Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (58 page)

Ashiq’s wife Badrunnisa was at home with their three daughters. They lived far enough away for the sound of the gunfire not to have reached them. ‘Phone calls kept coming from the Urdu media asking for my father,’
⁷
Sabeen, Ashiq and Badrunnissa’s eldest child, remembers. ‘When I would tell them that he’s in Surjani Town with Murtaza Bhutto they would go silent.’ A family friend called the Jatoi house with the news that there’d been firing outside 70 Clifton, but when speaking to Sabeen, then nineteen years old, he had downplayed the seriousness of the gunfire. Sabeen, who is by nature remarkably poised and composed, stayed calm. It wasn’t until her aunt, whose husband owned Mideast and who was on his way there, having been called when Papa was brought in, phoned and told Sabeen that Murtaza Bhutto had been shot and was in a critical condition that Sabeen worried. ‘We panicked,’ Sabeen recalled. ‘We knew Murtaza Bhutto always sat in front and that Baba always sat next to him in the driver’s seat. If your father was in a critical condition then what had happened to Baba?’

Sabeen and her mother got into their car to go and look for Ashiq. Before leaving, Sabeen told her two younger sisters, Anushka and Maheen, to man the phones and to keep the news of what had happened away from their elderly grandparents – Ashiq’s parents – who were
asleep upstairs. ‘We went to Mideast first. Baba wasn’t there. Then we went to Jinnah hospital, thinking that any police cases should have gone there. Amma was too shaky to get out of the car, so I went. I had to go to the morgue to ask if his body had been brought in. As I was walking towards it some Urdu journalists came up to me and told me that my father wasn’t in the morgue. I was relieved. I trusted them. We got back in the car and continued searching.’

Sabeen is a very brave woman. She was the first woman in her family to be sent abroad to college. Ashiq supported her; he was wonderfully progressive and knew that his daughter was intelligent and that more than marriage proposals awaited her in life. Sabeen was home that September for the summer holidays and was preparing to go back to England to start her second year of studying law. She and I had met for the first time a few weeks earlier when we both attended a rally for the party in Lyari that our fathers were speaking at. By then I had spent some time with Sabeen’s father and knew how besotted he was with her. I liked Sabeen. She had a warm and genuinely friendly manner and she immediately befriended Zulfi, who was only six years old then. I also knew that she was a rebel, a trailblazer, and that made me like her even more.

Sabeen’s
chacha
Zahid, Ashiq’s younger brother, had rushed over to join Aneed as soon as he heard the news about the firing. No one knew where Ashiq was or whether he’d been hurt. Ashiq’s family were on their own, going from hospital to police station looking for him. Zahid’s wife Nuzhat, a doctor like her husband, had also been searching for her brother-in-law. No one had any leads. ‘At some point,’ Nuzhat tells me, ‘they told us at Jinnah that two seriously injured people had been brought to the hospital but had been taken back. They didn’t give us any names or any information other than that.’
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‘We went to the Agha Khan hospital – at the other end of town. It was far away but we were desperate,’ Sabeen continues. ‘Amma stayed in the car and I went into the emergency area and asked if Ashiq Jatoi had been brought in. There was a lot of confusion and the people behind the desk weren’t giving me any clear answers. I described my father’s build, his height, and his weight, told them that
he had been wearing a black
shalwar kameez
, but they didn’t seem to have a clear idea of anything. My aunt Nuzhat had joined us there and together we decided that we’d go back to Mideast to check if any of our relatives there had any news. As we were leaving and walking back to our cars I saw a police car parked near the emergency wing. I went up to one of the officers standing near the rear of the car – at that time we still had no idea that the police were involved – and I asked him if he knew where my father was. I told him my name and said I was looking for Ashiq Jatoi, who was with Mir Murtaza Bhutto. ‘There’s been an incident at 70 Clifton,’ I said. ‘Do you know where they’ve taken them?’ I was polite, I had no reason not to be, I was so nervous and scared, I just wanted help. And this cop, he was young and he had a moustache, he turned to me and grunted, ‘Huh, we’ve killed them already.’ Sabeen started to scream. She totally lost the calm she’d been fighting to retain throughout the hour or so that she’d been out with her mother searching for Ashiq. ‘I was yelling at the top of my lungs. “What are you saying?” I screamed “How dare you!” But he just stood there, unmoved. Another cop, he must have been more senior, got out of the front seat and came over to us. He asked me why I was creating a scene. I was in a total state of shock. Some of the drivers who were standing nearby and had witnessed what the policeman said to me came forward to defend me and told the second officer what his colleague had said.’ Sabeen goes silent. She’s breathing heavily and takes a minute to collect herself. We’ve spent the last thirteen years together, inseparable almost, and we’ve often spoken about that night. Sabeen is my best friend; we speak about our fathers all the time. But neither of us had ever shared the details of that night with each other; it is too painful. ‘I know I’ll see that policeman again some day,’ Sabeen says, almost to herself. ‘I remember his face so clearly.’

