check my email, but I couldn’t remember the password.

On the fifth day I got my voice back but it sounded like someone else. When Rehanna came in we talked about the shooting from an Islamic perspective. ‘They shot at me,’ I told her.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ she replied. ‘Too many people in the Muslim world can’t believe a Muslim can do such a thing,’ she said. ‘My mother, for example, would say they can’t be Muslims. Some people call themselves Muslims but their actions are not Islamic.’ We talked about how things happen for different reasons, this happened to me, and how education for females not just males is one of our Islamic rights. I was speaking up for my right as a Muslim woman to be able to go to school.

Once I got my voice back, I talked to my parents on Dr Javid’s phone. I was worried about sounding strange. ‘Do I sound different?’ I asked my father.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You sound the same and your voice will only get better. Are you OK?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but this headache is so severe, I can’t bear the pain.’

My father got really worried. I think he ended up with a bigger headache than me. In all the calls after that he would ask, ‘Is the headache increasing or decreasing?’

After that I just said to him, ‘I’m OK.’ I didn’t want to upset him and didn’t complain even when they took the staples from my head and gave me big injections in my neck. ‘When are you coming?’ I kept asking.

By then they had been stuck in the army hostel at the hospital in Rawalpindi for a week with no news about when they might come to Birmingham. My mother was so desperate that she told my father, ‘If there is no news by tomorrow I will go on a hunger strike.’ Later that day my father went to see the major in charge of security and told him. The major looked alarmed. Within ten minutes my father was told arrangements would be made for them to move to Islamabad later that day. Surely there they could arrange everything?

When my father returned to my mother he said to her, ‘You are a great woman. All along I thought Malala and I were the campaigners but you really know how to protest!’

They were moved to Kashmir House in Islamabad, a hostel for members of parliament. Security was still so tight that when my father asked for a barber to give him a shave, a policeman sat with them all the way through so the man wouldn’t cut his throat.

At least now they had their phones back and we could speak more easily. Each time, Dr Javid would call my father in advance to tell him what time he could speak to me and to make sure he was free. But when the doctor called the line was usually busy. My father is always on the phone! I rattled off my mother’s eleven-digit mobile number and Dr Javid looked astonished. He knew then that my memory was fine. But my parents were still in darkness about why they weren’t flying to me. Dr Javid was also baffled as to why they weren’t coming. When they said they didn’t know, he made a call and then assured them the problem was not with the army but the civilian government.

Later they would discover that, rather than do whatever it took to get my parents on the first plane to Birmingham to join their sick daughter, the interior minister Rehman Malik was hoping to fly with them so they could have a joint press conference at the hospital, and it was taking some time to make the arrangements. He also wanted to make sure they didn’t ask for political asylum in Britain, which would be embarrassing for his government. Eventually he asked my parents outright if this was their plan. It was funny because my mother had no idea what asylum was and my father had never even thought about it - there were other things on his mind.

When my parents moved to Kashmir House they were visited by Sonia Shahid, the mother of Shiza, our friend who had arranged the trip to Islamabad for all us Khushal School girls. She had assumed they had gone to the UK with me, and when she found out they were still in Pakistan, she was horrified. They said they had been told there were no plane tickets to Birmingham. Sonia brought them clothes as they had left everything in Swat and got my father the number for President Zardari’s office.

He called and left a message. That night the president spoke to him and promised everything would be sorted out. ‘I know what it’s like to be kept from one’s children,’ he said, referring to his years in jail.

When I heard they would be in Birmingham in two days I had one request. ‘Bring my school bag,’ I pleaded to my father. ‘If you can’t go to Swat to fetch it, no matter - buy new books for me because in March it’s my board examination.’ Of course I wanted to come first in class. I especially wanted my physics book because physics is difficult for me, and I needed to practise numericals as my maths is not so good and they are hard for me to solve.

I thought I’d be back home by November.

It ended up being ten days before my parents came. Those ten days I spent in hospital without them felt like a hundred days. It was boring and I wasn’t sleeping well. I stared at the clock in my room.

The changing time reassured me I was alive and I saw for the first time in my life that I was waking early. Every morning I longed for 7 a.m. when the nurses would come. The nurses and Dr Fiona played games with me. QEH is not a children’s hospital so they brought over a play coordinator with games. One of my favourites was Connect 4. I usually drew with Dr Fiona but I could beat everyone else. The nurses and hospital staff felt sorry for me in a far-off land away from my family and were very kind, particularly Yma Choudhury, the jolly director of operations, and Julie Tracy, the head nurse, who would sit and hold my hand.

