Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (36 page)

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W
hat happened next is still a mystery. What we do know is this: in October of 1984, Shah and his wife Raehana and daughter Sassi left Damascus and moved to the south of France. The move was a welcome change of pace for the young couple. In Kabul Raehana had been a young student from a diplomatic family with ties to the ancien régime. Her husband was a guest of the Soviet-backed communist government. They were in their early twenties, younger than I am now writing this. They had married against the wishes of Shah’s family, who were not happy that their son rush into a union so soon after his engagement to Nurseli, whom they had known and happily approved of, had been broken off. They had, by all accounts, a passionate and intense marriage. They were hindered not only by their families, but also by politics. Raehana had been a vocal mujahideen supporter, Shah an opponent. Fully ensconced in their anti-imperialist ideology, Shah and his brother believed that the United States not only had a hand in their father’s execution, but was still propping up Zia’s military junta.

France gave the couple their first opportunity to experience life on their own, away from divisive politics and away from their families. They settled into an apartment in Nice, a pleasant flat on the second floor of a building on the Avenue de Roi Albert. Shah travelled often to Syria to meet Murtaza, but kept his visits short and returned eagerly to France, where the family led as normal a life as their situation allowed.

In the summer of 1985, we met for a family reunion in Nice. It was the first time for years that the family had all been together at
the same time. Nusrat came from Geneva, where she had been living in exile, Murtaza travelled from Damascus, and Benazir – along with Sanam – came from London.

The brothers were overjoyed to see each other – they had been virtually inseparable since their father was executed and they relished the opportunity to be together again. Murtaza and Shah shared jokes from their childhood, a popular tease being Shah’s insistence during the family’s state visit to China on posing with his arm bent at the elbow and folded across his midriff, imitating Chou En-lai, who was forced to hold his arm that way due to an old war wound. We moved into Shah’s flat and planned to be in Nice for the month of July.

When we arrived, Murtaza noticed that Shah had put his name outside the building, on the intercom board. It troubled him that Shah had used his real name and he reproached him for it – you mustn’t advertise your location, this is France, Murtaza told his brother. There was no protection provided by the government in Nice, no local officials were charged with minding the safety of the Bhutto brothers. But it seemed a small lapse and the summer began happily.

Our families spent afternoons on the beach, lounging in the sun. Shah, ever the athlete, would go jet-skiing or waterskiing, waving to us on the shore and fooling around with funny gestures – he could do anything. He was twenty-six years old and at the peak of his physical strength. I remember him waterskiing behind a perilously fast boat, lifting one hand behind his head and giggling when everyone gasped, but keeping his balance. He was the life of the family, the cherished youngest child and second son. He had a spirit that was upbeat, no matter the situation, a personality that always managed to shine in company.

Sassi and I were both three years old, I the elder by three months. We took particular delight in standing on the balcony of Shah’s secondfloor flat and pouring cartons of juice into the ground-floor flat’s swimming pool, running away in hysterics when its owner came blazing out of the apartment, cursing us in French for having turned her pool into a cocktail of orange and apple juice. The balcony was
our territory, it was where we often sat, on a small rocking horse that had been put out there, presumably to distract us from the pool. We wore 1980s sunglasses in neon colours that made us feel like rock stars and we shared a bracelet, a pink and white bangle, that we passed back and forth depending on whose turn it was to wear. We looked, double cousins as we were, strangely similar. We both wore our hair in shoulder-length bobs, heavily fringed. My hair was dark brown, Sassi’s light brown. But we were almost twins, as we saw it anyway.

I used to grab on to Uncle Shah’s leg when he passed by, to annoy Sassi, and scream, ‘
My
Papa,’ knowing that she was too gentle to claw at my father and do the same. When Sassi would sniffle I would run back to my father’s leg, hang on to it and declare, ‘
My
Papa
too
.’ Sassi claims I used to bite her cheeks, but I don’t remember that. I adored her and thought of her as my own. We were surrounded by grownups and were aware, with whatever limited understanding we possessed as children, that things around us were dangerous. We knew we had a grandfather who had been killed. We knew we didn’t live in our own country, a far-away place we only heard the adults talk about. We knew that things weren’t as they should be and so we stuck together and created a small make-believe world that entertained and fascinated us.

