Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

11: The Clever Class

IT WAS SCHOOL that kept me going in those dark days. When I was in the street it felt as though every man I passed might be a talib. We hid our school bags and our books in our shawls. My father always said that the most beautiful thing in a village in the morning is the sight of a child in a school uniform, but now we were afraid to wear them.

We had moved up to high school. Madam Maryam said no one wanted to teach our class as we asked so many questions. We liked to be known as the clever girls. When we decorated our hands with henna for holidays and weddings, we drew calculus and chemical formulae instead of flowers and butterflies. My rivalry with Malka-e-Noor continued, but after the shock of being beaten by her when she first joined our school, I worked hard and had managed to regain my position on the school honours board for first in class. She usually came second and Moniba third. The teachers told us examiners first looked at how much we had written, then presentation. Moniba had the most beautiful writing and presentation of the three of us, but I always told her she did not trust herself enough. She worked hard as she worried that if she got low marks her male relatives might use it as an excuse to stop her education. I was weakest in maths - once I got zero in a test - but I worked hard at it. My chemistry teacher Sir Obaidullah (we called all our teachers Sir or Miss) said I was a born politician because, at the start of oral exams, I would always say, ‘Sir, can I just say you are the best teacher and yours is my favourite class.’

Some parents complained that I was being favoured because my father owned the school, but people were always surprised that despite our rivalry we were all good friends and not jealous of each other. We also competed in what we call board exams. These would select the best students from private schools in the district, and one year Malka-e-Noor and I got exactly the same marks. We did another paper at school to see who would get the prize and again we got equal marks. So people wouldn’t think I was getting special treatment, my father arranged for us to do papers at another school, that of his friend Ahmad Shah. Again we got the same, so we both got the prize.

There was more to school than work. We liked performing plays. I wrote a sketch based on Romeo and Juliet about corruption. I played Romeo as a civil servant interviewing people for a job. The first candidate is a beautiful girl, and he asks her very easy questions such as, ‘How many wheels does a bicycle have?’ When she replies, ‘Two,’ he says, ‘You are so brilliant.’ The next candidate is a man so Romeo asks him impossible things like, ‘Without leaving your chair tell me the make of the fan in the room above us.’ ‘How could I possibly know?’ asks the candidate. ‘You’re telling me you have a PhD and you don’t know!’ replies Romeo. He decides to give the job to the girl.

The girl was played by Moniba, of course, and another classmate Attiya played the part of my assistant to add some salt, pepper and masala with her witty asides. Everyone laughed a lot. I like to mimic people, and in breaks my friends used to beg me to impersonate our teachers, particularly Sir Obaidullah. With all the bad stuff going on in those days, we needed small, small reasons to laugh.

The army action at the end of 2007 had not got rid of the Taliban. The army had stayed in Swat and were everywhere in the town, yet Fazlullah still broadcast every day on the radio and throughout 2008 the situation was even worse than before with bomb blasts and killings. All we talked about in those days was the army and the Taliban and the feeling that we were caught between the two. Attiya used to tease me by saying, ‘Taliban is good, army not good.’ I replied, ‘If there is a snake and a lion coming to attack us what would we say is good, the snake or lion?’

Our school was a haven from the horrors outside. All the other girls in my class wanted to be doctors, but I decided I wanted to be an inventor and make an anti-Taliban machine which would sniff them out and destroy their guns. But of course at school we were under threat too, and some of my friends dropped out. Fazlullah kept broadcasting that girls should stay at home and his men had started blowing up schools, usually during night-time curfew when the children were not there.

The first school to be blown up was Shawar Zangay, a government girls’ primary school in Matta.

We couldn’t believe anyone would do such a thing. Then many more bombings followed, almost every day. Even in Mingora, there were explosions. Twice bombs went off when I was in the kitchen, so close by that the whole house rattled and the fan above the window fell down. I became very scared of going into the kitchen and would only run in and out.

