Aunt Najma was in tears. She had never seen the sea before. My family and I sat on the rocks, gazing across the water, breathing in the salt tang of the Arabian Sea. It was such a big expanse, surely no one could know where it ended. At that moment I was very happy. “One day I want to cross this sea,” I said.
“What is she saying?” asked my aunt, as if I were talking about something impossible. I was still trying to get my head around the fact that she had been living in the seaside city of Karachi for thirty years and yet had never actually laid eyes on the ocean. Her husband would not take her to the beach, and even if she had somehow slipped out of the house, she would not have been able to follow the signs to the sea because she could not read.
I sat on the rocks and thought about the fact that across the water were lands where women were free. In Pakistan we had had a woman prime minister and in Islamabad I had met those impressive working women, yet the fact was that we were a country where almost all the women depend entirely on men. My headmistress Maryam was a strong educated woman, but in our society she could not live on her own and come to work. She had to be living with a husband, brother or parents.
In Pakistan when women say they want independence, people think this means we don’t want to obey our fathers, brothers or husbands. But it does not mean that. It means we want to make decisions for ourselves. We want to be free to go to school or to go to work. Nowhere is it written in the Quran that a woman should be dependent on a man. The word has not come down from the heavens to tell us that every woman should listen to a man.
“You are a million miles away, Jani,” said my father, interrupting my thoughts. “What are you dreaming about?”
“Just about crossing oceans, Aba,” I replied.
“Forget all that!” shouted my brother Atal. “We’re at the beach and I want to go for a camel ride!”
It was January 2012 and we were in Karachi as guests of Geo TV after the Sindh government announced they were renaming a girls’ secondary school on Mission Road in my honor. My brother Khushal was now at school in Abbottabad, so it was just me, my parents and Atal. We flew to Karachi, and it was the first time any of us had ever been on a plane. The journey was just two hours, which I found incredible. It would have taken us at least two days by bus. On the plane we noticed that some people could not find their seats because they could not read letters and numbers. I had a window seat and could see the deserts and mountains of our land below me. As we headed south the land became more parched. I was already missing the green of Swat. I could see why when our people go to Karachi to work they always want to be buried in the cool of our valley.
Driving from the airport to the hostel, I was amazed by the number of people and houses and cars. Karachi is one of the biggest cities on earth. It was strange to think it was just a port of 300,000 people when Pakistan was created. Mohammad Ali Jinnah lived there and made it our first capital, and it was soon flooded by millions of Muslim refugees from India known as mohajirs which means “immigrants” and speak Urdu. Today it has around twenty million people. It’s actually the largest Pashtun city in the world, even though it’s far from our lands; between five and seven million Pashtuns have gone there to work.
Unfortunately, Karachi had also become a very violent city and there is always fighting between the mohajirs and Pashtuns. The mohajir areas we saw all seemed very organized and neat whereas the Pashtun areas were dirty and chaotic. The mohajirs almost all support a party called the MQM led by Altaf Hussain, who lives in exile in London and communicates with his people by Skype. The MQM is a very organized movement, and the mohajir community sticks together. By contrast we Pashtuns are very divided, some following Imran Khan because he’s a great cricketer, some Maulana Fazlur Rehman because his party JUI is Islamic, some the secular ANP because it’s a Pashtun nationalist party, and some the PPP of Benazir Bhutto or the PML(N) of Nawaz Sharif.
We went to the Sindh assembly, where I was applauded by all the members. Then we went to visit some schools including the one that was being named after me. I made a speech about the importance of education and also talked about Benazir Bhutto, as this was her city. “We must all work together for the rights of girls,” I said. The children sang for me and I was presented with a painting of me looking up at the sky. It was both odd and wonderful to see my name on a school just like my namesake, Malalai of Maiwand, after whom so many schools in Afghanistan are named. In the next school holidays my father and I planned to go and talk to parents and children in the distant hilly areas of Swat about the importance of learning to read and write. “We will be like preachers of education,” I said.
Later that day we visited my aunt and uncle. They lived in a very small house and so at last my father understood why they had refused to take him in when he was a student. On the way we passed through Aashiqan e-Rasool Square and were shocked to see a picture of the murderer of Governor Salman Taseer decorated with garlands of rose petals as though he were a saint. My father was angry. “In a city of twenty million people is there not one person who will take this down?”
There was one important place we had to include in our visit to Karachi besides our outings to the sea or the huge bazaars, where my mother bought lots of clothes. We needed to visit the mausoleum of our founder and great leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah. This is a very peaceful building of white marble and somehow seemed separate from the hustle and bustle of the city. It felt sacred to us. Benazir was on her way there to make her first speech on her return to Pakistan when her bus was blown up.
The guard explained that the tomb in the main room under a giant chandelier from China did not contain Jinnah’s body. The real tomb is on the floor below, where he lies alongside his sister Fatima, who died much later. Next to it is the tomb of our first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was assassinated.
Afterward we went into the small museum at the back, which had displays of the special white bow ties Jinnah used to order from Paris, his three-piece suits tailored in London, his golf clubs and a special traveling box with drawers for twelve pairs of shoes including his favorite two-tone brogues. The walls were covered with photographs. In the ones from the early days of Pakistan you could easily see from his thin sunken face that Jinnah was dying. His skin looked paper-thin. But at the time it was kept a secret. Jinnah smoked fifty cigarettes a day. His body was riddled with TB and lung cancer when Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy of India, agreed that India would be divided at independence. Afterward he said that had he known Jinnah was dying he would have delayed and there would have been no Pakistan. As it was, Jinnah died in September 1948, just over a year later. Then, a little more than three years after that, our first prime minister was killed. Right from the start we were an unlucky country.
