Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (4 page)

‘Papa, are you sure you’re right?’ I asked. He nodded to me. ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, can I have the papers that prove it?’ Papa let go of my head and laughed out loud. Wherever did I learn to become so paranoid? he asked. Yes, yes there were papers – did I need them that instant? ‘No,’ I said, ‘I just want to make sure you have them.’

The evening celebrations came and went. Friends joined us and brought sweets and bouquets of flowers and funny cards and I sat next to my father in our velvety drawing room throughout the evening. We ate dinner in the dining room, the table set by Mummy and laid with silver from my great-grandfather, Sir Shahnawaz’s time. We ate Middle Eastern
mezze
and
taboule
and barbecued meats. It felt as if we were home in Damascus, far away from all the danger and violence of Karachi. But we weren’t. We were in the thick of the danger, though we didn’t realize it at the time. Papa kept excusing himself to go to the phone and check whether Ali Sonara had been found, but he did so discreetly not wanting to scare or upset us. We hadn’t heard anything all day. More disturbingly, it looked as if the state was building a case against Papa. There had been some small blasts around the city, small
pathakas
or firecrackers put in the dustbins outside trade centres and government offices in Saddar. No one was hurt, but the tension was palpable. Late editions of city newspapers quoted the authorities as laying the blame on the workers of PPP (SB) and on my father.

By the evening, we spotted another tank, this one behind the first. The next morning there was a third, on the right-hand side of the house, hugging the corner of the office at 71 Clifton. By 20 September, two days later, there were four armoured vehicles, one on each side of 70 Clifton. We were surrounded.

‘Do you regret your life?’ I asked Papa after we returned home from his sombre birthday dinner at the Avari Hotel. He was sitting on his green chair, his legs crossed and his elbows resting on the arms of the chair. He paused for a moment, stroking the crown of his head as he often did when he was lost in thought. ‘No.’ Papa leaned forward towards me. ‘I fought the government that killed my father and brother and I’m proud of that. What we failed in, we failed in, but we didn’t take the coup lying down. We resisted. I’d do it all again,’ he said and leaned back into his chair. We had, my parents and I, been having a light-hearted conversation – escaping briefly from the day’s madness into our own private world of late-night jokes and memories. Papa was teasing Mummy and she was giggling back at Papa; they had been flirting absent-mindedly until my question brought us back to the dangerous present.

‘You should write a book,’ I said. Papa laughed loudly and threw his hands up in the air. ‘I can’t write a book while I’m alive. They’d never let me come out into the open with the things I know.’ ‘What do you mean? You have to do it – write a book about your life, Papa, it would be
so
interesting.’ But he just laughed again, this time more quietly. ‘No, I can’t. You’ll do it for me. You can write the book on my life.’

He smiled at me. Papa had the most beautiful spirit of any grown-up I had ever encountered. No matter that his life was often fraught with uncertainty and danger, he never let anything cloud his smile. I picked up a pen and a scrap of paper from the table, ready to take preliminary notes. ‘Not now,’ Papa said. ‘You can write it after I’m dead.’ ‘Why when you die?’ I felt my mood dropping and the anxiety of the past few days returning to the pit of my stomach. ‘It’s too dangerous before then,’ he said, looking at me. Papa’s eyes were sad. I don’t know if he felt it too, the uncertainty of what was ahead, the growing nervousness that had rumbled inside me for days. I think he did.

20 September was a Saturday.

By the evening my father would be dead.

In the morning there was a flurry of activity in our house – bearers were rushing to prepare the meals and Mummy was planning a belated party for my brother Zulfikar’s sixth birthday the following day. We had planned to hold his birthday party at a children’s amusement park, Sinbad. It was ten minutes away from our house and had been built in the 1970s as a casino but was now an Islamically acceptable games centre. With its kitsch, windowless architecture Sinbad lorded it over Sea View, staring out at the grey sand on Clifton Beach and the Arabian Sea beyond.