On the last day of February 2008 I was in the kitchen when we heard an enormous blast. It was earshatteringly loud and obviously close by. As we always did, we called to each other to make sure we were all safe. ‘Khaista, Pisho, Bhabi, Khushal, Atal!’ Then we heard sirens, one after another as if all the ambulances of Mingora were passing. A suicide bomber had struck in the basketball court at Haji Baba High School. Funeral prayers had been under way for a popular local police officer, Javid Iqbal, who had been killed by a suicide bomber in a remote area while trying to escape from the Taliban. He was from Mingora, and his body had been brought back for the funeral and a police salute. Now the Taliban had bombed the mourners. More than fifty-five people were killed, including Javid Iqbal’s young son and many people we knew. Ten members of Moniba’s family were there and were either killed or injured. Moniba was devastated and the whole town was in shock. There were condolences in every mosque.

‘Are you scared now?’ I asked my father.

‘At night our fear is strong, Jani,’ he told me, ‘but in the morning, in the light, we find our courage again.’ And this is true for my family. We were scared, but our fear was not as strong as our courage.

‘We must rid our valley of the Taliban, and then no one has to feel this fear,’ he said.

In times of crisis we Pashtuns resort to the old trusted ways, so in 2008 elders in Swat created an assembly called the Qaumi Jirga to challenge Fazlullah. Three local men, Mukhtar Khan Yousafzai, Khurshid Kakajee and Zahid Khan went from hujra to hujra persuading elders to join together. The senior elder was a white-bearded man of seventy-four called Abdul Khan Khaliq who had been one of the Queen’s bodyguards when she had visited Swat to stay with our wali. Even though my father was not an elder or a khan, he was chosen as spokesperson as he was not afraid to speak out. Though he was more poetic in Pashto, he could speak our national language, Urdu, and English fluently, which meant he was an effective communicator outside Swat as well as inside.

Every day, on behalf of the Swat Council of Elders, he was at seminars or on the media challenging Fazlullah. ‘What are you doing?’ he would ask. ‘You are playing havoc with our lives and our culture.’

My father would say to me, ‘Any organisation which works for peace, I will join. If you want to resolve a dispute or come out from conflict, the very first thing is to speak the truth. If you have a headache and tell the doctor you have a stomach ache, how can the doctor help? You must speak the truth. The truth will abolish fear.’

When he met his fellow activists, particularly his old friends Ahmad Shah, Mohammad Farooq and Zahid Khan, I often went with him. Ahmad Shah also had a school, where Mohammad Farooq worked, and they would sometimes gather on his lawn. Zahid Khan was a hotel owner and had a big hujra. When they came to our house I would bring them tea then sit quietly listening as they discussed what to do. ‘Malala is not just the daughter of Ziauddin,’ they would say; ‘she is the daughter of all of us.’ They went back and forth to Peshawar and Islamabad and gave lots of interviews on the radio, particularly to the Voice of America and the BBC, taking turns so there would always be one of them available. They told people that what was happening in Swat was not about Islam. My father said the Taliban presence in Swat was not possible without the support of some in the army and the bureaucracy. The state is meant to protect the rights of its citizens, but it’s a very difficult situation when you can’t tell the difference between state and non-state and can’t trust the state to protect you against non-state.

Our military and ISI are very powerful and most people did not like to voice these things publicly, but my father and many of his friends were not scared. ‘What you are doing is against our people and against Pakistan,’ he would say. ‘Don’t support Talibanisation, it’s inhuman. We are told that Swat is being sacrificed for the sake of Pakistan, but no one and nothing should be sacrificed for the state. A state is like a mother, and a mother never deserts or cheats her children.’

He hated the fact that most people would not speak up. In his pocket he kept a poem written by Martin Niemöller, who had lived in Nazi Germany.

First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak out because I was not a Catholic.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

I knew he was right. If people were silent nothing would change.

At school my father organised a peace march and encouraged us to speak out against what was happening. Moniba put it well. ‘We Pashtuns are a religion-loving people,’ she said. ‘Because of the Taliban, the whole world is claiming we are terrorists. This is not the case. We are peace-loving.

Our mountains, our trees, our flowers - everything in our valley is about peace.’ A group of us girls gave an interview on ATV Khyber, the only privately owned Pashto television channel, about girls dropping out of school due to militancy. Teachers helped us beforehand on how to respond to questions. I wasn’t the only one to be interviewed. When we were eleven and twelve, we did them together, but as we turned thirteen or fourteen my friends’ brothers and fathers didn’t allow them because they had entered puberty and should observe purdah and also they were afraid.

