He laughed. ‘You already have lots of problems and we are doing lots for you,’ he replied. ‘We have pledged billions of dollars in economic aid; we are working with your government on providing electricity, gas . . . but your country faces a lot of problems.’

I did an interview with a radio station called Power 99. They liked it very much and told us they had a guesthouse in Abbottabad where we could all go. We stayed there for a week and to my joy I heard Moniba was also in Abbottabad, as was one of our teachers and another friend. Moniba and I had not spoken since our fight on the last day before becoming IDPs. We arranged to meet in a park, and I brought her Pepsi and biscuits. ‘It was all your fault,’ she told me. I agreed. I didn’t mind; I just wanted to be friends.

Our week at the guesthouse soon ended and we went to Haripur, where one of my aunts lived. It was our fourth city in two months. I knew we were better off than those who lived in the camps, queuing for food and water for hours under the hot sun, but I missed my valley. It was there I spent my twelfth birthday. Nobody remembered. Even my father forgot, he was so busy hopping about. I was upset and recalled how different my eleventh birthday had been. I had shared a cake with my friends. There were balloons and I had made the same wish I was making on my twelfth birthday, but this time there was no cake and there were no candles to blow out. Once again I wished for peace in our valley.

PART THREE

Three Girls, Three Bullets

Sir de pa lowara tega kegda

Praday watan de paki nishta balakhtona

O Wayfarer! Rest your head on the stony cobblestone

It is a foreign land – not the city of your kings!

16

The Valley of Sorrows

IT ALL SEEMED like a bad dream. We had been away from our valley for almost three months and as we drove back past

Churchill’s Picket, past the ancient ruins on the hill and the giant Buddhist stupa, we saw the wide Swat River and my father began to weep. Swat seemed to be under complete military control. The vehicle we were in even had to pass through an explosives check before we could head up the Malakand Pass. Once we got over the other side and down into the valley it seemed there were army checkpoints everywhere and soldiers had made nests for their machine guns on so many of the rooftops.

As we drove through villages we saw buildings in ruins and burned-out vehicles. It made me think of old war movies or the video games my brother Khushal loves to play. When we reached Mingora we were shocked. The army and Taliban had fought street to street and almost every wall was pockmarked with bullet holes. There was the rubble of blown-up buildings which the Taliban had used as hideouts, and piles of wreckage, twisted metal and smashed-up signs. Most of the shops had heavy metal shutters; those that didn’t had been looted. The city was silent and emptied of people and traffic as if a plague had descended. The strangest sight of all was the bus station. Usually it’s a complete confusion of Flying Coaches and rickshaws, but now it was completely deserted. We even saw plants growing up through the cracks in the paving. We had never seen our city like this.

At least there was no sign of the Taliban.

It was 24 July 2009, a week after our prime minister had announced that the Taliban had been cleared out. He promised that the gas supply had been restored and that the banks were reopening, and called on the people of Swat to return. In the end as many as half of its 1.8 million population had left our valley. From what we could see, most of them weren’t convinced it was safe to return.

As we drew close to home we all fell silent, even my little brother, Atal the chatterbox. Our home was near Circuit House, the army headquarters, so we were worried it might have been destroyed in the shelling. We’d also heard that many homes had been looted. We held our breath as my father unlocked the gate. The first thing we saw was that in the three months we’d been away the garden had become a jungle.

My brothers immediately rushed off to check on their pet chickens. They came back crying. All that remained of the chickens was a pile of feathers and the bones of their small bodies entangled as if they had died in an embrace. They had starved to death.

I felt so sad for my brothers but I had to check on something of my own. To my joy I found my school bag still packed with my books, and I gave thanks that my prayers had been answered and that they were safe. I took out my books one by one and just stared at them. Maths, physics, Urdu, English, Pashto, chemistry, biology, Islamiyat, Pakistan studies. Finally I would be able to return to school without fear.

Then I went and sat on my bed. I was overwhelmed.

We were lucky our house had not been broken into. Four or five of the houses on our street had been looted and TVs and gold jewellery had been taken. Safina’s mother next door had deposited her gold in a bank vault for safekeeping and even that had been looted.

My father was anxious to check on the school. I went with him. We found that the building opposite the girls’ school had been hit by a missile but the school itself looked intact. For some reason my father’s keys would not work so we found a boy who climbed over the wall and opened it from the inside. We ran up the steps anticipating the worst.

‘Someone has been in here,’ my father said as soon as we entered the courtyard. There were cigarette stubs and empty food wrappers all over the floor. Chairs had been upended and the space was a mess. My father had taken down the Khushal School sign and left it in the courtyard. It was leaning against the wall and I screamed as we lifted it. Underneath were the rotting heads of goats. It looked like the remains of someone’s dinner.

Then we went into the classrooms. Anti-Taliban slogans were scrawled all over the walls. Someone had written army zindabad (Long live the army) on a whiteboard in permanent marker. Now we knew who had been living there. One soldier had even written corny love poems in one of my classmate’s diaries. Bullet casings littered the floor. The soldiers had made a hole in the wall through which you could see the city below. Maybe they had even shot at people through that hole. I felt sorry that our precious school had become a battlefield.

While we were looking around we heard someone banging on the door downstairs. ‘Don’t open it, Malala!’ my father ordered.

In his office my father found a letter left by the army. It blamed citizens like us for allowing the Taliban to control Swat. ‘We have lost so many of the precious lives of our soldiers and this is due to your negligence. Long live Pak Army,’ he read.

‘This is typical,’ he said. ‘We people of Swat were first seduced by the Taliban, then killed by them and now blamed for them. Seduced, killed and blamed.’

In some ways the army did not seem very different to the militants. One of our neighbours told us he had even seen them leaving the bodies of dead Taliban in the streets for all to see. Now their helicopters flew in pairs overhead like big black buzzing insects, and when we walked home we stayed close to the walls so they wouldn’t see us.

We heard that thousands of people had been arrested including boys as young as eight who had been brainwashed to train for suicide bombing missions. The army was sending them to a special camp for jihadis to de-radicalise them. One of the people arrested was our old Urdu teacher who had refused to teach girls and had instead gone to help Fazlullah’s men collect and destroy CDs and DVDs.