Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (13 page)

The dynamic between the four children had been established early on in their lives. Sanam, who was spoilt rotten by her brothers and allowed to roughhouse with them and hang out with their friends because she was considered cool enough to be one of the boys, divided her time between her brothers and her sister, who engaged in no such roughhousing and recoiled at the thought of hanging out with the boys and their friends. Sanam was the sister they could count on to join in their bawdy jokes and naughty pranks; she was always up for a good time. Benazir was more formal, more distant, except with regard to her sister whom she treated like a lady-in-waiting. The two sisters shared a room, arranged to have the walls painted black and the curtains finished with striped white and black cloth that looked like fabric prison bars, and smoked secretly in their dressing room, wearing leather gloves on their hands and wet towels on their heads so the smell of smoke would not stain their nails or get stuck in their poker-straight hair. They sounded so rebellious and impossibly cool to me when I heard the stories as a child; I was always desperate to hear more stories of my aunts’ renegade teenage years, imagining that one day I too would learn to smoke cigarettes in dressing rooms with such laid-back nonchalance, though since punks were big when I was
young, I imagined myself forgoing the towel for a pink Mohican. Papa would make angry faces at me when I expressed delight at hearing of my naughty aunts’ antics and I would collapse in laughter and tell him, no, no I was only kidding, I didn’t want to smoke cigarettes with leather gloves on! How silly that must look . . .

Murtaza and Shahnawaz shared a room across from their sisters, until they moved into the annexe outside the main 70 Clifton house that had been built for their two uncles, Imdad and Sikandar. The boys painted their room ‘communist red’ and covered their walls with posters of Kiss and the Beatles, fabric wall hangings of Lenin that their father brought back from the Soviet Union for his sons and a large red and blue painting of Che Guevara. As Murtaza and Shah got older, and lazier when it came to the rigours of school and alarm bells, they would stay up late at night talking and bouncing around their room, dress for school sometime around 2 a.m. and then hop into bed and try to sleep in perfectly still positions so their school uniforms wouldn’t crease too much. Murtaza, ever obsessive-compulsive when it came to his appearance, would still wake up with enough time to brush his hair and shave what few stray bristles there were around what he hoped would be a fine moustache. Shah, meanwhile, would shuffle out of bed with minutes to spare, brush his teeth, fill the sink to the brim with cold water and dunk his head in before racing down the stairs to get into the waiting car. Later, both boys would develop a demanding sartorial regimen they would call ‘suiting and booting’.

In eleventh grade, under the remarks for Chemistry, a teacher with a pink pen has written: ‘It would be a prudent move to drop Chemistry altogether.’ By his junior year in high school, Murtaza’s standing academically had improved significantly. Religious knowledge education had been completed, he dropped Chemistry and managed an almost miraculous ‘excellent effort’ in Algebra. A different class master, as Grammar School insisted on calling its teachers, wrote: ‘Murtaza’s improvement in most subjects and his dropping of science has made a great difference – this is splendid.’ He graduated second in his entire class.

Murtaza managed good grades in his A levels, the British equivalent of twelfth grade, but didn’t put as much effort into those exams – he had applied to college on the strength of his O-level results – tenth and eleventh grades – and spent his time towards the end of her school career in pursuit of other knowledge. Murtaza was part of the tae kwon do association of Karachi, becoming a black belt. He got himself certified in first aid through the St John’s Ambulance Association of Pakistan for two years in a row, and received several Duke of Edinburgh awards.

Together with his brother Shah, Murtaza enjoyed an idyllic childhood amidst the uncertainty of Pakistan’s fragile new nationhood. As the 1965 war raged on, bringing the sounds of air-raid sirens and emergency warnings to Karachi, Murtaza dreamt of becoming a fighter pilot. He confessed, ‘I was fascinated with fighter jets . . . I guess it was because at that time the war had broken out and I used to watch the planes take off and land – it was a fairly impressionable age.’
⁷