My room was being redecorated, being made my own after two years of living in the bedroom my two aunts had shared as angsty teenagers in the 1970s, so Papa came upstairs to the TV room, used as a makeshift bomb shelter during the 1965 war and where I now slept, to wake me up. After I’d got dressed we walked over to take a look at the renovations. My parents had waged a mini-war over who was going to decorate my new bedroom. The problem was that Papa had no taste at all when it came to décor. He tried to woo me with the promise of a disco ball in the centre of the room. It almost worked. Otherwise, his plans were wholly embarrassing. While Mummy knew that I wanted light green walls and a girly flowery look, Papa hadn’t a clue. He still thought of me as an eight-year-old tomboy. ‘We can put in Western-style swinging saloon doors like the ones in the old movies.’ No, Papa, we can’t. ‘OK, well how about rounded windows like in a submarine?’ No. The glittering disco ball was his finest moment.

We walked into my freshly painted room. It was all white – only the base coat had been applied – and empty except for the wrought iron bed, which was pushed to one side of the room along with two side tables that hugged each other at another corner. The room looked clinical, like a hospital. ‘Nice,’ smirked Papa. ‘I bet you’re really happy
you went with Mummy’s design.’ He laughed.
Khe khe khe.
Papa sounded like a naughty schoolboy when he laughed like that, his eyes wrinkling at the corners and his cheeks widening with each
khe
. Papa had brought back some panes of traditional stained glass from the interior of Sindh a while earlier. They were orange, blue and green. They were, in truth, repellent, but Mummy had vetoed putting them anywhere else in the house so I sided with Papa and insisted they were gorgeous. My reward was a set of my own Sindhi glass windows. They had already been installed and with the sun so bright that day and the room so white, their colours bounced across the room. ‘Good windows though,’ Papa murmured as we walked out of the room and down the stairs.

At two that afternoon my father held a press conference. Journalists from various local papers and television crews were assembled in the press hall in 71 Clifton, an open room with windows facing towards the garden. Papa entered the room and sat at a long wooden table facing the press. Next to him sat Ashiq Jatoi, the president of the Sindh chapter of the party, and Malik Sarwar Bagh, an elderly gentleman who was PPP (SB)’s Karachi division president. Papa was wearing a midnight-blue
shalwar kameez
that day, so dark it seemed almost black, and at his neck he wore the two-pointed sword of Hazrat Ali, the courageous disciple of the Prophet who became the first Imam of Shia Islam. Papa was not a religious man but he revered the warrior who fought for the struggling Muslims in the days when they were outnumbered and under threat. The sword, small and golden, had the words
la illah ill allah
, there is no god but Allah, with small crisscrossed etchings finely imprinted around its curved shape. It hung on a black thread around Papa’s neck. He almost never wore jewellery, only a watch given to him by his father on his left wrist.

Before coming in to speak to the press, Papa called Yar Mohammad and Sajjad over to speak to him privately. The young men were his two bodyguards. They were political workers too, but once my father was released from jail they rarely ever left his side. They protected him as if he was their own father, never moving too far from him. He had information from the police, Papa explained. He asked Yar
Mohammad and Sajjad to leave Karachi. ‘Go where you want, it doesn’t matter where, but I don’t want you or your families nearby. We don’t know what they’ve done to Sonara and I want you safe until we find out.’ Yar Mohammad and Sajjad were not to accompany Papa to his public meeting in Surjani Town after the press conference; he made it clear that he would not risk their lives. The men protested, without effect. Things were just too dangerous to take a chance. They didn’t ask where the information about their lives came from or what it meant. But Papa was insistent. They were to leave him today and get out of the city, end of discussion.

