Pizza-loving, double jointed and scared of her teachers:

Meet the real Malala

by Louise Carpenter

Malala Yousafzai sits very still, a rainbow of colour in the corner of a vast, drab, empty room. Security personnel with earpieces and walkie-talkie equipment mill around downstairs; watching, patrolling. They spill out on to the street around us, a secret location on the outskirts of west London.

It’s a reminder, as if one were needed, that Malala – shot in the head on October 9, 2012, aged 15, on her way home from school in the Swat Valley, Pakistan, for speaking out against the Taliban and its ban on female education – is still under threat. She is guarded, at least for public events like today, the launch of a new documentary film about her life: ‘He Named Me Malala’. Her mother, Toor Pekai, a beautiful woman with green eyes, prays for her every day, Malala tells me. “Please God, keep Malala safe today,” Pekai said this morning back in Birmingham, where the family have lived since Malala was shot. It’s a prayer just like those Malala used to say to protect her father, Ziauddin, back in Pakistan when he was the main campaigner in the family.

Once, they found a letter from the Taliban taped to the gate of the Khushal Girls High School, which he ran and Malala attended. “Sir,” it said, “the school you are running is Western and infidel. You teach girls and you have a uniform that is un-Islamic. ‘Stop this or you will be in trouble and your children will weep and cry for you.” Ziauddin responded the next day in a letter to a newspaper: “Please don’t harm my schoolchildren because the God you believe in is the same God they pray to every day. You can take my life but please don’t kill my schoolchildren.”

Malala began speaking out about herself back in 2009 when she was just 12, first writing a blog for BBC Urdu under the name ‘Gul Makai’, and then finally stepping up, unbidden, to the microphone with face uncovered. “It is my own passion, my own choice that I said I will speak,” she says now of the subsequent accusations that her father made her a figurehead for his own message.

I am Malala

It is what led her to be singled out among her classmates – all of them clever girls committed to the cause – by the masked gunman. “Who is Malala?” the Taliban fighter asked. Then he shot her. Everything she has done since has been in defiance of the attempt to silence her. Her book, ‘I am Malala: the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban’ (2013), and its sister book for children, ‘Malala: the Girl who Stood up For Education and Changed the World’ (2014), are responses to that deadly question: Who is Malala? The Malala Fund, set up two years ago, campaigns for girls’ secondary education throughout the world. Last year, Malala was the youngest recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Malala is here with her father, although I am to meet her alone. They are always together at her international speaking engagements, meetings (at the UN, White House) and trips (Syria, Nigeria, the US) – and so it is at the international launch of ‘He Named Me Malala’. The film, directed by Davis Guggenheim, is a mixture of animation, old and new footage and voiceover; a subtle retelling of her life and attempted assassination that can – and should – be watched by children of 10 upwards. It’s hard not to feel star-struck in the days leading up to meeting Malala. The security hoopla, to which she has become accustomed while meeting some of the most influential world leaders, only adds to a low-level stomach churning. What will she be like, this child/woman Nobel Laureate?

Mala’s inspiration

Malala is dressed in a salwar kameez of deep purple, with pink trimmings, her head covered with a purple scarf. Her hair is twisted over her shoulder in a low ponytail. She’s wearing high pastel-pink wedge sandals and her toenails are painted to match.

Her handbag, adorned with embroidered flowers, lies, by her feet. She smells gorgeous – she giggles when I compliment her – and says it is a scent chosen by her mother. “I do like nice clothes,” she says (although she’s not a ‘girly girl’ and her favourite colour has changed from pink to purple). “And my mother really takes care of me. She wants me to look good, and I don’t get the time to buy things myself.”

Malala’s intense relationship with her father is well known. He inspired her from infancy. As he says in the film, “We came to depend on each other, like one soul in two different bodies… It was attachment from the very first moment I saw her.” She remembers him telling her, “I will protect your freedom, Malala. Carry on with your dreams.” “Don’t ask me what I did,” he says in the film. “Ask me what I didn’t do. I didn’t clip her wings.” He added her name to the family tree; the first female to be included for 300 years. She worried about him constantly in Pakistan: that he would be targeted by the Taliban for his outspoken opinions, dragged away from the school he started, or their home, and killed.

Where’s my father

She checked the gates and windows of their home every night. Her mother kept a ladder against the side of the house so he could escape if he needed to. After Malala was shot, and had lifesaving surgery on her brain, the first question she asked after waking up in hospital in Britain was, “Where’s my father?” Pekai does not feature nearly as much in the film, but Malala is especially keen to talk about her, “It is really hard for a woman [from Pakistan] to think totally in a different way, but she did it… and now she has this passion [to learn],” she tells me.