It was during these early childhood years that Murtaza and Shah developed the bond that would carry them through adulthood. Naturally close and protective of each other, both boys, but especially Murtaza as he was the first-born son, were treated strictly by their father, who kept them on a tight leash. Murtaza and Shahnawaz received an allowance of fifty rupees a month, meaning that the brothers had to pool their funds if they ever wanted to live it up or splurge on something special. ‘Two governments before,’ Murtaza’s best friend in adulthood, Suhail Sethi, explains politely, wriggling around Zulfikar’s apparent stinginess, ‘Ayub Khan’s sons ran wild with the bounty their father’s excesses in government provided them with. ZAB was very determined to avoid the same thing happening to his family and was determined to keep his children on the straight and narrow.’
⁸
Suhail and I sit quietly for a minute. Urm, I venture, all his children? ‘You know, he directed it at his sons who in those days were the representations of your family’ Suhail says. ‘In his first speech on television, after he assumed the presidency, ZAB said very clearly: this government will be different, there will be no nepotism under my regime.’ I’ve seen the speech Suhail is referring to. It’s Zulfikar at his best, at
his most upfront. He wears his thick black-framed glasses and speaks from notes, which he shows the cameras at some point, telling them these are only notes, he’s speaking from the heart. Zulfikar speaks in English, apologetically telling his audience that it pains him to do so – that he often speaks in Urdu, though small children laugh at his mistakes in the language – but that the world’s eyes are watching Pakistan after the break-up of its eastern province, so he speaks in a language that everyone can understand. He says there will be no nepotism, no corruption from within his family, he swears it. ‘I have a talented cousin,’ Zulfikar says as an aside, referring to Mumtaz Bhutto who was a founding member of the PPP and later Chief Minister of Sindh, and says that he would like his assistance in government. But that’s it, he promises. That’s the extent of it. Zulfikar saw it as his duty to groom his sons from an early age, toughen them up and turn them into men, even though they were only young boys. Zulfikar was neither as lenient nor as relaxed with his sons as he was with his daughters; he demanded nothing short of perfection from his sons and wasted no time mollycoddling them or playing around with them. On a trip to Larkana, the two boys went hunting with their cousin Bhao – who, having lived the feudal life Zulfikar allowed his sons only sparingly, was prone to reckless
chota sahib
behaviour. As the boys sat at the dining table in the family room waiting for their lunch, Bhao picked up his hunting rifle and jumped on his chair, aiming at his male cousins as if they were hunting marks. He stomped his feet on his chair, making Bollywood-style
dshoom dshoom
shooting noises, all the while thoughtlessly keeping his finger on the trigger. At some point in Bhao’s stupid game, a shot was fired, hitting Murtaza in the back, above his shoulder blade. Murtaza slumped forward onto the table and Bhao and the girls giggled, thinking Mir was pulling one of his famous pranks. Then Shah, who watched over his brother with a concern unique among the siblings, noticed that there was blood seeping through Murtaza’s
shalwar kameez
. Shah shoved Bhao off his chair and didn’t leave his brother’s side until he had been taken to the hospital and the bullet had been safely removed.

For his part, Murtaza doted on Shah. He indulged him, never
pushing away his younger brother when he had friends around, and guarded him vigilantly. Any schoolyard tussle that Shah – proud and combative towards anyone who tried to goad him or was unchivalrous about his family – found himself in always saw Murtaza standing alongside his brother. He defended Shah to their father too, pleading with him not to send Shah off to boarding school – or cadet college in the heart of Sindh when he had been especially egregious – whenever he broke some cardinal rule of Zulfikar’s. Sanam and Shah were both sent off to boarding school at one point or another and both children would manage to escape: Shah by having his brother plead for his parole on the grounds of good behaviour and Sanam by jumping the school wall and hitching a ride with a truck driver down to whichever official residence Zulfikar was living in at the time.

It wasn’t until Murtaza was twelve years old that he became aware of the political dynamics surrounding his family.

We didn’t really understand what this minister stuff was all about initially. Of course, we had policemen around all the time and the normal privileges that come with the territory, but it didn’t really seem that inspiring. I mean, we knew my father was important because we heard his name on the radio all the time, but it was only in 1966, when he came out of jail, that we realized this was serious business.
⁹

Zulfikar was on the cusp of founding the Pakistan People’s Party and he went, overnight it seemed, from being a minister to being a political icon.

