We ran around for a while in the green forest, then took some photographs and waded into the river and splashed each other with water. The drops sparkled in the sun. There was a waterfall down the cliff and for a while we sat on the rocks and listened to it. Then Moniba started splashing me again.
‘Don’t! I don’t want to get my clothes wet!’ I pleaded. I walked off with two other girls she didn’t like. The other girls stirred things up, what we call ‘putting masala on the situation’. It was a recipe for another argument between Moniba and me. That put me in a bad mood, but I cheered up when we got to the top of the cliff, where lunch was being prepared. Usman Bhai Jan, our driver, made us laugh as usual. Madam Maryam had brought her baby boy and Hannah, her two-year-old, who looked like a little doll but was full of mischief.
Lunch was a disaster. When the school assistants put the pans on the fire to heat up the chicken curry, they panicked that there was not enough food for so many girls and added water from the stream. We said it was ‘the worst lunch ever’. It was so watery that one girl said, ‘The sky could be seen in the soupy curry.’
Like on all our trips my father got us all to stand on a rock and talk about our impressions of the day before we left. This time all anyone talked about was how bad the food was. My father was embarrassed and for once, short of words.
The next morning a school worker came with milk, bread and eggs to our house for our breakfast. My father always answered the door as women must stay inside. The man told him the shopkeeper had given him a photocopied letter.
When my father read it, he went pale. ‘By God, this is terrible propaganda against our school!’ he told my mother. He read it out.
Dear Muslim brothers
There is a school, the Khushal School, which is run by an NGO [NGOs have a very bad reputation among religious people in our country so this was a way to invite people’s wrath] and is a centre of vulgarity and obscenity. It is a Hadith of the Holy Prophet that if you see something bad or evil you should stop it with your own hand. If you are unable to do that then you should tell others about it, and if you can’t do that you should think about how bad it is in your heart. I have no personal quarrel with the principal but I am telling you what Islam says. This school is a centre of vulgarity and obscenity and they take girls for picnics to different resorts. If you don’t stop it you will have to answer to God on Doomsday. Go and ask the manager of the White Palace Hotel and he will tell you what these girls did . . .
He put down the piece of paper. ‘It has no signature. Anonymous.’
We sat stunned.
‘They know no one will ask the manager,’ said my father. ‘People will just imagine something terrible went on.’
‘We know what happened there. The girls did nothing bad,’ my mother reassured him.
My father called my cousin Khanjee to find out how widely the letters had been distributed. He called back with bad news – they had been left everywhere, though most shopkeepers had ignored them and thrown them away. There were also giant posters pasted on the front of the mosque with the same accusations.
At school my classmates were terrified. ‘Sir, they are saying very bad things about our school,’ they said to my father. ‘What will our parents say?’
My father gathered all the girls into the courtyard. ‘Why are you afraid?’ he asked. ‘Did you do anything against Islam? Did you do anything immoral? No. You just splashed water and took pictures, so don’t be scared. This is the propaganda of the followers of Mullah Fazlullah. Down with them! You have the right to enjoy greenery and waterfalls and landscape just as boys do.’
My father spoke like a lion, but I could see in his heart he was worried and scared. Only one person came and withdrew his sister from the school, but we knew that was not the end of it. Shortly after that we were told a man who had completed a peace walk from Dera Ismail Khan was coming through Mingora and we wanted to welcome him. I was on the way to meet him with my parents when we were approached by a short man who was frantically talking on two different phones. ‘Don’t go that way,’ he urged. ‘There is a suicide bomber over there!’ We’d promised to meet the peace walker, so we went by a different route, placed a garland round his neck, then left quickly for home.