Eventually, Sabeen’s aunt Nuzhat persuaded her to get back into the car. They were wasting time. Ashiq’s whearabouts were still unknown and his family could not be sure that he’d already been killed. They drove back to Mideast with the nagging fear that something awful had happened, that the policeman hadn’t been lying.
‘If Murtaza Bhutto was critical, where was Baba?’ Sabeen repeats. ‘They were always together.’

I don’t remember how we got to Mideast or how we found ourselves in the large recovery room that Papa had been placed in. I remember walking in and seeing only my father’s legs. I thought I would collapse. Mummy ran into the room and straight towards Papa, who was lying unconscious on a low hospital bed. I saw him and froze. I stood before my father, covered in blood, and wanted to scream but I couldn’t open my mouth. I was paralysed with shock. I just stood there.

Mummy ran straight to Papa’s side and began speaking to him, as if she hadn’t registered how frightening he looked, how much blood covered his face and his chest. ‘Wake up Mir! Wake up!’ she yelled. I went closer to him and crouched beside the bed. I touched Papa’s face but got blood on my fingers and got scared. His face was still warm, the blood dark and wet. I stood up quickly and walked to the end of the room and sat down on a white metal chair. I couldn’t breathe.

Mummy sat with Papa as he was fitted with a heart monitor and as the hospital staff scrambled to find surgeons to operate on him – there were none on call, there never were at Mideast. People filtered into the room, coming in to watch, to have a look, to see Murtaza Bhutto die. I screamed at one of them, an odious magazine editor turned politician who behaved as if she had bought tickets to an event. ‘Why are you here?’ I screamed at her. ‘This isn’t a show! Get out!’ She moved away from me, but she didn’t leave. Others, friends and strangers, came. I couldn’t focus long enough to understand how dire things were, how we ended up in a hospital with not one surgeon to save my father’s life.

Dr Ghaffar Jatoi, Ashiq’s brother-in-law and Mideast’s principal owner, was there. He had come as soon as he was called by his staff. ‘I had no driver,’ Dr Ghaffar recalled as I spoke to him about that night for the first time. ‘So I drove myself. The area was in total
darkness. There were Rangers, police, I can’t tell you how many, it was too dark to see – the road was lit only by my car’s lights. They stopped me and said I couldn’t pass. I told them I had an emergency, and they still refused to let me go through.’
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Dr Ghaffar tried two or three other routes before finally reaching Mideast. It must have taken, he estimates, half an hour to make the two-minute drive from
Do Talwar
to Mideast.

‘Your father, I was told, was very restless,’ said Dr Ghaffar, who reached Mideast a few minutes before we did. ‘He was trying feverishly to breathe, he was gasping for air, but he couldn’t. The doctors couldn’t put the endotrachic tube in properly, to give air to his lungs, because there was so much blood in his throat. I could see that his tongue had been lacerated. We had to do a tracheotomy to pass the tube in and bypass the blood blockage so he could breathe. While this was going on, he went into cardiac arrest. We had to resuscitate him.’