In the film, Malala says of her mother, “I think she is not independent or free because she is not educated.” But Malala turned 18 this year and seems to have a growing emotional maturity, combined with an understanding of her mother’s different strengths: her morality, her strong faith, her thirst to educate herself (she left school at five and was illiterate), which she does now every day at college.

All these things have deepened Malala’s respect for her mother, who is uncomfortable in the limelight, living as she has for much of her life in purdah. “She truly believes in telling the truth and standing against what is wrong,” says Malala. “My mother is learning too – through the passage of time – that covering your face and what kinds of clothes you wear are not issues, although she is proud of our culture. She had felt it was part of her religion, and part of what was right, but now she sees that as being truthful and honest and just.” It is something that struck Laurie MacDonald, one of the film’s producers. “Toor Pekai is someone who observes cultural traditions and has a tremendous, yet quiet strength, which I think has a lot to do with who Malala has become.”

My mother

“I don’t know how to explain her personality because it’s very complex,” says Malala. “She has this strong belief in her heart of Islam, but she does not really give powerful speeches like my father. I might be [more like her] in that respect because my father is quite open and he says whatever is in his heart, which is how my grandfather was. “I do speak, but I don’t speak like my father or my grandfather. I am usually very quiet and my speeches are well controlled. I don’t get emotional – and my mother is the same.”, “The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage were born.” “Toor Pekai is more than present in the family home,” says Malala’s literary agent, Karolina Sutton, “but she herself chooses how present (or not) she wants to be in the media.”

“My mother,” Malala says, “has inspired both of us, not just me but my father as well. She is like the person behind both of us. We need to stay happy, we need to stay positive and saying jokes. I used to cry when I was little, ‘Why is my mother so beautiful and I am not?’ She is a great person, and she has not just a face of beauty but beauty of heart.” It is hard to over emphasise Malala’s sweetness and self-effacement. She has just moved into the sixth form after getting 10 GCSEs, all A*s and As. “I should be worried about my grades,” she says (we meet before she got the results).

She is two years older than her classmates, having joined a younger class for obvious reasons, and is now taking A Levels in history, economics, maths and religious studies. The plan, she says, is to read PPE at Oxford (although her father said recently that she is considering Stanford University in California). “I’m not going to write any award on my [application] CV. I’m just going to write down my work experience and my schoolwork.”

This year she did two work-experience placements with a school friend from Edgbaston High School in Birmingham, both working for social change. She made coffee, “and wrote questions, arranged projects – and I just really felt like a normal person”. She loved it.

Normal person

Did being a normal person feel good? “Very good,” she says, “very good”. “I do sometimes go to the cinema,” she adds. “And to markets, and people do come [up] and sometimes people hug me and say, ‘Can I take a picture of you?’ and some people just say, ‘We support you.’” But there is an element of her, too, that needs to disengage from her public persona, particularly when it comes to her own peer group. In class, she says she never speaks up, which must pose an interesting dilemma for her teachers, given her meetings with Barack Obama and Ban Ki-moon and her accomplished political speeches on the world stage.

“Outside the school, I am this girl who is speaking to the world leaders but inside school, I stay quiet and I am very obedient. I really believe that whatever the teacher says, it is always right. I am really fond of them – and I am a bit scared as well.

“But they are very nice and supportive of me.” Sometimes, she says, they do grade her work a B and write, “Malala needs to focus more on this topic.” If Malala has any nagging worries, they are not about the Taliban but the prospect of getting a C at school. “I do worry about my grades! I mustn’t get a C.” Life in England has not always been easy for her. In the beginning, post-rehabilitation (her injuries were extensive: to this day, she still needs to massage the right side of her face, a result of a severed nerve from the bullet), she found it hard to settle at school. Everything was new and foreign. Apart from a slight facial lopsidedness, barely noticeable – “I notice it because I see it in the mirror every day” – she looked the same as her classmates; same dark-green uniform save for a longer-length skirt and headscarf, and yet in those early days, she had a completely different frame of reference, not only because she had come overnight from the Swat Valley but, in particular, because she was used to an entirely different education system, weighting marks in a different way. (“I found that very hard – in Pakistan you got marks for handwriting and just writing a long answer.”)

I am the same Malala

But slowly the homesickness has eased (“When I am in a car looking through the window I sometimes think I am [here] in England but it’s just for a short time,” she says poignantly), and the prevailing spirit is her optimism. “I am the same Malala. I have been given a new life and this life is a sacred life.” She still phones her best friend, Moniba, in Pakistan to ask, “What’s the breaking news? The gossip. Moniba informs me about everything so I can feel updated,” Malala explains to me.

This is the ‘normal’ teenage Malala, the one who inwardly cheers on a Friday lunchtime because she can eat French fries in the school canteen instead of the English ‘boiled things’ that she doesn’t like (her mother cooks only Pakistani food at home), who listens to Katy Perry and watches Inside Out. The girl who gets irritated by her younger brothers, Khushal, 15, and Atal, 11, and can’t understand the way they play on their Xbox all the time. “And Minecraft? I don’t know why they play but they are crazy for it. They are like typical boys!”