One day I went on Geo, which is one of the biggest news channels in our country. There was a wall of screens in their office. I was astonished to see so many channels. Afterwards I thought, The media needs interviews. They want to interview a small girl, but the girls are scared, and even if they’re not, their parents won’t allow it. I have a father who isn’t scared, who stands by me. He said, ‘You are a child and it’s your right to speak.’ The more interviews I gave, the stronger I felt and the more support we received. I was only eleven but I looked older, and the media seemed to like hearing from a young girl. One journalist called me takra jenai - a ‘bright shining young lady’ and another said you are ‘pakha jenai’ - you are wise beyond your years. In my heart was the belief that God would protect me. If I am speaking for my rights, for the rights of girls, I am not doing anything wrong. It’s my duty to do so. God wants to see how we behave in such situations. There is a saying in the Quran, ‘The falsehood has to go and the truth will prevail.’ If one man, Fazlullah, can destroy everything, why can’t one girl change it? I wondered. I prayed to God every night to give me strength.

The media in Swat were under pressure to give positive coverage to the Taliban - some even respectfully called the Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan ‘School dada’, when in reality he was destroying schools. But many local journalists were unhappy about what was happening to their valley and they gave us a powerful platform as we would say things they didn’t dare to.

We didn’t have a car so we went by rickshaw, or one of my father’s friends would take us to the interviews. One day my father and I went to Peshawar to appear on a BBC Urdu talk show hosted by a famous columnist called Wasatullah Khan. We went with my father’s friend Fazal Maula and his daughter. Two fathers and two daughters. To represent the Taliban they had Muslim Khan, who wasn’t in the studio. I was a bit nervous but I knew it was important as many people all over Pakistan would be listening. ‘How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?’ I said. There was no response from Muslim Khan because his phone interview had been pre-recorded. How can a recording respond to live questions?

Afterwards people congratulated me. My father laughed and said I should go into politics. ‘Even as a toddler you talked like a politician,’ he teased. But I never listened to my interviews. I knew these were very small steps.

Our words were like the eucalyptus blossoms of spring tossed away on the wind. The destruction of schools continued. On the night of 7 October 2008 we heard a series of faraway blasts. The next morning we learned that masked militants had entered the Sangota Convent School for girls and the Excelsior College for boys and blown them up using improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The teachers had already been evacuated as they had received threats earlier. These were famous schools, particularly Sangota, which dated from the time of the last wali and was well known for academic excellence. They were also big - Excelsior had over 2,000 pupils and Sangota had 1,000. My father went there after the bombings and found the buildings completely razed to the ground. He gave interviews to TV reporters amid broken bricks and burned books and returned home horrified. ‘It’s all just rubble,’ he said.

Yet my father remained hopeful and believed there would be a day when there was an end to the destruction. What really depressed him was the looting of the destroyed schools - the furniture, the books, the computers were all stolen by local people. He cried when he heard this, ‘They are vultures jumping on a dead body.’

The next day he went on a live show on the Voice of America and angrily condemned the attacks.

Muslim Khan, the Taliban spokesman, was on the phone. ‘What was so wrong with these two schools that you should bomb them?’ my father asked him.

Muslim Khan said that Sangota was a convent school teaching Christianity and that Excelsior was co-educational, teaching girls and boys together. ‘Both things are false!’ replied my father. ‘Sangota school has been there since the 1960s and never converted anyone to Christianity - in fact some of them converted to Islam. And Excelsior is only co-educational in the primary section.’

Muslim Khan didn’t answer. ‘What about their own daughters?’ I asked my father. ‘Don’t they want them to learn?’

Our headmistress Madam Maryam had studied at Sangota, and her younger sister Ayesha was a pupil there, so she and some of the other Sangota girls transferred to our school. The monthly school fees were never enough to cover all our outgoings so the extra fees were welcome, but my father was unhappy. He went everywhere he could demanding the reconstruction of both schools. Once he spoke at a big gathering and held up an audience member’s baby girl and said, ‘This girl is our future. Do we want her to be ignorant?’ The crowd agreed that they would sacrifice themselves before giving up their daughters’ education. The new girls had horrible stories. Ayesha told us how one day on the way home from Sangota she had seen a Taliban holding up the severed head of a policeman by its hair, blood dripping from the neck. The Sangota girls were also very bright, which meant more competition. One of them, Rida, was excellent at making speeches. She became a good friend of mine and of Moniba’s, which sometimes caused fights as three is a tricky number. Moniba often brought food to school and would just bring one spare fork. ‘Are you my friend or Rida’s?’ I asked Moniba.