In the evenings, the family would eat out at restaurants, pulling tables together to accommodate our numbers, and the conversation and food would roll on late into the night. Inevitably, Murtaza and Shah would steal away and go for a drink at the Carlton Hotel, taking advantage of the freedom that the south of France afforded them, coming home in the small hours of the morning.

On 17 July, we spent the day swimming at the Port La Galère. A barbecue was planned for the evening and Shah and Raehana stayed at the flat getting food ready for dinner. Papa took Sassi and me to the beach and we spent most of the day splashing around in the water and enjoying ourselves. At the flat, Raehana sent Shah to the grocery to pick up some basics; we were going to eat out on the beach and there were going to be a lot of mouths to feed. He returned
with drinks and disposable cutlery, then watched TV and smoked a cigar while we got ready for the night ahead.

There were several of us there that night on the beach at La Napoule. Shah and Murtaza drove around town picking up various members of the family and dropping them off at the beach. By 9.30 the party was complete and the revelry began. Joonam, as I now called my grandmother Nusrat, brought salad and yoghurt and cucumbers in the Iranian style. Someone else brought ice-cream for dessert. The grill was fired up and Shah began to cook the chops and meat brochettes over the open fire. I remember him squeezing lemon onto the meat and laughing when the juice got in his eye. He continued to cook, wary of the flying lemon juice, squinting theatrically for the pictures someone took as he barbecued. I remember the beach was empty that night, except for our rowdy family. I also remember that there was graffiti spray-painted on the wall near the cars. Papa told me later that Joonam had been lively that night, bringing herself out of the depression she had suffered from ever since Zulfikar was killed. She spoke in Farsi to her relatives and in English to the rest of the family and, at some point out of nowhere, said that she hoped she would die before her children; she couldn’t imagine the pain of losing one more loved one.

The barbeque lasted till around 11 p.m., when Murtaza and Shahnawaz got into separate cars to drive their relatives home. I was with my father. I don’t know where Sassi was. When Shahnawaz and Raehana reached Avenue de Roi Albert they were both angry; they’d had an argument on the way. Shah wanted to carry on to the casino in town and Raehana didn’t, she wanted to go to the Whiskey a Go Go nightclub.

By the time they reached the lobby of the apartment block, things had become ugly. Papa asked what was going on and Raehana told him to mind his own business. He reacted angrily and expected Shah to step in to calm his wife down. But by then words were being exchanged between my father and Raehana and Shah was caught in the middle. Raehana asked my father and her sister to pack their bags and get out of her house. Papa swore angrily, he had been insulted.
He stormed into the apartment to pack our things. I remember the row. I remember wishing that everyone would stop screaming, I remember being scared and tired. Within a few minutes our clothes had been thrown into our suitcases and we drove over to Joonam’s flat in a nearby neighbourhood.

Shah took his wife and daughter into their apartment and tried to calm the situation down. Raehana and Sassi went to their bedroom and Shah brought his young daughter a bottle of milk. He settled them to sleep and moved to the living room. Meanwhile Papa and some other family members left for the casino and spent the rest of the evening there together, leaving at five in the morning – closing time – and going to the nearby Manhattan restaurant before driving home. Papa reached us around 6.30 in the morning and went to sleep. What happened next is a mystery.

On the morning of the 18th, Papa got up and ran some errands in town. He picked up a copy of the
Herald Tribune
and returned to his mother’s flat. At a quarter to two in the afternoon Raehana rang the doorbell. She was very distressed, and initially Papa was not in the mood to receive her. Joonam saw that something was amiss and asked Murtaza to come and talk to her. ‘Something is wrong,’ Raehana told them. ‘At that moment, I thought Shah must have hurt himself doing something in the house,’ Murtaza would later tell the police. No one will remember later on if the word ‘overdose’ was used or if it was not. Joonam immediately called the police and gave them Shah’s address.

Papa got into Shah’s metallic green Mercedes that Raehana had driven over with Sassi at her side and took them back to Shah’s flat. On the way, another family member who was with them in the car asked how Shah was. Everyone remembers Raehana saying he was blue. Murtaza would recall being frightened and asked her angrily if he was dead or alive. The thought hadn’t occurred to him until then. She replied that she didn’t know, she had been too scared to look.

