Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (45 page)

At the daily public meetings and rallies we attended, Joonam would speak in Urdu to the crowds who screamed and clapped for her. Mummy would be asked to read a speech too, one that she had written in Urdu, no different from the Arabic script, but that she pronounced gingerly because the language was alien to her. She was brave and spoke at each meeting, directly after her mother-in-law, stopping every once in a while to tweak the speech and add thoughts of her own. Inevitably, I would be encouraged by some member of our campaign group to speak too. They would whisper a slogan or two in my ear and have me hold my brother while I trembled in front of the microphone. I hated the sound of my squeaky adolescent voice and would make myself sick with worry in the short walk from my chair to the podium. I pretended to have a sore throat, a fever, anything to stop me having to speak to the crowds. Until one day I stood up there, faced with thousands of eager faces, trying to summon the courage to parrot the three phrases I’d been given when Zulfi, only three years old, grabbed the mike and repeated what he’d heard for the last two weeks: ‘
Ji-ye Bhuttooooo
,’ he cooed, ‘Long live Bhutto,’ and the crowd went wild. I laughed and turned around to look at Mummy, who was just as shocked as I was that our little boy had been listening and waiting for his chance. From then on, I became Zulfi’s delighted crutch; I would walk him to the microphone, lift him above the podium and patiently hold him while he wowed the crowd with his baby Urdu and mature showmanship. I had been saved.

On the road, we memorized the campaign songs – Sindhi folk music but with new words about Papa. On those long road trips we all slept bundled together, legs sprawled out over each other’s laps, our heads contorted and cramped and lost all sense of privacy. But there were moments of worry and anger too.

In Larkana, the base of operations for Papa’s campaign, we were
in the car driving to a series of rallies when Joonam noticed an election banner and ordered the driver to hit the brakes. She stormed out of the car and walked straight up to the shopkeeper whose store was displaying the dark-blue banner. ‘What is this?’ Joonam yelled, her hands shaking with anger. The banner had been put up by Munawar Abbassi, Benazir’s candidate against her brother. ‘Vote for Munawar,’ the banner read, ‘Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s
sepah
’ – ‘[soldier]’. ‘He’s running against Bhutto’s son and he calls himself his soldier?’ Joonam was livid, she was screaming at the storeowner. I thought she might hit him. The shopkeeper froze. It wasn’t his banner. He wasn’t to blame for the sign, but he kept his mouth shut and let Joonam scream. She was furious, at her daughter, at the party, at how hard she had to work to bring back her only remaining son.

There had been a creatively vicious slander campaign carried out, unsurprisingly, by the PPP. It attacked Murtaza’s candidacy by calling him a terrorist, by claiming that he had been living abroad in the lap of luxury; it promised, through Chinese whispers, that he would not return, even if he won.

But our campaign continued undaunted; the excitement over the return of the prodigal son was infectious, remembers Maulabux, even though the divide between the party and family was turning ugly. ‘Before Mir
baba
returned,’ he tells me over biscuits and cooled Pakcola bottles at a party worker’s house in Malir, ‘we made T-shirts with his face on them. They were simple white shirts with a photograph in the centre. As we were going to a PPP rally in Nishtar Park in Karachi one day, people stopped me and said, “Mauli are you looking to get beaten?” Why? “Why should we get beaten?” I asked – “We’re only showing his face, we’re remembering him here today, letting the media see Murtaza has the support of the ordinary workers.” So, we went on to the rally. We were stopped at the entrance of the park by the police – they told us we couldn’t go in, that we were “Murtaza’s boys,” “
Al Zulfikaris
”. We thought, straight away, that this must be the police, the establishment, trying to make trouble for BB and create bad press for the party. So we waited for her outside the park. When we saw her car approaching I went to meet it and told her, through her
window, “
Sahiba
they’re not letting us in.” She looked at me, coolly, and said, “If you’re going to wear these pictures, then go and make your own rally, don’t come to ours.”’ Maulabux shakes his head. ‘I’ll never forget that she said that to me, never.’
⁶

On election day in October, Papa sat in his office in the Damascus flat with the doors uncharacteristically shut. He made forms on plain white paper to tally the incoming votes and was sitting quietly in front of two phones. He was tense. We weren’t allowed to make the smallest of noises; if Papa heard any of us outside talking or larking around in the hallways he’d slowly come out of his office and with his face looking quite red and tired ask us to be quiet.