The only thing I had with me from Pakistan was a beige shawl which Colonel Junaid had given to Dr Fiona as a present for me so they went clothes shopping to buy me things. They had no idea how conservative I was or what a teenage girl from the Swat Valley would wear. They went to Next and British Home Stores and came back with bags of T-shirts, pyjamas, socks and even bras. Yma asked me if I would like shalwar kamiz and I nodded. ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ she asked. Pink was, of course, my reply.

They were worried I wasn’t eating. But I didn’t like the hospital food and I was worried it was not halal. The only things I’d eat there were the nutritional milkshakes. Nurse Julie discovered I liked Cheesy Wotsits so brought me those. ‘What do you like?’ they asked me. ‘Fried chicken,’ I replied.

Yma discovered there was a halal Kentucky Fried Chicken at Small Heath so would go there every afternoon to buy me chicken and chips. One day she even cooked me a curry.

To keep me occupied they brought me a DVD player. One of the first movies they got me was Bend it Like Beckham, thinking the story of a Sikh girl challenging her cultural norms and playing football would appeal to me. I was shocked when the girls took off their shirts to practise in sports bras and I made the nurses switch it off. After that they brought cartoons and Disney movies. I watched all three Shrek movies and A Shark’s Tale. My left eye was still blurry so I covered it when I watched, and my left ear would bleed so I had to keep putting in cotton-wool balls. One day I asked a nurse, ‘What is this lump?’ placing her hand on my tummy. My stomach was big and hard and I didn’t know why.

‘It’s the top of your skull,’ she replied. I was shocked.

After I started to speak I also walked again for the first time. I hadn’t felt any problem with my arms or legs in bed apart from my left hand which was stiff because the bullet had ended up by my shoulder so I didn’t realise I couldn’t walk properly. My first few steps were such hard work it felt like I’d run a hundred kilometres. The doctors told me I would be fine; I just needed lots of physiotherapy to get my muscles working again.

One day another Fiona came, Fiona Alexander, who told me she was in charge of the hospital press office. I thought this was funny. I couldn’t imagine Swat Central Hospital having a press office. Until she came I had no idea of the attention I’d attracted. When I was flown from Pakistan there was supposed to be a news blackout, but photographs were leaked from Pakistan of me leaving and saying I was going to the UK, and the media soon found out my destination was Birmingham. A Sky News helicopter was soon circling above, and as many as 250 journalists came to the hospital from as far away as Australia and Japan. Fiona Alexander had spent twenty years as a journalist herself, and had been editor of the Birmingham Post, so she knew exactly how to feed them material and stop them trying to get in. The hospital started giving daily news briefings on my condition.

People just turned up wanting to see me - government ministers, diplomats, politicians, even an envoy from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Most brought bouquets, some of them exquisitely beautiful.

One day Fiona Alexander brought me a bag of cards and toys and pictures. It was Eid ul-Azha, ‘Big Eid’, our main religious holiday, so I thought maybe some Muslims had sent them. Then I saw the postage dates, from 10 October, 11 October, days before, and I realised it was nothing to do with Eid.

They were from people all over the world wishing me a speedy recovery, many of them schoolchildren. I was astonished and Fiona laughed. ‘You haven’t seen anything yet.’ She told me there were sacks and sacks more, about 8,000 cards in total, many just addressed, ‘Malala, Birmingham Hospital’. One was even addressed, ‘The Girl Shot in the Head, Birmingham’, yet it had got there. There were offers to adopt me as if I had no family and even a marriage proposal.

Rehanna told me that thousands and millions of people and children around the world had supported me and prayed for me. Then I realised that people had saved my life. I had been spared for a reason. People had sent other presents too. There were boxes and boxes of chocolates and teddy bears of every shape and size. Most precious of all perhaps was the parcel that came from Benazir Bhutto’s children Bilawal and Bakhtawar. Inside were two shawls that had belonged to their late mother. I buried my nose in them to try and smell her perfume. Later I found a long black hair on one of them, which made it even more special.

I realised what the Taliban had done was make my campaign global. While I was lying in that bed waiting to take my first steps in a new world, Gordon Brown, the UN special envoy for education and former prime minister of Britain, had launched a petition under the slogan ‘I am Malala’ to demand no child be denied schooling by 2015. There were messages from heads of state and ministers and movie stars and one from the granddaughter of Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor of our province. She said she was ashamed at not being able to read and write Pashto although her grandfather had been fluent. Beyoncé had written me a card and posted a photo of it on Facebook, Selena Gomez had tweeted about me and Madonna had dedicated a song. There was even a message from my favourite actress and social activist, Angelina Jolie - I couldn’t wait to tell Moniba.