When Papa started the press conference, there was a weighty silence in the room. The papers had been full of stories, some falsely titillating, some accurate, about Papa’s midnight visits to the police centres two nights earlier. On 18 September, General Naserullah Babar, Benazir’s powerful Interior Minister who would proudly herald the Taliban in next-door Afghanistan as ‘my boys’, had taken to the floor of the National Assembly in Islamabad. General Babar announced that there were going to be, according to his top-level information, two bomb blasts in Karachi as a protest against the arrest of the terrorist Ali Sonara. He informed the assembly members and the press that the perpetrators of the violence were going to be from the MQM party or the Shaheed Bhutto party. Sure enough, there were ‘blasts’, and the government was quick to blame my father’s party. The journalists at the press conference on 20 September were eager to hear what Murtaza Bhutto had to say about all this. General Babar’s clairvoyance was making for serious copy in all the papers.

Papa began his statement. ‘There is a plot against me, formulated by the most criminal elements within the police force, such as Wajid Durrani and Shahbaig Suddle.’ Papa named two notorious police officers. Rumour had it that they had achieved high rank owing to their close personal friendship with Benazir’s husband, Zardari, and also to their well-documented penchant for violence. Suddle was the District Inspector-General of Karachi and Wajid Durrani was the Senior Superintendent of the Police, heading one of the police stations my father visited on the night of the 17th. But Papa mispronounced one
of their names; it wasn’t Shahbaig Suddle, it was Shoaib Suddle. We wouldn’t forget Shoaib Suddle’s name again, not ever.

‘These men,’ my father continued, ‘under the supervision of Abdullah Shah, the Chief Minister of Sindh, want to kill me. My life is in danger today. I’m giving this press conference to tell the government that my bags are ready. Bring a warrant for whatever it is you are accusing me and my party workers of and I’ll come myself and sit in your car.’ In fact, Papa’s packed briefcase had been sitting by the side of his bed since the night of the 17th.

‘I want to answer the allegations the government has made about my visits to several police stations. Regarding this, let me remind you that I am an elected official, an MPA, and it is my right to enter government offices.’At this Papa held up a picture of Ali Sonara. It is a photograph of one of Benazir’s
jalsas
, her political rallies; she is standing up with her head and shoulders poking out of the sunroof of a jeep, and waving at a crowd swarming around her. Several men stand behind her, eyes fierce, shielding her from every side; they are her bodyguards. Sonara is circled in the picture. ‘This is the man taken by the government,’ Papa said and pointed to Sonara. ‘Naseerullah Babar, the Minister of the Interior, said on the floor of the National Assembly that there would be blasts after Sonara’s “arrest” and that the MQM or SB would be behind it. If he had this information what did he do to avert any danger of the blasts actually going off? Nothing. There was nothing to do. This is a crackdown on the Pakistan People’s Party (Shaheed Bhutto). The Interior Minister knew about these supposed blasts because it is his office that planted them. I want to tell the government that we are a political party and we will resist these illegal, warrantless arrests and extra-judicial killings politically . . . We will not go into hiding. We are ready. It is not my style – in times of trouble – to hide behind my workers for protection. I stand on the frontline, they are behind me.’

We ate lunch at home in 70 Clifton while Papa was giving the press conference next door, and left afterwards for Sea View, to continue the preparations for Zulfi’s party. As Mummy and I returned home, we ran into Papa, who came striding across the lobby. He was on his
way out. The press conference was over. Ashiq Jatoi was waiting for him in the car outside on our driveway. I ran over to talk to my father but he was in a hurry and looked tense. ‘I’m late. I have to go,’ he said, stroking my back, as he moved towards the heavy wooden door. ‘Papa, wait,’ I said. ‘Let me change, I’ll come with you.’ I had only climbed one or two stairs, bounding towards my bombshelter bedroom, when Papa gently caught my elbow, stopping me in my tracks. ‘No, Fati, you can’t come,’ he said. ‘Things aren’t safe right now. Stay here, I’ll be back soon.’ I stood on the stairs and watched him walk out of the door, pulling it shut on his way out.