‘No, I have to do this,’ said Nawab Ali.

My father came home fuming. ‘If people volunteered in the same way to construct schools or roads or even clear the river of plastic wrappers, by God, Pakistan would become a paradise within a year,’ he said. ‘The only charity they know is to give to mosque and madrasa.’

A few weeks later the same teacher told him that he could no longer teach girls as ‘the maulana doesn’t like it’.

My father tried to change his mind. ‘I agree that female teachers should educate girls,’ he said. ‘But first we need to educate our girls so they can become teachers!’

One day Sufi Mohammad proclaimed from jail that there should be no education for women even at girls’ madrasas. ‘If someone can show any example in history where Islam allows a female madrasa, they can come and piss on my beard,’ he said. Then the Radio Mullah turned his attention to schools. He began speaking against school administrators and congratulating girls by name who left school. ‘Miss So-and-so has stopped going to school and will go to heaven,’ he’d say, or, ‘Miss X of Y village has stopped education at Class 5. I congratulate her.’ Girls like me who still went to school he called buffaloes and sheep.

My friends and I couldn’t understand why it was so wrong. ‘Why don’t they want girls to go to school?’ I asked my father.

‘They are scared of the pen,’ he replied.

Then another teacher at our school, a maths teacher with long hair, also refused to teach girls. My father fired him, but some other teachers were worried and sent a delegation to his office. ‘Sir, don’t do this,’ they pleaded. ‘These are bad days. Let him stay and we will cover for him.’

Every day it seemed a new edict came. Fazlullah closed beauty parlours and banned shaving so there was no work for barbers. My father, who only has a moustache, insisted he would not grow a beard for the Taliban. The Taliban told women not to go to the bazaar. I didn’t mind not going to the Cheena Bazaar. I didn’t enjoy shopping, unlike my mother, who liked beautiful clothes even though we didn’t have much money. My mother always told me, ‘Hide your face – people are looking at you.’

I would reply, ‘It doesn’t matter; I’m also looking at them,’ and she’d get so cross.

My mother and her friends were upset about not being able to go shopping, particularly in the days before the Eid holidays, when we beautify ourselves and go to the stalls lit up by fairy lights that sell bangles and henna. All of that stopped. The women would not be attacked if they went to the markets, but the Taliban would shout at them and threaten them until they stayed at home. One Talib could intimidate a whole village. We children were cross too. Normally there are new film releases for the holidays, but Fazlullah had closed the DVD shops. Around this time my mother also got tired of Fazlullah, especially when he began to preach against education and insist that those who went to school would also go to hell.

Next Fazlullah began holding a shura, a kind of local court. People liked this as justice was speedy, unlike in Pakistani courts, where you could wait years and have to pay bribes to be heard. People began going to Fazlullah and his men to resolve grievances about anything from business matters to personal feuds. ‘I had a thirty-year-old problem and it’s been resolved in one go,’ one man told my father. The punishments decreed by Fazlullah’s shura included public whippings, which we had never seen before. One of my father’s friends told him he had seen three men publicly flogged after the shura had found them guilty of involvement in the abduction of two women. A stage was set up near Fazlullah’s centre, and after going to hear him give Friday prayers, hundreds of people gathered to watch the floggings, shouting ‘Allahu akbar! ’ – ‘God is great!’ with each lash. Sometimes Fazlullah appeared galloping in on a black horse.

His men stopped health workers giving polio drops, saying the vaccinations were an American plot to make Muslim women infertile so that the people of Swat would die out. ‘To cure a disease before its onset is not in accordance with sharia law,’ said Fazlullah on the radio. ‘You will not find a single child to drink a drop of the vaccine anywhere in Swat.’

Fazlullah’s men patrolled the streets looking for offenders against his decrees just like the Taliban morality police we had heard about in Afghanistan. They set up volunteer traffic police called Falcon Commandos, who drove through the streets with machine guns mounted on top of their pick-up trucks.

Some people were happy. One day my father ran into his bank manager. ‘One good thing Fazlullah is doing is banning ladies and girls from going to the Cheena Bazaar, which saves us men money,’ he said. Few spoke out. My father complained that most people were like our local barber, who one day grumbled to my father that he had only eighty rupees in his till, less than a tenth of what his takings used to be. Just the day before the barber had told a journalist that the Taliban were good Muslims.

After Mullah FM had been on air for about a year, Fazlullah became more aggressive. His brother Maulana Liaquat, along with three of Liaquat’s sons, were among those killed in an American drone attack on the madrasa in Bajaur at the end of October 2006. Eighty people were killed including boys as young as twelve, some of whom had come from Swat. We were all horrified by the attack and people swore revenge. Ten days later a suicide bomber blew himself up in the army barracks at Dargai, on the way from Islamabad to Swat, and killed forty-two Pakistani soldiers. At that time suicide bombings were rare in Pakistan – there were six in total that year – and it was the biggest attack that had ever been carried out by Pakistani militants.

At Eid we usually sacrifice animals like goats or sheep. But Fazlullah said, ‘On this Eid two-legged animals will be sacrificed.’ We soon saw what he meant. His men began killing khans and political activists from secular and nationalist parties, especially the Awami National Party (ANP). In January 2007 a close friend of one of my father’s friends was kidnapped in his village by eighty masked gunmen. His name was Malak Bakht Baidar. He was from a wealthy khan family and the local vice president of the ANP. His body was found dumped in his family’s ancestral graveyard. His legs and arms had all been broken. It was the first targeted killing in Swat, and people said it was because he had helped the army find Taliban hideouts.

The authorities turned a blind eye. Our provincial government was still made up of mullah parties who wouldn’t criticise anyone who claimed to be fighting for Islam. At first we thought we were safe in Mingora, the biggest town in Swat. But Fazlullah’s headquarters were just a few miles away, and even though the Taliban were not near our house they were in the markets, in the streets and the hills. Danger began to creep closer.

During Eid we went to our family village as usual. I was in my cousin’s car, and as we drove through a river where the road had been washed away we had to stop at a Taliban checkpoint. I was in the back with my mother. My cousin quickly gave us his music cassettes to hide in our purses. The Taliban were dressed in black and carried Kalashnikovs. They told us, ‘Sisters, you are bringing shame. You must wear burqas.’

When we arrived back at school after Eid, we saw a letter taped to the gate. ‘Sir, the school you are running is Western and infidel,’ it said. ‘You teach girls and have a uniform that is un-Islamic. Stop this or you will be in trouble and your children will weep and cry for you.’ It was signed, ‘Fedayeen of Islam’.

My father decided to change the boys’ uniform from shirt and trousers to shalwar kamiz, baggy pyjama-like trousers and a long shirt. Ours remained a royal-blue shalwar kamiz with a white dupatta, or headscarf, and we were advised to keep our heads covered coming in and out of school.