I didn’t realise then I wouldn’t be going home.

24: ‘They have snatched her smile’

THE DAY MY parents flew to Birmingham I was moved out of intensive care and into room 4, ward 519, which had windows so I could look out and see England for the first time. ‘Where are the mountains?’ I asked. It was misty and rainy so I thought maybe they were hidden. I didn’t know then that this was a land of little sun. All I could see were houses and streets. The houses were red brick and all looked exactly the same. Everything looked very calm and organised, and it was odd to see people’s lives going on as if nothing had happened.

Dr Javid told me my parents were coming and tilted my bed so that I was sitting up to greet them when they arrived. I was so excited. In the sixteen days since that morning when I had run out of our house in Mingora 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.

I wanted to change it to:

Whether the men are winning or losing the battle, O my country, The women are coming and the women will win you an honour.

He laughed and repeated the story to everyone, as he always does.

I worked hard in the gym and with the physiotherapist to get my arms and legs working properly again and was rewarded on 6 December with my first trip out of the hospital. I told Yma that I loved nature so she arranged for two staff to take me and my mother on an outing to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, not far from the hospital. They didn’t let my father come as they thought he would be recognised, having been in the media a lot. Even so I was very happy, my first time back in the outside world, seeing Birmingham and England.

They told me to sit in the back of the car in the middle, not next to a window, which was annoying as I wanted to see everything in this new country. I didn’t realise they were trying to protect my head from any bump. When we entered the gardens and I saw all the green plants and trees, it was a powerful reminder of home. I kept saying, ‘This one is in my valley,’ and, ‘We also have this one.’ I am very proud of the beautiful plants of my valley. It was odd seeing all the other visitors, for whom it was just a normal day out. I felt like Dorothy at the end of her journey. My mother was so excited she called my father. ‘For the first time I am happy,’ she said. But it was ice cold and so we went into the café and had delicious tea and cakes, something called a ‘cream tea’.

Two days after that I had my first visitor from outside the family - the president of Pakistan, Asif Zardari. The hospital did not want him to come as they knew it would mean a media frenzy, but it was difficult for my father to refuse. Not only was Mr Zardari our head of state but he had said the government would pay all my medical bills, which would end up being around £200,000. They had also rented an apartment for my parents in the centre of Birmingham so they could move out of the hostel. The visit was on Saturday, 8 December, and the whole thing was like something out of a James Bond movie.

There were a lot of journalists gathered outside from early on, who naturally assumed the president would be brought to me in the hospital. Instead I was wrapped up in a big purple parka with a hood, taken down through the staff entrance and driven to the hospital offices. We drove right past journalists and photographers, some of whom were up in trees, and they did not even notice. Then I sat and waited in an office, playing a game called Elf Bowling on the computer and beating my brother Atal even though it was the first time I had played it. When Zardari and his party arrived in two cars they were brought in through the back. He came with about ten people including his chief of staff, his military secretary and the Pakistan High Commissioner in London, who had taken over from Dr Fiona as my official guardian in the UK till my parents arrived.

The president was first briefed by doctors not to mention my face. Then he came in to see me with his youngest daughter Asifa, who is a few years older than me. They brought me a bouquet of flowers.

He touched my head, which is our tradition, but my father was worried as I had nothing but skin, no bone to protect my brain, and my head beneath the shawl was concave. Afterwards the president sat with my father, who told him that we were fortunate I had been brought to the UK. ‘She might have survived in Pakistan but she wouldn’t have had the rehabilitation and would have been disfigured,’ he said. ‘Now her smile will return.’

Mr Zardari told the high commissioner to give my father a post as education attaché so he would have a salary to live on and a diplomatic passport so he would not need to seek asylum to stay in the UK. My father was relieved as he was wondering how he would pay for things. Gordon Brown, in his UN role, had also asked him to be his adviser, an unpaid position, and the president said that was fine; he could be both. After the meeting Mr Zardari described me to the media as ‘a remarkable girl and a credit to Pakistan’. But still not everyone in Pakistan was so positive. Though my father had tried to keep it from me I knew some people were saying he had shot me, or that I wasn’t shot at all, and we had staged it so we could live overseas.

The new year of 2013 was a happy one when I was discharged from hospital in early January finally to live with my family again. The Pakistan High Commission had rented two serviced apartments for us in a building in a modern square in the centre of Birmingham. The apartments were on the tenth floor, which was higher than any of us had ever been before. I teased my mother, as after the earthquake when we were in a three-storey building she said she would never again live in an apartment block. My father told me that when they arrived she had been so scared that she had said, ‘I will die in this lift!’