They entered the apartment and found Shah’s body lying face down on the living-room floor, between the sofa and the coffee table. ‘When I saw him,’ Murtaza would later say, ‘I knew he was dead.’
Shah had blue marks on his chest and his face had already begun to turn a blue-ish black. He was wearing the trousers he had on from the previous evening, but no shirt. He was dead.

When Murtaza saw the blue marks on his brother’s body, he knew something unnatural had happened. He suspected poison. He directed someone to go downstairs to see if the police had arrived, and began to search the apartment. A year earlier, the brothers had been given small vials of poison to take if they were ever apprehended by Zia’s authorities. Nobody knows where they got the poison from; they kept that to themselves. The small bottles were sealed with metal and contained a colourless liquid. If mixed with another liquid, they were told, the poison would be undetectable. If taken, they were warned, the toxins would work quickly and they would be dead within minutes.

The police arrived and immediately began to inspect the flat. Murtaza looked for the poison in all the rooms, but found nothing. He searched the kitchen cupboards, careful not to move anything. A doctor, who came hours too late to save Shah, was standing in the kitchen when Murtaza opened the rubbish bin and found under several tissues a small glass bottle labelled ‘PENTREXIDE’. He gave the bottle to the doctor and informed the police of what he had found. Murtaza told the police that Shah had already survived four attempts on his life. He told them that they had enemies. He asked them if it was possible that the flat had been broken into. He told them that he didn’t believe, not even for a second, that Shah had committed suicide.

Before Shah’s body could be taken away, Murtaza had one more thing to do. He had to tell their mother. He got back into the car and drove to Nusrat’s apartment. She had been calling and asking what had happened, and had been told repeatedly, ‘Mir will tell you, he’ll come and tell you himself.’ Mir reached his mother’s flat alone. She opened the door, hysterical with worry. He held her by the arms and told her that Shah was dead. ‘Mummy, Gogi’s gone,’ he said, using the family’s childhood nickname for Shah. Nusrat fell weeping into his arms and demanded he take her to see him. We all went back to the apartment, even me. There was no one to look after Sassi and
me, so we were taken back to the crime scene with the rest of the family.

Sassi had been the one to find her father that afternoon. ‘I’ve been haunted by flashbacks of discovering my father’s lifeless body,’ she told me twenty-four years later. ‘It is the only clear memory I possess of him. It was so long ago, but I remember it vividly, staring at him lying there, waiting for him to wake. It was my duty to wake him up every morning. But this particular morning was far from routine, because my father wouldn’t wake up and grab me and kiss me or toss me in the air as he usually did.’
¹
Raehana later said that it had been her daughter’s frightened voice that woke her up that day. She heard Sassi in the living room calling, ‘Papa, Papa,’ over and over again. When she found her, Sassi was sitting next to her father’s lifeless body trying to wake him up.

The initial investigation found specks of vomit on the floor of the bathroom attached to the couple’s bedroom. The police confirmed that they had found poison in Shah’s system, that it was strong and that it was designed to leave a residue in the victim’s nostrils, not in the blood or internal organs. But who administered the poison, no one can tell me.

Theories circulated quickly. There was the obvious – General Zia had ordered the hit on Shah’s life. Though Murtaza was the elder brother and technically in charge of the organization leading the attacks on the military regime, he was regarded as the diplomat. There was a strong perception that Shah was the more aggressive of the two brothers; he was, after all, in charge of security and training. Murtaza always believed Zia’s government had ordered the assassination. But how they carried it out was harder to explain.

Of course others assumed that he had committed suicide, a claim furiously denied by Murtaza. He told reporters and policemen that Shah ‘had a very courageous character. He knew how to face life. He was never scared and always moved without a bodyguard. He knew how to face all types of situations.’ He told the investigators that his brother was happy, successful and financially settled, and had never at any point in their lives together mentioned the notion of killing
himself. There was no suicide note, no indication from the previous night or recent past that he had even contemplated the idea. Nusrat also denied the possibility of suicide. It was a sin in Islam to take one’s own life. She never believed Shah, who had faced his father’s death so bravely, would reach a point so far beyond hope that he would kill himself. But others felt differently. Fowzia told the police that she felt Shah had killed himself and that the Bhutto family was too proud to ever admit it. It was an assumption that hurt the family gravely.