We saw all the crowds, the hysteria and the passions that were being evoked in front of our eyes, especially at the Lahore railway station (where Zulfikar had gone to launch the PPP), and it had a very powerful impact on us children. I was about twelve at the
time and after that I wouldn’t miss any opportunity to go along with my father. But I was largely drawn to politics as a spectator at that time, I wasn’t thinking of myself as an actor at any stage.
¹⁰

Murtaza began keeping newspaper clippings, charting the politics of Pakistan and every rise and fall of his father’s party. He hoarded newspapers as they came in, combing them hungrily, marking in pen the articles he felt worth removing first and then carefully – he was a fastidious Virgo; clean lines meant the world to him – clipping them out of the broadsheets to archive. He bought simple notebooks, some with seventies psychedelic flowers on their covers, others plain and looking like they’d belong to a chartered accountant, businesslike and austere; one of the notebooks, made by the Hamdam Book Binding Works in Karachi, has a watercolour painting of the Shalimar Gardens. There is a white box, hanging over the Shalimar pond, with the words ‘name/subject/class/sec’ written in navy blue with long lines attached to them, waiting for answers. It is empty. The answers are inside.

The clippings are from Urdu and English newspapers, kept in place with Scotch tape. Some are of photographs of Zulfikar addressing large crowds of people across the country, in Murree, in Korangi, in Kahuta. Some are pictures of riots, mainly religious Jammaat Islami gatherings pitched against Zulfikar and his new party. There are also statements, strong confident statements: ‘Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto said here yesterday that his party does not believe in political alliances.’ ‘Our alliance is with the people,’ reads a clipping from the
Daily News
, Monday, 27 July 1970. Another article from a Lahore newspaper, dated 2 October, blares the headline ‘Bhutto says: NOBODY CAN DARE . . .’ followed by the words: ‘Chairman of the People’s Party Z. A. Bhutto declared here yesterday that even if all the political parties of Pakistan joined together they could not beat the People’s Party . . . He added we will wipe out bribery, corruption and nepotism from this country.’

Murtaza kept everything. No story was too small or too large; this
was a habit that stayed with Murtaza throughout his life. Later, when I was a child and we were living in exile in Damascus, my father and I would sit together in the evenings clipping newspapers. We each had our own notebooks. I cut out cartoon strips, ‘Garfield’ mainly, while Papa clipped news stories from Pakistan.

It was around this time, his early teenage years, that Murtaza discovered the world of politics and it did something to him – something strange. It consumed him and electrified how he thought of himself and the world. He began to read, to study. Che Guevara’s diaries and Mao’s dialectics were the cornerstones of his ideological material at the time. Gudu, who befriended a young Murtaza at the age of fourteen, remembers his friend as ‘quiet, pensive’ but ‘very ideological towards Pak-China friendship. He was reading a lot of Mao at the time and we’d go to the embassy and watch movies there when they had screenings.’
¹¹

Gudu and Murtaza organized Che marches to commemorate the most famous moments of their hero’s career and martydom. They wore black berets, carried Che posters and once managed to convince a bunch of Russian soldiers on leave, who were wandering around the market in Saddar, to join their procession. Otherwise, young Murtaza and Gudu followed a fairly spartan schedule. Most days they would go to swim at Clifton Beach, timing their visits to coincide with the Karachi police cavalry, who would bring their horses to the sandy beach for their afternoon plunge in the salty waters. The two friends would go to visit the Sufi shrine of Mango Pir in outer Karachi, where Mango Pir’s
Sheedi
disciples fed and tended to a pack of crocodiles they believed to be avatars of their saint. Murtaza would yearn to touch the crocodiles, Gudu remembers, but never did. When time was a factor, Gudu and Murtaza would bike to the shrine of Abdullah Shah Gazi, Karachi’s patron saint, or the Hindu temple near 70 Clifton. They would sit with the Muslim or Hindu devotees and eat delicious oily food before excusing themselves. When they were feeling especially maudlin or unsure of their place in the world, Murtaza and Gudu would sit in the empty black ceramic bathtub in Murtaza’s bathroom and stay up talking, knees bent and cramped, late into the night.