We were so happy to be a family again. My brother Khushal was as annoying as always. The boys were bored cooped up waiting for me to recover, away from school and their friends, though Atal was excited by everything new. I quickly realised I could treat them how I liked and I wouldn’t get told off. It was a cold winter, and as I watched the snow falling outside through the big glass windows I wished I could run around and chase the snowflakes like we used to back home.

Sometimes we went for walks to build up my strength though I tired easily.

In the square was a fountain and a Costa coffee bar with glass walls through which you could see men and women chatting and mixing in a way that would be unthinkable in Swat. The apartment was just off Broad Street, a famous road of shops, night clubs and stripbars. We went to the shops though I still did not like shopping. At nights our eyes were all out on stalks at the skimpy clothes that women wore - tiny shorts almost like knickers and bare legs on the highest heels even in the middle of winter. My mother was so horrified that she cried, ‘Gharqa shoma!’ - ‘I’m drowning’ - and begged my father, ‘Please take me to Dubai. I can’t live here!’ Later we laughed about it. ‘Are their legs made of iron so they don’t feel cold?’ asked my mother.

We were warned not to be out late on Broad Street on weekend nights as it could be dangerous.

This made us laugh. How could it be unsafe compared to where we had come from? Were there Taliban beheading people? I didn’t tell my parents but I flinched if an Asian-looking man came close.

I thought everyone had a gun.

Once a week I Skyped my friends back in Mingora, and they told me they were still keeping a seat in class for me. The teacher had brought to class my Pakistan Studies exam from that day, the day of the shooting. I had got 75 out of 75, but as I never did the others, Malka-e-Noor got first in class.

Though I had been getting some schooling at the hospital, I worried that I was falling behind. Now the competition was between Malka-e-Noor and Moniba. ‘It’s boring without you to compete with,’

Malka-e-Noor told me.

I was getting stronger every day, but my surgery wasn’t over. I still had the top of my skull missing.

The doctors were also concerned about my hearing. When I went for walks I could not understand the words of my mother and father in a crowd. And inside my ear was a tinny noise which only I could hear. On Saturday, 2 February I was back in QEH to be operated on - this time by a woman. Her name was Anwen White. First she removed the skull bone from my tummy, but after looking at it decided not to put it back as it had not kept well and there was a risk of infection. Instead she did something called a titanium cranioplasty (I now know lots of medical terms!) and fitted a specially moulded titanium plate in my head with eight screws to do the job of a skull and protect my brain.

While I was in surgery Mr Irving, the surgeon who had repaired my nerve, also had a solution for my damaged left eardrum. He put a small electronic device called a cochlear implant inside my head near the ear and told me that in a month they would fit the external part on my head, and then I should be able to hear. I was in theatre five hours and I’d had three operations, but I didn’t feel like I’d had major surgery and was back in the apartment within five days. A few weeks later when the receiver was fitted behind my ear, my left ear heard beep beep for the first time. To start with, everything was like a robot sound, but soon it was getting better and better.

We human beings don’t realise how great God is. He has given us an extraordinary brain and a sensitive loving heart. He has blessed us with two lips to talk and express our feelings, two eyes which see a world of colours and beauty, two feet which walk on the road of life, two hands to work for us, a nose which smells the beauty of fragrance, and two ears to hear the words of love. As I found with my ear, no one knows how much power they have in their each and every organ until they lose one.

I thank Allah for the hard-working doctors, for my recovery and for sending us to this world where we may struggle for our survival. Some people choose good ways and some choose bad ways. One person’s bullet hit me. It swelled my brain, stole my hearing and cut the nerve of the left side of my face in the space of a second. And after that one second there were millions of people praying for my life and talented doctors who gave me my own body back. I was a good girl. In my heart I had only the desire to help people. It wasn’t about the awards or the money. I always prayed to God, ‘I want to help people and please help me to do that.’

A talib fires three shots at point-blank range at three girls in a van and doesn’t kill any of them.

This seems an unlikely story, and people say I have made a miraculous recovery. My friend Shazia, who was hit twice, was offered a scholarship at Atlantic College in Wales so has also come to the UK for schooling, and I hope Kainat will too. I know God stopped me from going to the grave. It feels like this life is a second life. People prayed to God to spare me, and I was spared for a reason - to use my life for helping people. When people talk about the way I was shot and what happened I think it’s the story of Malala, ‘a girl shot by the Taliban’; I don’t feel it’s a story about me at all.