My father was in a fix. Then we remembered General Abbas and his visiting card. It was because of the army operation to expel the Taliban that we had all had to leave and found ourselves in this situation now. So Madam Maryam and I wrote an email to General Abbas explaining the situation. He was very kind and sent us 1,100,000 rupees so my father could pay everyone three months’ back pay. The teachers were so happy. Most had never received so much money at once. Miss Hera called my father in tears, grateful that her wedding could go ahead as planned.

This didn’t mean we went easy on the army. We were very unhappy about the army’s failure to capture the Taliban leadership, and my father and I continued to give lots of interviews. We were often joined by my father’s friend Zahid Khan, a fellow member of the Swat Qaumi Jirga. He was also the president of the All Swat Hotels Association, so he was particularly eager for life to go back to normal so that tourists could return. Like my father he was very outspoken and had been threatened too. One night in November 2009 he had had a very narrow escape. Zahid Khan was returning to his home from a meeting with army officials at Circuit House late at night when he was ambushed. Fortunately, many of his family live in the same area and they exchanged fire with the attackers, forcing them to flee.

Then on 1 December 2009 there was a suicide attack on a well-known local ANP politician and member of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assembly, Dr Shamsher Ali Khan. He had been greeting friends and constituents for Eid at his hujra, just a mile from Imam Deri where Fazlullah’s headquarters had been, when the bomb went off. Dr Shamsher had been an outspoken critic of the Taliban. He died on the spot and nine other people were injured. People said the bomber was about eighteen years old. The police found his legs and other parts of his body.

A couple of weeks after that our school was asked to take part in the District Child Assembly Swat, which had been set up by the charity UNICEF and by the Khpal Kor (My Home) Foundation for orphans. Sixty students from all over Swat had been chosen as members. They were mostly boys although eleven girls from my school went along. The first meeting was in a hall with lots of politicians and activists. We held an election for speaker and I won! It was strange to stand up there on the stage and have people address me as Madam Speaker, but it felt good to have our voices heard. The assembly was elected for a year and we met almost every month. We passed nine resolutions calling for an end to child labour and asking for help to send the disabled and street children to school, as well as for the reconstruction of all the schools destroyed by the Taliban. Once the resolutions were agreed, they were sent to officials and a handful were even acted on.

Moniba, Ayesha and I also started learning about journalism from a British organisation called the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which ran a project called Open Minds Pakistan. It was fun learning how to report issues properly. I had become interested in journalism after seeing how my own words could make a difference and also from watching the Ugly Betty DVDs about life at an American magazine. This was a bit different – when we wrote about subjects close to our hearts these were topics like extremism and the Taliban rather than clothes and hairstyles.

All too soon it was another year of exams. I beat Malka-e-Noor for first place again although it was close. Our headmistress had tried to persuade her to be a school prefect but she said she couldn’t do anything that might distract her from her studies. ‘You should be more like Malala and do other things,’ said Madam Maryam. ‘It’s just as important as your education. Work isn’t everything.’ But I couldn’t blame her. She really wanted to please her parents, particularly her mother.

It wasn’t the same Swat as before – maybe it never would be – but it was returning to normal. Even some of the dancers of Banr Bazaar had moved back, although they were mostly making DVDs to sell, rather than performing live. We enjoyed peace festivals with music and dancing, unheard of under the Taliban. My father organised one of the festivals in Marghazar and invited those who had hosted the IDPs in the lower districts as a thank you. There was music all night long.

Things often seemed to happen around my birthday, and around the time I turned thirteen in July 2010 the rain came. We normally don’t have monsoons in Swat and at first we were happy, thinking the rain would mean a good harvest. But it was relentless and so heavy that you couldn’t even see the person standing in front of you. Environmentalists had warned that our mountains had been stripped of trees by the Taliban and timber smugglers. Soon muddy floods were raging down the valleys, sweeping away everything in their wake.

We were in school when the floods started and were sent home. But there was so much water that the bridge across the dirty stream was submerged so we had to find another way. The next bridge we came to was also submerged but the water wasn’t too deep so we splashed our way across. It smelt foul. We were wet and filthy by the time we got home.

The next day we heard that the school had been flooded. It took days for the water to drain away and when we returned we could see chest-high tide marks on the walls. There was mud, mud, mud everywhere. Our desks and chairs were covered with it. The classrooms smelt disgusting. There was so much damage that it cost my father 90,000 rupees to repair – equivalent to the monthly fees for ninety students.

It was the same story throughout Pakistan. The mighty Indus River, which flows from the Himalayas down through KPK and Punjab to Karachi and the Arabian Sea, and of which we are so proud, had turned into a raging torrent and burst its banks. Roads, crops and entire villages were washed away. Around 2,000 people drowned and 14 million people were affected. Many of them lost their homes and 7,000 schools were destroyed. It was the worst flood in living memory. The head of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, called it a ‘slow-motion tsunami’. We read that more lives had been affected and more damage had been caused by the floods than the Asian tsunami, our 2005 earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake combined.

Swat was one of the places most affected. Thirty-four of our forty-two bridges had been washed away, cutting off much of the valley. Electric pylons had been smashed into pieces so we had no power. Our own street was on a hill so we were a bit better protected from the overflowing river, but we shivered at the sound of it, a growling, heavy-breathing dragon devouring everything in its path. The riverside hotels and restaurants where tourists used to eat trout and enjoy the views were all destroyed. The tourist areas were the hardest hit parts of Swat. Hill station resorts like Malam Jabba, Madyan and Bahrain were devastated, their hotels and bazaars in ruins.

We soon heard from our relatives that the damage in Shangla was unimaginable. The main road to our village from Alpuri, the capital of Shangla, had been washed away, and entire villages were submerged. Many of the houses on the hilly terraces of Karshat, Shahpur and Barkana had been taken by mudslides. My mother’s family home, where Uncle Faiz Mohammad lived, was still standing but the road it stood on had vanished.

People had desperately tried to protect what little they owned, moving their animals to higher ground, but the floods saturated the corn they had harvested, destroyed the orchards and drowned many of the buffaloes. The villagers were helpless. They had no power, as all their makeshift hydroelectric projects had been smashed to pieces. They had no clean water as the river was brown with wreckage and debris. So strong was the force of the water that even concrete buildings had been reduced to rubble. The school, hospital and electricity station along the main road were all razed to the ground.