She has one close English school friend now, who must remain nameless. The girl is not a Muslim and she often helps Malala understand colloquialisms. “My friend helps me every day, telling me words I shouldn’t say because I don’t know their other meanings! And she helps me understand the words in songs.”

The two friends were on their work placements together and visit each other’s houses. “She comes to our house and we have halal food and we don’t have wine and she’s fine with it. And then when I go to her home, they have a very different culture.

“They don’t wear shalwar kameez, they do have wine in the house but I don’t mind. It’s co-existence, it’s harmony and we really enjoy it. I’ve never ever thought that being culturally different makes it difficult for us to become friends. These things make friendship more special rather than stopping it.”

Pride of Britain

She barely mentions her political career to her classmates, but sometimes they see her picture in the paper. The one that caused the most fuss was when she accepted a Pride of Britain award from David Beckham. “I had no clear idea how famous he was,” she says, giggling. “And how women and girls really liked him.”

He was probably more smitten meeting you, I tell her. (Some time after I talk to her, she meets Beckham again in New York and he posts the selfie, above, with her on Instagram, saying how privileged he feels.)

In fact, the subject of boys, full stop, sets her off in a fit of giggles (she seems to quite like Shane Warne and Roger Federer). When I ask her about how she might protect any future romantic life, say if she is at Oxford or any university, she laughs again.

“When I talk about going to university, my parents say they will also go with me! And they are joking and teasing me [saying], ‘We will go just to keep an eye on you!’ And I say, ‘No! It’s compulsory at university that parents can’t come!’” Some of the girls she was at school with back in Pakistan have already disappeared from the classroom, swallowed up by a life of traditional married subservience. Two of her friends who were on the school bus when she was shot are studying at the prestigious international Atlantic College in Wales (Malala recommended them after she was offered a place but decided to stay in Birmingham with her family).

When schoolwork allows, they come for sleepovers in Birmingham, where they might all watch something funny on her iPad (pink case), and she will impress them with her card tricks or click her double joints and try to make them laugh with her jokes. “I do like jokes,” she says. “And when my friends visit, we talk about our old times at school and the silly things we have done, making fun of others or someone making fun of us or talking about our teachers… memorable parts of life from the old days. “I am hopeful I can go back after finishing my education,” she says of her homeland. “I think only about the future. I don’t really think about the dangers or the threats. They are gone now.”

The Malala Fund

Since Malala and her father set up the Malala Fund, it has donated $3.5 million (£2.2m) to local services and global projects working to educate girls in Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, Sierra Leone and countries housing Syrian refugees. This year, the fund has given further grants to localised leaders working towards change in their own countries. It is this campaigning that has taken Malala all over the world, and has attracted criticism from those against her message; that she is a mouthpiece for her father’s beliefs: that she is a puppet for the West. This is where I suspect her mother’s faith and moral strength gives her ballast.

“Criticism and opposition are always there when you stand up for something big and when you want to bring change,” Malala says. “I usually learn from it. Sometimes they say the right thing and sometimes they say something that doesn’t make sense at all. So I think I have to carry on my journey. I have to carry on this fight.”

In ‘He Named Me Malala’, she goes to a Syrian refugee camp, where she looks stricken. “I did cry,” she says, “when I saw these people, with no hope for home, no hope for children’s safety, no hope for their own safety, children with no shoes and no food.

“It was horrible to imagine. What have they done? Why should this person become a refugee? That did make me cry. I don’t usually cry, but that made me cry.” (It’s an interesting detail, this ability to keep her emotions in check. Maybe she sees tears as wasted energy, a sign of hopelessness rather than hope.) “I want to continue my campaigning for the fund,” she says, “and I’m really proud to have such a strong team. When I was young, I was interested in becoming a doctor, but then I thought becoming a prime minister is very important. But now I can’t promise and I can’t clarify. I am not sure. My fund work will continue, my work for education will continue, but in terms of a job, I don’t know.”

He named me Malala

In a way, the small details of Malala’s life are as gripping as the bigger picture: the way she prefers cupcakes to sweets; that she loves pizza; that when she was younger, she spent too much time fiddling with her hair; how she tried to lighten her skin with honey, rosewater and buffalo milk, so she could be paler-skinned, like her mother. How she thinks Bella from Twilight is fickle and Edward is too boring because she and Moniba and her other friends in Pakistan think that ‘he doesn’t give her any lift’.

Why are these insights into Malala’s life so wonderful? It is because, I think, they show her to be human rather than superhuman; because they allow her to be considered normal even when we know that, ultimately, Malala Yousafzai is very special.

He Named Me Malala will be released on November 6

(This article was originally published in Telegraph UK)