She laughed and said, ‘We are all three good friends.’

By the end of 2008, around 400 schools had been destroyed by the Taliban. We had a new government under President Asif Zardari, the widower of Benazir, but they didn’t seem to care about Swat. I told people things would be different if Zardari’s own daughters were at school in Swat.

There were suicide bombings all over the country: even the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad had been blown up.

In Swat it was safer in the town than in the remote areas and many of our family came from the countryside to stay with us. The house was small and got very crowded with the cousins who already lived with us. There was little to do. We couldn’t play cricket in the street or on the roof like we used to. We played marbles in the yard over and over again. I fought non-stop with my brother Khushal, and he would go crying to our mother. Never in history have Khushal and Malala been friends.

I liked doing my hair in different styles and would spend ages in the bathroom in front of the mirror trying out looks I had seen in movies. Until I was eight or nine my mother used to cut my hair short like my brothers because of lice and also to make it easier to wash and brush as it would get messed up under my shawl. But finally I had persuaded her to let me grow it to my shoulders. Unlike Moniba, who has straight hair, mine is wavy, and I liked to twist it into curls or tie it into plaits. ‘What are you doing in there Pisho?’ my mother would shout. ‘Our guests need the bathroom and everyone is having to wait for you.’

One of the worst times was the fasting month of Ramadan in 2008. During Ramadan no food or drink can pass a Muslim’s lips in daylight hours. The Taliban bombed the power station so we had no electricity, then a few days later they blasted the pipeline so we had no gas either. The price of the gas cylinders we used to buy from the market doubled so my mother had to cook on a fire like we did in the village. She didn’t complain - food needed to be cooked and she cooked it, and there were others worse off than us. But there was no clean water and people started dying from cholera. The hospital could not cope with all the patients and had to erect big tents outside to treat people.

Though we had no generator at home, my father bought one to install at the school, and fresh water was pumped from a bore-hole, which all the children in the neighbourhood went to collect. Every day there would be lines of people waiting to fill jugs, bottles and drums. One of the neighbours got frightened. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘If the Taliban find out you’re giving water in the month of Ramadan they will bomb us!’

My father replied that people would die either of thirst or bombings.

The days when we used to go for trips or for picnics seemed like a dream. No one would venture from their homes after sunset. The terrorists even blew up the ski lift and the big hotel in Malam Jabba where tourists used to stay. A holiday paradise turned into a hell where no tourist would venture.

Then, at the end of 2008, Fazlullah’s deputy Maulana Shah Dauran announced on the radio that all girls’ schools would close. From 15 January girls must not go to school, he warned. First I thought it was a joke. ‘How can they stop us from going to school?’ I asked my friends. ‘They don’t have the power. They are saying they will destroy the mountain but they can’t even control the road.’

The other girls didn’t agree with me. ‘Who will stop them?’ they asked. ‘They have already blown up hundreds of schools and no one has done anything.’

My father used to say the people of Swat and the teachers would continue to educate our children until the last room, the last teacher and the last student was alive. My parents never once suggested I should withdraw from school, ever. Though we loved school, we hadn’t realised how important education was until the Taliban tried to stop us. Going to school, reading and doing our homework wasn’t just a way of passing time, it was our future.

That winter it snowed and we built snow bears but without much joy. In winter the Taliban used to disappear into the mountains, but we knew they would be back and had no idea what was coming next. We believed school would start again. The Taliban could take our pens and books, but they couldn’t stop our minds from thinking.

12: The Bloody Square

THE BODIES WOULD be dumped in the square at night so that everyone would see them the next morning on their way to work. There was usually a note pinned to them saying something like, ‘This is what happens to an army agent’, or ‘Do not touch this body until 11 a.m. or you will be next.’ On some of the nights of the killings there would also be earthquakes, which made people even more scared as we connect every natural disaster with a human disaster.

