In the square was a fountain and a Costa coffee bar with glass walls through which you could see men and women chatting and mixing in a way that would be unthinkable in Swat. The apartment was just off Broad Street, a famous road of shops, night clubs and stripbars. We went to the shops though I still did not like shopping. At nights our eyes were all out on stalks at the skimpy clothes that women wore – tiny shorts almost like knickers and bare legs on the highest heels even in the middle of winter. My mother was so horrified that she cried, ‘Gharqa shoma!’ – ‘I’m drowning’ – and begged my father, ‘Please take me to Dubai. I can’t live here!’ Later we laughed about it. ‘Are their legs made of iron so they don’t feel cold?’ asked my mother.

We were warned not to be out late on Broad Street on weekend nights as it could be dangerous. This made us laugh. How could it be unsafe compared to where we had come from? Were there Taliban beheading people? I didn’t tell my parents but I flinched if an Asian-looking man came close. I thought everyone had a gun.

Once a week I Skyped my friends back in Mingora, and they told me they were still keeping a seat in class for me. The teacher had brought to class my Pakistan Studies exam from that day, the day of the shooting. I had got 75 out of 75, but as I never did the others, Malka-e-Noor got first in class. Though I had been getting some schooling at the hospital, I worried that I was falling behind. Now the competition was between Malka-e-Noor and Moniba. ‘It’s boring without you to compete with,’ Malka-e-Noor told me.

I was getting stronger every day, but my surgery wasn’t over. I still had the top of my skull missing. The doctors were also concerned about my hearing. When I went for walks I could not understand the words of my mother and father in a crowd. And inside my ear was a tinny noise which only I could hear. On Saturday, 2 February I was back in QEH to be operated on – this time by a woman. Her name was Anwen White. First she removed the skull bone from my tummy, but after looking at it decided not to put it back as it had not kept well and there was a risk of infection. Instead she did something called a titanium cranioplasty (I now know lots of medical terms!) and fitted a specially moulded titanium plate in my head with eight screws to do the job of a skull and protect my brain.

While I was in surgery Mr Irving, the surgeon who had repaired my nerve, also had a solution for my damaged left eardrum. He put a small electronic device called a cochlear implant inside my head near the ear and told me that in a month they would fit the external part on my head, and then I should be able to hear. I was in theatre five hours and I’d had three operations, but I didn’t feel like I’d had major surgery and was back in the apartment within five days. A few weeks later when the receiver was fitted behind my ear, my left ear heard beep beep for the first time. To start with, everything was like a robot sound, but soon it was getting better and better.

We human beings don’t realise how great God is. He has given us an extraordinary brain and a sensitive loving heart. He has blessed us with two lips to talk and express our feelings, two eyes which see a world of colours and beauty, two feet which walk on the road of life, two hands to work for us, a nose which smells the beauty of fragrance, and two ears to hear the words of love. As I found with my ear, no one knows how much power they have in their each and every organ until they lose one.

I thank Allah for the hard-working doctors, for my recovery and for sending us to this world where we may struggle for our survival. Some people choose good ways and some choose bad ways. One person’s bullet hit me. It swelled my brain, stole my hearing and cut the nerve of the left side of my face in the space of a second. And after that one second there were millions of people praying for my life and talented doctors who gave me my own body back. I was a good girl. In my heart I had only the desire to help people. It wasn’t about the awards or the money. I always prayed to God, ‘I want to help people and please help me to do that.’

A talib fires three shots at point-blank range at three girls in a van and doesn’t kill any of them. This seems an unlikely story, and people say I have made a miraculous recovery. My friend Shazia, who was hit twice, was offered a scholarship at Atlantic College in Wales so has also come to the UK for schooling, and I hope Kainat will too. I know God stopped me from going to the grave. It feels like this life is a second life. People prayed to God to spare me, and I was spared for a reason – to use my life for helping people. When people talk about the way I was shot and what happened I think it’s the story of Malala, ‘a girl shot by the Taliban’; I don’t feel it’s a story about me at all.

EPILOGUE

One Child, One Teacher, One Book, One Pen . . .

Birmingham, August 2013

IN MARCH WE moved from the apartment to a rented house on a leafy street, but it feels as if we are camping in it. All our belongings are still in Swat. Everywhere there are cardboard boxes full of the kind letters and cards that people send, and in one room stands a piano none of us can play. My mother complains about the murals of Greek gods on the walls and carved cherubs on the ceilings watching her.

Our house feels big and empty. It sits behind an electric iron gate and it sometimes seems as if we are in what we in Pakistan call a sub-jail, a kind of luxury house arrest. At the back there is a large garden with lots of trees and a green lawn for me and my brothers to play cricket on. But there are no rooftops to play on, no children fighting with kites in the streets, no neighbours coming in to borrow a plate of rice or for us to ask for three tomatoes. We are just a wall’s distance from the next house but it feels miles away.

If I look out, I see my mother wandering around the garden, her head covered by a shawl, feeding the birds. She looks as if she is singing, maybe that tapa she likes: ‘Don’t kill doves in the garden./ You kill one and the others won’t come.’ She is giving the birds the remains of our dinner from the night before and there are tears in her eyes. We eat much the same here as we did back home – rice and meat for lunch and dinner, while breakfast is fried eggs, chapatis and sometimes also honey, a tradition started by my little brother Atal, though his favourite Birmingham discovery is Nutella sandwiches. But there are always leftovers. My mother is sad about the waste of food. I know she is remembering all the children we fed in our house, so they would not go to school on empty stomachs, and wondering how they are faring now.

When I came home from school in Mingora I never found my house without people in it; now I can’t believe that I used to plead for a day of peace and some privacy to do my school work. Here the only sound is of the birds and Khushal’s Xbox. I sit alone in my room doing a jigsaw puzzle and long for guests.

We didn’t have much money and my parents knew what it was like to be hungry. My mother never turned anyone away. Once a poor woman came, hot, hungry and thirsty, to our door. My mother let her in and gave her food and the woman was so happy. ‘I touched every door in the mohalla and this was the only one open,’ she said. ‘May God always keep your door open, wherever you are.’

I know my mother is lonely. She was very sociable – all the women of the neighbourhood used to gather in the afternoons on our back porch and women who worked in other houses came to rest. Now she is always on the phone to everyone back home. It’s hard for her here as she does not speak any English. Our house has all these facilities, but when she arrived they were all mysteries to her and someone had to show us how to use the oven, washing machine and the TV.