Papa had no polling agents on the ground in any of the constituencies he was contesting; no first defence against vote-rigging, no workers filing complaints of irregularities, no monitors. Joonam had spent the last three days in Larkana knocking on hundreds of doors asking people to vote to bring her son back to his country. The disinformation campaign put out by Benazir’s party had reached fever pitch in the weeks before election day and Joonam worked tirelessly to turn back the tide.

In the early evening Mummy and I were in the kitchen, getting food ready for the friends who would be joining us for dinner, regardless of the outcome. We weren’t preparing for a celebration, but we weren’t going to face defeat hungry either. Mummy was leaning over the oven and I was standing next to the door when we heard a scream. I had only heard a noise like that once before – the night Zia’s plane had crashed. It was so loud I thought the oven had exploded. My heart leapt into my throat and lodged itself there and before I could figure out what was happening, Papa ran into the kitchen. He had won from Larkana, from his father’s home constituency, from his independent, hotly contested seat.

We hugged each other and tried to take in what this meant. We were going home. People started coming over shortly afterwards. The house, our small two-bedroom flat, was full of music and friends. He had won.

{
17
}

A
fter sixteen years of exile, of being kept quiet, Murtaza had been propelled into the limelight as the heir apparent of the PPP. He had been giving interviews to Pakistani newspapers throughout the summer, meeting journalists who flew to Syria to write about his decision to contest the elections, speaking to press clubs on the telephone, and sending statements from his black fax machine that hadn’t stopped whirring for months. In the beginning it was Al Zulfikar and the Bhutto brothers’ militant activities that fuelled much of the media interest. It was like a ball and chain, holding Murtaza, his name and his reputation firmly in their place lest he ever got out of hand. He countered the allegations that he was an anti-democratic vigilante with candour.

‘If force comes by force, against the will of the people and breaks the constitution of the country, imprisons members of the parliament, kills representatives of the people . . . then the people must resist. It is their moral and national duty. It is their constitutional duty to resist the force that broke their will,’ Murtaza said in an oft-quoted interview.

I am prepared to speak on every subject. I have never betrayed my people. I would like to live with my people. My brother died for the cause. I will live and die in Syria but I will never compromise. I am not ashamed. The hijacking of the PIA plane was an act of three people to secure the release of political prisoners. In Kabul the plane was wired from the cockpit to the tail with 100 small explosive devices. They threatened to blow up the plane . . .

I am against hijacking, hostage taking. I saved the lives of over 100 people by intervening. Why don’t you give me credit for that? It is said Mir Murtaza hijacked the plane, but who saved the lives of over 100 innocent people on board the plane?
¹

The flurry of negative press attention in Pakistan, no doubt spurred on by the political establishment, could not damage the momentum that had started with Murtaza contesting the elections and climaxed with his win in Larkana.

On 12 August he had told the
Pakistani Daily News
, ‘My decision to return and contest elections is final . . . If the Pakistani establishment want, they can hang another Bhutto – but will they hang my son, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto? And hundreds of other Zulfikar Ali Bhuttos across the country?’
²

I hated it when he spoke like that. It seemed like tempting fate, especially with a family history such as ours. The article noted that Murtaza’s voice was ‘choked with emotion’. He was so close to his dream of going home, he couldn’t see beyond it.

Another story two weeks later quoted Murtaza declaring he would return to Karachi ‘come what may’, followed by his scathing criticism of Benazir’s first government. ‘The deserving, honest and underprivileged people of Sindh should sit in parliament as opposed to the corrupt, wealthy, power-seekers who have thronged the assemblies in the past.’
³
His interviews were dangerous – they pitted Murtaza firmly against his sister, whose party members constituted the bulk of those corrupt power-seekers that were returning to government for a second term. ‘I am incorruptible, with a clean heart,’ Murtaza continued, prompting the interviewer to ask if they might call him Mr Clean, a pun on Benazir’s husband, Mr Ten Per Cent – which would inflate to Mr Fifty Per Cent in the coming second term. The paper noted that Murtaza laughed and answered, ‘Yes, you may.’