They killed Shabana on a bitterly cold night in January 2009. She lived in Banr Bazaar, a narrow street in our town of Mingora which is famous for its dancers and musicians. Shabana’s father said a group of men had knocked at her door and asked her to dance for them. She went to put on her dancing clothes, and when she returned to dance for them, they pulled out their guns and threatened to slit her throat. This happened after the 9 p.m. curfew and people heard her screaming, ‘I promise I’ll stop! I promise I won’t sing and dance again. Leave me, for God’s sake! I am a woman, a Muslim. Don’t kill me!’ Then shots rang out and her bullet-ridden body was dragged to Green Chowk. So many bodies had been left there that people started calling it the Bloody Square.

We heard about Shabana’s death the next morning. On Mullah FM, Fazlullah said she deserved to die for her immoral character and any other girls found performing in Banr Bazaar would be killed one by one. We used to be proud of our music and art in Swat, but now most of the dancers fled to Lahore or to Dubai. Musicians took out adverts in the papers saying they had stopped playing and were pledging to live pious lives to appease the Taliban.

People used to talk about Shabana’s bad character, but our men both wished to see her dance and also despised her because she was a dancer. A khan’s daughter can’t marry a barber’s son and a barber’s daughter can’t marry a khan’s son. We Pashtuns love shoes but don’t love the cobbler; we love our scarves and blankets but do not respect the weaver. Manual workers made a great contribution to our society but received no recognition, and this is the reason so many of them joined the Taliban - to finally achieve status and power.

So people loved to see Shabana dance but didn’t respect her, and when she was murdered they said nothing. Some even agreed with her killing, out of fear of the Taliban or because they were in favour of them. ‘Shabana was not a Muslim,’ they said. ‘She was bad, and it was right that she was killed.’

I can’t say that was the worst day. Around the time of Shabana’s murder every day seemed like the worst day; every moment was the worst. The bad news was everywhere: this person’s place bombed, this school blown up, public whippings. The stories were endless and overwhelming. A couple of weeks after Shabana’s murder, a teacher in Matta was killed when he refused to pull his shalwar above the ankle the way the Taliban wore theirs. He told them that nowhere in Islam is this required.

They hung him and then they shot his father.

I couldn’t understand what the Taliban were trying to do. ‘They are abusing our religion,’ I said in interviews. ‘How will you accept Islam if I put a gun to your head and say Islam is the true religion?

If they want every person in the world to be Muslim why don’t they show themselves to be good Muslims first?’

Regularly my father would come home shaken up due to the terrible things he had witnessed and heard about such as policemen beheaded, their heads paraded through the town. Even those who had defended Fazlullah at the start, believing his men were the real standard-bearers of Islam, and given him their gold, began to turn against him. My father told me about a woman who had donated generously to the Taliban while her husband was working abroad. When he came back and found out she had given away her gold he was furious. One night there was a small explosion in their village and the wife cried. ‘Don’t cry,’ said her husband. ‘That is the sound of your earrings and nose studs.

Now listen to the sound of your lockets and bangles.’

Yet still so few people spoke out. My father’s old rival in college politics Ihsan ul-Haq Haqqani had become a journalist in Islamabad and organised a conference on the situation in Swat. None of the lawyers and academics he invited from Swat to speak turned up. Only my father and some journalists went. It seemed that people had decided the Taliban were here to stay and they had better get along with them. ‘When you are in the Taliban you have 100 per cent life security,’ people would say.

That’s why they volunteered their young men. The Taliban would come to peoples’ houses, demanding money to buy Kalashnikovs, or they would ask them to hand over their sons to fight with them. Many of the rich fled. The poor had no choice but to stay and survive the best they could. So many of our men had gone to the mines or to the Gulf to work, leaving their families fatherless, the sons were easy prey.

The threats began to come closer to home. One day Ahmad Shah received a warning from unknown people that they would kill him, so for a while he left for Islamabad to try to raise awareness there of what was happening to our valley. One of the worst things about that period was when we started to doubt one another. Fingers were even pointed at my father. ‘Our people are being killed, but this Ziauddin is so outspoken and he’s still alive! He must be a secret agent!’ Actually he had been threatened too but hadn’t told us. He had given a press conference in Peshawar demanding that the military act against the Taliban and go after their commanders. Afterwards people told him his name was heard on Mullah FM in a threat from Shah Douran.