It was at this time that Mummy and I reached Mideast. Mummy positioned herself right by Papa’s ear and curled herself into a ball, bending down so that she was small and not in the way of the doctors who were frantically moving around her. She didn’t leave Papa’s side, not for a second, and she spoke to him non-stop, begging him to pull through. I remember listening to Mummy and wanting to join her and talk to Papa too but I couldn’t. I was in shock. I was frozen in fear. She yelled at Papa, ‘Don’t go, Mir! Don’t die! Fati and Zulfi need you! Stay with us . . . please stay with us . . .’

Every time Mummy said my and Zulfi’s names, Papa’s heart monitor would react, lines jolting across the screen. ‘Every time,’ Mummy remembers. ‘His heart was only beating for you and your brother.’

‘Murtaza was losing a lot of blood,’ Dr Ghaffar says. He checks every once in a while, as we speak in his living room, that I am all right. I am not. But I need him to tell me everything. I say I’m fine and ask him to continue. ‘He was losing blood from his nose, his mouth, the side of his neck where he had been shot fatally. The major blood vessels going to the brain must have been ruptured, there was
just too much blood leaving him. There was also blood in his mouth; he may have even inhaled blood into his lungs. I don’t know how much blood he lost on the road that night, before he came to Mideast, we’ll never know. He needed blood badly, fifteen units at least. I asked the staff to donate because we didn’t have enough. Murtaza was losing blood faster than we were able to give it to him.’

I heard the commotion and understood that Papa needed blood. I had just asked him about our blood types. It was the only moment where things began to slow down for me. ‘I’ll give blood’ I said to one of the doctors. He asked me what my blood type was and I repeated what Papa had told me: ‘I don’t know, but we’re the same type.’ They needed blood fast and I ran down the stairs after the doctor who was sprinting down the Mideast corridors to get us to the room where I’d be donating the blood. Running behind the doctor, I saw Sabeen out of the corner of my eye. ‘What’s she doing here?’ I thought to myself. I had no idea that anyone besides Papa had been hurt.

‘Fati!’ Sabeen yelled, trying to stop me. ‘Have you seen my father?’ I didn’t stop. I didn’t know why she was asking about her father. I shook my head. I don’t remember the rest of our conversation in the hallway but Sabeen tells me I told her ‘We need blood for Papa.’ ‘I’ll give blood,’ she replied, ‘I’ll do it now but tell me, do you know where my father is?’ I didn’t answer her. I had already run into the room and sat down, rolling up my sleeve for the needle. It was the first time that night that I thought there was a chance we’d save Papa. For the first time, as the doctor filled clear donor bags of my blood, my head cleared and my spirits lifted. If they were taking blood, there was a chance. I was doing something, finally. I was doing something to help. I ran back upstairs after the doctor had taken as much as he thought I could handle and entered the room. Papa was no longer there. After various people placed calls to surgeons across the city, enough had come to operate with a fighting chance – Papa was being wheeled into the operating theatre just as I returned. Mummy and I were escorted into a waiting room. He was going to be OK. He was going to survive. I said it over and over again, to Mummy, to those who had joined us, to anyone who would listen. It was all going to be OK.

It was past eleven at night and we waited patiently for news. Many people had joined us; the small carpeted waiting room was crowded and impossibly full. Someone had taken out prayer beads,
tasbees
, and started to pray. Someone else ran back and forth bringing cups of water to Mummy and me. We were very lucky not to have been alone then. I focused all my thoughts on seeing Papa again. He was going to be fine. This was going to be a night we’d talk about for many years to come and I’d end up in school after the weekend with a harrowing story to tell but everything was going to be all right in the end. I didn’t let any other thoughts, any negative ideas, enter my head. It was going to be fine.

One of Papa’s cousins, a man nicknamed Pitu, whose brother had been with Mummy and Joonam in Al Murtaza on 5 January when the police fired on the house, had come to the hospital and ran between our waiting room and the doctors, bringing whatever news he could, keeping Mummy and me as informed as possible. Pitu made things seem manageable and I waited for his periodic updates, they seemed almost hopeful. Things were going to be OK after all, I received each of Pitu’s updates with this silent mantra.