Some of Jinnah’s most famous speeches were displayed. There was the one about people of all religions being free to worship in the new Pakistan. And another where he had spoken about the important role of women. I wanted to see pictures of the women in his life. But his wife died young and was a Parsee, and their only daughter Dina stayed in India and married a Parsee, which didn’t sit very well in the new Muslim homeland. Now she lives in New York. So most of the pictures I found were of his sister Fatima.
It was hard to visit that place and read those speeches without thinking that Jinnah would be very disappointed in Pakistan. He would probably say that this was not the country he had wanted. He wished us to be independent, to be tolerant, to be kind to each other. He wanted everyone to be free whatever their beliefs.
“Would it have been better if we had not become independent but stayed part of India?” I asked my father. It seemed to me that before Pakistan there was endless fighting between Hindus and Muslims. Then even when we got our own country there was still fighting, but this time it was between mohajirs and Pashtuns and between Sunnis and Shias. Instead of celebrating each other, our four provinces struggle to get along. Sindhis often talk of separation and in Baluchistan there is an ongoing war which gets talked about very little because it is so remote. Did all this fighting mean we needed to divide our country yet again?
When we left the museum some young men with flags were protesting outside. They told us they were Seraiki speakers from southern Punjab and wanted their own province.
There seemed to be so many things about which people were fighting. If Christians, Hindus or Jews are really our enemies, as so many say, why are we Muslims fighting with each other? Our people have become misguided. They think their greatest concern is defending Islam and are being led astray by those like the Taliban who deliberately misinterpret the Quran. We should focus on practical issues. We have so many people in our country who are illiterate. And many women have no education at all. We live in a place where schools are blown up. We have no reliable electricity supply. Not a single day passes without the killing of at least one Pakistani.
One day a lady called Shehla Anjum turned up at our hostel. She was a Pakistani journalist living in Alaska and wanted to meet me after she had seen the documentary about us on the New York Times website. She chatted with me for a while, then with my father. I noticed she had tears in her eyes. Then she asked my father, “Did you know, Ziauddin, that the Taliban have threatened this innocent girl?” We didn’t know what she was talking about, so she went on the Internet and showed us that the Taliban had that day issued threats against two women—Sha Begum, an activist in Dir, and me, Malala. “These two are spreading secularism and should be killed,” it said. I didn’t take it seriously, as there are so many things on the Internet and I thought we would have heard from elsewhere if it were real.
That evening my father received a call from the family who had been sharing our home for the last eighteen months. Their previous home had a mud roof which leaked in the rain and we had two spare rooms, so they stayed with us for a nominal rent and their children went to our school for free. They had three children, and we liked them living with us as we all played cops and robbers on the roof. They told my father that the police had turned up at the house and demanded to know whether we had received any threats. When my father heard this, he called the deputy superintendent, who asked him the same thing. My father asked, “Why, have you any information?” The officer asked to see my father when we were back in Swat.
After that my father was restless and could not enjoy Karachi. I could see my mother and father were both very upset. I knew my mother was still mourning my aunt and they had been feeling uneasy about me receiving so many awards, but it seemed to be about more than that. “Why are you like this?” I asked. “You’re worried about something but you’re not telling us.”
Then they told me about the call from home and that they were taking the threats seriously. I don’t know why, but hearing I was being targeted did not worry me. It seemed to me that everyone knows they will die one day. My feeling was nobody can stop death; it doesn’t matter if it comes from a Talib or cancer. So I should do whatever I want to do.
“Maybe we should stop our campaigning, Jani, and go into hibernation for a time,” said my father.
“How can we do that?” I replied. “You were the one who said if we believe in something greater than our lives, then our voices will only multiply even if we are dead. We can’t disown our campaign!”
People were asking me to speak at events. How could I refuse, saying there was a security problem? We couldn’t do that, especially not as proud Pashtuns. My father always says that heroism is in the Pashtun DNA.
Still it was with a heavy heart that we returned to Swat. When my father went to the police they showed him a file on me. They told him that my national and international profile meant I had attracted attention and death threats from the Taliban and that I needed protection. They offered us guards, but my father was reluctant. Many elders in Swat had been killed despite having bodyguards and the Punjab governor had been killed by his own bodyguard. He also thought armed guards would alarm the parents of the students at school, and he didn’t want to put others at risk. When he had had threats before he always said, “Let them kill me, but I’ll be killed alone.”
He suggested sending me to boarding school in Abbottabad like Khushal, but I didn’t want to go. He also met the local army colonel, who said being in college in Abbottabad would not really be any safer and that as long as I kept a low profile we would be OK in Swat. So when the government of KPK offered to make me a peace ambassador, my father said it was better to refuse.
At home I started bolting the main gate of our house at night. “She smells the threat,” my mother told my father. He was very unhappy. He kept telling me to draw the curtains in my room at night, but I would not.
“Aba, this is a very strange situation,” I told him. “When there was Talibanization we were safe; now there are no Taliban we are unsafe.”
“Yes, Malala,” he replied. “Now the Talibanization is especially for us, for those like you and me who continue to speak out. The rest of Swat is OK. The rickshaw drivers, the shopkeepers are all safe. This is Talibanization for particular people, and we are among them.”
There was another downside to receiving those awards—I was missing a lot of school. After the exams in March the cup that went into my new cabinet was for second place.