I had no idea what had happened to me, and I didn’t trust anyone. Don’t worry about payment.” I repeated the questions to anyone who came in. The first two questions my pen wrote were “Why have I no father?” and “My father has no money. She also brought me a pink exercise book to write in. I didn’t know who Junaid was, so I named it Lily. She said I should call it Junaid and she would explain why later. Fiona came and gave me a white teddy bear. Nurses and doctors kept coming in and out. My left ear kept bleeding and my left hand felt funny. My head was aching so much that even the injections they gave me couldn’t stop the pain. Only later did they bring me an atlas so I could see it was in England. The nurse told me I was in Birmingham, but I had no idea where that was. The first words I spelled out were father and country. Javid brought me an alphabet board so I could point to the letters. I wanted to write my father’s phone number. A nurse gave me a pencil and a pad, but I couldn’t write properly and the words came out wrong. Everything was clean and shiny, not like the hospital in my hometown, Mingora. It was an intensive-care cubicle in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. When I woke again the next day, I noticed I was in a strange green room with no windows and very bright lights. Her voice was soft and her words were soothing, and I drifted back to sleep. She told me her name was Rehanna and she was the Muslim chaplain. Then she started saying prayers in Urdu and reciting verses of the Quran. A nice lady in a headscarf held my hand and said, “Asalaamu alaikum,” which is our traditional Muslim greeting. The only thing I knew was that Allah had blessed me with a new life. Javid Kayani, deputy medical director of University Hospitals Birmingham who had been in Islamabad when I was shot and was the reason I was now in Birmingham, was there when I was brought around and says he will never forget the look of fear and bewilderment on my face. All sorts of questions flew through my waking brain: Where was I? Who had brought me there? Where were my parents? Was my father alive? I was terrified. To start with, my left eye was very blurry and everyone had two noses and four eyes. I was speaking to them, but no one could hear me because of the tube in my neck. The nurses and doctors were speaking English, though they all seemed to be from different countries. The first thing I thought when I came around was, ‘Thank God I’m not dead.’ But I had no idea where I was. I was thousands of miles away from home with a tube in my neck to help me breathe and unable to speak. while unconscious and without my parents. I had been flown from Pakistan to the U.K.
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