The press played on both sides; one day writing that Murtaza was returning to Pakistan to bring militancy and terrorism back into Pakistani politics and the next day editorializing that he was a representative of the lost dreams of the PPP and reminding readers that
he had been a ‘four
anna
paying member of the PPP since he was a thirteen-year-old boy’.

Papa was set to leave Syria on 3 November and we were to follow him a month later, when the school term had ended. Suhail, who had been widowed during the long years of exile, came to Damascus with his two sons, Bilal and Ali, to prepare for the return home with us. Everyone was caught up in a frenzy of excitement. We had been preparing to leave almost since we had first settled in Damascus. Mummy gave me a suitcase one evening and asked me to start gathering my things and sorting out what I was taking and what I would leave behind. I filled the case with my books, Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, and when it was full went to my mother and asked if I might have another case for my clothes. I began telling all my friends I was leaving for good, and acted casual when they reacted sadly. I was going home too. Papa’s enthusiasm was contagious.

Several days before his departure, Murtaza went to see President Hafez al Assad to thank him for his country’s hospitality.
Al Qa’ed
, the leader, had been a gracious host to us for many years and a constant friend of the Bhutto family. When Benazir came to Damascus on a state visit during her first term, she was received with great ceremony and honours. Papa made me miss my annual spring concert to receive Wadi and though I was a little annoyed to miss my class’s performance, I was excited to see my aunt. This time, though, she wasn’t staying at our small flat but at the presidential guesthouse on the top of a hill overlooking the city.

Upon her arrival I glued myself to my aunt, sitting on her lap and nuzzling her shoulder with my nose, looking for the mole between the nape of her neck and where her shoulders began, my navigation now stunted by the new obstacle of her prime ministerial
hijab
.

Wadi brought me a set of encyclopedias, the most perfect present. Asif, on the other hand, gave me twenty-four Barbie dolls, that year’s entire series, along with a gargantuan Barbie doll’s house that seemed larger than I was. Papa didn’t care for Zardari’s overly generous gift. ‘Is he trying to buy my family?’ Papa complained to Mummy when we got home. I was allowed to keep one Barbie and the rest were donated to a local orphanage. I don’t know where the doll’s house
went; I didn’t get to keep it either. Papa had only met Zardari once or twice before, the first time in Paris, where we met Wadi when she had flown in to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, but it was in Syria that Papa first experienced Asif’s reprobate nature first-hand.

At the state dinner President Hafez al Assad held for Benazir, I slipped away from my seat as soon as dinner was served and climbed on to my aunt’s lap as she sat next to President Assad. The President smiled at my breach of protocol and patted my head. He turned to the official interpreter to relay a question about what grade I was in school and whether I liked it.

Mummy had insisted that my American school place me in classical Arabic classes with the native speakers. ‘Leave her in the colloquial class,’ Papa suggested. ‘She’ll be with the other foreigners, we’re going home soon anyway, why does she need Arabic?’ (The Bhuttos seem to have a personal distaste for all languages other than English. Even though Papa spoke beautiful Sindhi and Urdu, he never taught me a word of either. My aunts would speak to each other exclusively in English and Joonam had managed to pass on to her children only the most basic understanding of Farsi, though she spoke it beautifully herself. But Mummy, wary of my fate as part of this monolingual lot, persisted and I was placed in the advanced Arabic classes in school.)

I understood the President’s question before the interpreter translated it into English and answered him directly. Assad’s official aides seemed to be flustered, strutting and fidgeting around us like peacocks, and my aunt’s people were positively unhinged at my breach of diplomatic etiquette. My parents, initially amused by my precociousness, had since been trying to lure me back to my seat, but I ignored them. I was chatting to the President and nuzzling my nose into Wadi’s powdery scented neck. I remember President Assad as very kind and informal that night. Wadi too. She was in a loving and relaxed mood and let me sit on her lap all evening.