My father brushed it off. But I was worried. He was outspoken and involved in so many groups and committees that he often wouldn’t come home till midnight. He started to sleep at one of his friend’s houses to protect us in case the Taliban came for him. He couldn’t bear the thought of being killed in front of us. I could not sleep until he returned and I could lock the gate. When he was at home my mother would place a ladder in the back yard up to the outside wall so he could get down to the street below if he was in sudden danger. He laughed at the idea. ‘Maybe Atal the squirrel could make it but not me!’

My mother was always trying to think up plans for what she would do if the Taliban came. She thought of sleeping with a knife under her pillow. I said I could sneak into the toilet and call the police. My brothers and I thought of digging a tunnel. Once again I prayed for a magic wand to make the Taliban disappear.

One day I saw my little brother Atal digging furiously in the garden. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.‘Making a grave,’ he said. Our news bulletins were full of killings and death so it was natural for Atal to think of coffins and graves. Instead of hide and seek and cops and robbers, children were now playing Army vs Taliban. They made rockets from branches and used sticks for Kalashnikovs; these were their sports of terror.

There was no one to protect us. Our own deputy commissioner, Syed Javid, was going to Taliban meetings, praying in their mosque and leading their meetings. He became a perfect talib. One target of the Taliban were non-governmental organisations or NGOs, which they said were anti-Islam. When the NGOs received threatening letters from the Taliban and went to the DC to ask for his help, he wouldn’t even listen to them. Once in a meeting my father challenged him: ‘Whose orders are you representing? Fazlullah’s or the government’s?’ We say in Arabic, ‘People follow their king.’ When the highest authority in your district joins the Taliban, then Talibanisation becomes normal.

We like conspiracy theories in Pakistan and we had many. Some believed the authorities were deliberately encouraging the Taliban. They said the army wanted the Taliban in Swat because the Americans wanted to use an airbase there to launch their drones. With the Taliban in the valley, our government could say to the Americans we can’t help you because we have our own problems. It was also a way to answer growing American criticism that our military was helping the Taliban rather than trying to stop them. Now our government could respond, ‘You say we are taking your money and aiding these terrorists, but if that’s the case why are they attacking us too?’

‘The Taliban obviously have the support of unseen forces,’ said my father. ‘But what’s happening is not simple, and the more you want to understand the more complex it becomes.’

That year, 2008, the government even released Sufi Mohammad, the founder of the TNSM, from prison. He was said to be more moderate than his son-in-law Fazlullah, and there was hope that he would make a peace deal with the government to impose sharia law in Swat and release us from Taliban violence. My father was in favour of this. We knew this would not be the end, but my father argued that if we had shariat the Taliban would have nothing more to fight for. They should then put down their arms and live like ordinary men. If they did not, he said, this would expose them for what they really were.

The army still had their guns trained on the mountains overlooking Mingora. We would lie in bed listening to them boom boom all night. They would stop for five, ten or fifteen minutes and then start again the moment we drifted off to sleep. Sometimes we covered our ears or buried our heads under pillows, but the guns were close by and the noise was too loud to block out. Then the morning after, on TV, we would hear of more Taliban killings and wonder what the army was doing with all its booming cannons and why they could not even stop the daily broadcasts on Mullah FM.

Both the army and the Taliban were powerful. Sometimes their roadblocks were less than a kilometre apart on the same main roads. They would stop us but seemed unaware of each other’s presence. It was unbelievable. No one understood why we were not being defended. People would say they were two sides of the same coin. My father said we common people were like chaff caught between the two stones of a water mill. But he still wasn’t afraid. He said we should continue to speak out.

I am only human, and when I heard the guns my heart used to beat very fast. Sometimes I was very afraid but I said nothing, and it didn’t mean I would stop going to school. But fear is very powerful and in the end it was this fear that had made people turn against Shabana. Terror had made people cruel. The Taliban bulldozed both our Pashtun values and the values of Islam.

I tried to distract myself by reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which answered big questions such as how the universe began and whether time could run backwards. I was only eleven years old and already I wished it could.

We Pashtuns know the stone of revenge never decays, and when you do something wrong you will face the music. But when would that be? we continually asked ourselves.